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Thoughts re in-game popups.  XML
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Mark Phillips


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Joined: 1969.12.31 00:00:00
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Location: Watsonville, CA
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TriadCity was designed a long time ago with an explicit goal of integrating Web content with the game world. This is why there are browser windows which pop up in response to certain actions. We use them in simple ways for signs, like road signs; in more interesting ways to integrate visual content such as images of artworks and even whole movies; and as a way of representing books in libraries - we can link to the Project Gutenberg texts for example.

This creates a puzzle for screen reader users. We think you'll probably want to turn your screen reader off while interacting with the new talking client. But, of course, you'll need it back on again to read the popups.

One thing we can do to make this issue less prevalent is to go back through the entire game world and really be ruthless about deciding where do popups add real value to the user experience, and where can they be replaced by ordinary text. Obviously if we replace them with text, the speech engine can simply read them and there’s no need for a screen reader. But, there are times when the popups are really nifty. For example, there's a very large grape vineyard in-game which was written by a player, featuring very detailed histories and descriptions of each type of grape in the vineyard. That makes sense as a popup. It's great content, but you don't want it interfering with the standard game output.

This'll be an issue we'll just have to experiment with, I think. Posting these thoughts here for context.

--Mark

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014.10.29 15:34:15


Bartle quotiet: E80, A67, S47, K7. TriadCity characters: Mark, Poobah, Occam, Abelard.
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Mark Phillips


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Joined: 1969.12.31 00:00:00
Messages: 2199
Location: Watsonville, CA
Offline

The talking UI now reads these popup windows. No need for you to do anything - it just reads them for you. So far seems to be working nicely.

Pretty cool!

Bartle quotiet: E80, A67, S47, K7. TriadCity characters: Mark, Poobah, Occam, Abelard.
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