Accessibility for the visually impaired.

[spacedaisy]

My sister is legally blind, and she uses extensions such as a magnifier in order to see anything on the screen, but much of your site is still quite small font. Additionally, I don't know how to accommodate her with the timers. She has gotten dinged on more than one occasion for taking too long, but this is just the natural result of someone who is visually impaired attempting to see everything in order to play. To be honest, I don't feel like this site accommodates well to the disabled and would highly encourage you make some changes in order to be more accessible. If these are something that can be changed in settings, I would love to be pointed in the right direction because I have searched and can't find anything akin to accessibility settings.

[Blacktango]

The BGA website is quite old (although the design has changed recently.
I think it takes a lot of work to make it accessible, and the dev team is quite small (although it has grown in the last 2 years).
But still, then, each game might need some adjustments to be accessible, so it’s a titanic task!

It would be great if the new games on BGA (especially the "commercial" ones) were accessible.

I don't know if there is a suggestion report asking for more accessibility. I would definitely vote for it!

[mr_kywar]

To answer, in the first place it is necessary to distinguish the site from the games, because even if they are in the same place, the developers are not all aware of this type of difficulty.
On the site itself I do not have the impression that there is any difficulty, if it is the case it would be necessary to detail it.
Given the rest of your message, your point seems to revolve around game(s), so I invite you to ask the game developers to look at what is wrong and suggest an improvement.
For my part, I would be interested in discussing the subject because being in development of a new game I would be curious to see if it would be possible for me to make it accessible.

[Blacktango]

Well, for example, you can’t navigate with the keyboard across the site.
You are stuck at the very beginning into the search bar.

[cigma]

I don't know if there is a suggestion report asking for more accessibility. I would definitely vote for it!

There are several suggestions on supporting colourblind people (usually referring to a special game) and I just asked for better contrast in Villagers: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=83747. Some people complained about the new pages being too colourful, but I don't know if they opened suggestion reports. I also remember some people were proposing better zoom in some games.

I think you have to look for suggestion reports for the games you are interested in. But as far as I can see, acessability and usability have very low priority on BGA

[thoun]

Additionally, I don't know how to accommodate her with the timers

When creating / joining a table, you can set / only accept on slow mode. Also turn-based mode will give her as many time as she needs.

[Kayvon]

Lots of good suggestions here. For the near term, start/join snow games for more time and use a custom .css file (BGA supports this!) to modify font sizesand colors.

[GinaT86]

Hi, I'm super new here and played half a dozen games, but I'm also struggling as I simply can't use a mouse for too long and none of them have been remotely keyboard-accessible - I can't even access the 'confirm' button with tabbing. That 'confirm' seems a standard bar/design across all games, so I'm wondering how the a11y issues might get addressed: do we have to log suggestions against each game vs the site? It will be very time-consuming to log against each game! We might need to divvy out the work

I'm happy to figure out logging something requesting WCAG Level A compliance (surely we don't have to log the individual items, which also feels discriminatory as I'd be saying which types of users deserve to be able to play over others...) and hope you can support with votes? I'm inclined to put this in as a bug not a suggestion, as not being able to differentiate items or access commands (via keyboard or zoom) makes the site unusable, so in many organisations that's a straight-up bug. But I'm worried it sounds like BGA would categorise these as suggestions (so maybe it's not a place I want to be after all...but better to try to help it improve than just quit).

@mr_kywar in your game development, WCAG Level A is the best place to start and there are many wcag testing tools out there to help; I used wave https://wave.webaim.org/ most recently but there are loads listed on the w3c site https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ hope that helps A less technical test is simply switch off your mouse, put your sunglasses on in a dark room, and see if you can play just as easily

[ViolentSilence]

Hi, I'm super new here and played half a dozen games, but I'm also struggling as I simply can't use a mouse for too long and none of them have been remotely keyboard-accessible - I can't even access the 'confirm' button with tabbing. That 'confirm' seems a standard bar/design across all games, so I'm wondering how the a11y issues might get addressed: do we have to log suggestions against each game vs the site? It will be very time-consuming to log against each game! We might need to divvy out the work

I'm happy to figure out logging something requesting WCAG Level A compliance (surely we don't have to log the individual items, which also feels discriminatory as I'd be saying which types of users deserve to be able to play over others...) and hope you can support with votes? I'm inclined to put this in as a bug not a suggestion, as not being able to differentiate items or access commands (via keyboard or zoom) makes the site unusable, so in many organisations that's a straight-up bug. But I'm worried it sounds like BGA would categorise these as suggestions (so maybe it's not a place I want to be after all...but better to try to help it improve than just quit).

@mr_kywar in your game development, WCAG Level A is the best place to start and there are many wcag testing tools out there to help; I used wave https://wave.webaim.org/ most recently but there are loads listed on the w3c site https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ hope that helps A less technical test is simply switch off your mouse, put your sunglasses on in a dark room, and see if you can play just as easily

I'd advocate putting it in as a suggestion, just because bugs tend to be much more situation specific and I think they have to relate to specific games, this would be a suggestion that would make the website better (albeit a suggestion which should have some legal weight behind it). I would say that the logical first step is to make sure any game only passes 'Beta' testing if it's WCAG Level A Compliant, that games with that Compliance can be searched for (at least until a significant proportion of the games on the site are), and then there would be some discussion on how to update the older titles. Ideally, there would just be one overall change to the interface site wide, but I don't know if that can happen with how games have been implemented by different coders

[GinaT86]

Thank you for the great advice

I've submitted the idea now, at https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=93895

I hope you don't mind me including your great tips about how to implement!

Please do share and upvote