Board Game Arena

Hey guys!

I have ALS, which is a progressive disease that will eventually leave me paralyzed. I can still use a mouse OK, but I recently received an eye tracking device which I'll have to rely on more in the near future. I'm typing this with my eyes right now!

Anyway, I've been trying out some of my favorite games on here to see how they play. For the most part, they work pretty well, but some of them could use some minor tweaking to make them more accessible. My device has a smaller screen size then a standard laptop, so some of the game boards don't scale well. Also, several of the games have tiny buttons, which takes me a long time to press. I consider myself pretty speedy with this technology, but I find myself hitting the time limits pretty often.

I realize I'm a super minority group here , but just a few tiny UI tweaks could make many of these games much more playable. I am a former developer, with PHP and a lot of fronted experience so I'd definitely be interested in helping make this happen however I can!

Let me know if there is some place else I should be sharing this...

I'm very sorry to hear about your diagnosis. A cure for ALS can't come soon enough!

You should check out the BGA Studio documentation: https://boardgamearena.com/doc/Studio

I'm not familiar with it, but I think you would need it to help fix the code yourself. I believe it is possible for developers to make changes to at least some of the games here. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable chimes in.

Good luck!

Hi! Just my thoughts, not an expert...

I would first contact the developers for each specific game to see what they think. If you go to any table of a finished game you'll see "Developed by" on the bottom left, you can click and message.

Also worth noticing that under advanced tab on user preferences you can introduce custom css. Haven't tested it but I guess it can work if you simply want to make a button bigger or something like that.
(Not ideal that you have to fix things this way as it'll only fix things for you and not anybody else with a similar issue...)

I think BGA should include some options in your preferences so you can specify whatever disabilities you have. That could be exposed to game developers via the BGA studio framework. Otherwise, each game developer will have to add an option in their game (meaning more work and more inconsistencies...).

Might be good if you band together with people with similar issues so you can present your "demands" to BGA folks in a organized and consistent way. Recently someone was talking about colour-blind problems. Looks to me it is a similar issue from the point of view of adapting the game.