Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

What would an ethical overlay look like?

• Karl Groves writes about the ‘overlay widgets’ offered by companies such as accessiBe, and how their claim that including their product on your website will make it fully WCAG compliant is simply untrue. Many a11y issues, such as missing alt text, can only be fixed by a person. Moreover, the extra features an overlay often provides (e.g. screen magnification) are poor imitations of what’s already available to the user on their computer. The only ‘ethical’ overlay is a temporary one, Karl says: it should only be used as a discovery tool to find accessibility problems, which you should then spend time fixing the root cause of.

Accessible Game Design / Accessible Player Experiences

• I came across accessible.games while watching the 2020 Video Game Accessibility Awards. It lists the basic “access design patterns” to follow when developing your games. Examples include “second channel” (such as captioning that alerts you to incoming attacks; not just relying on sound) and “improved precision” (allowing gamers to adjust sensitivity of mouse/controller input). There are also “challenge design patterns”, which are patterns to follow once you’ve got the basics sorted, which go beyond core access into the realm of inclusion, so that people can fully enjoy your game. Examples include “slow it down“, allowing gamers to adjust game speed or reduce enemy damage so that they can successfully progress through the game.

PlayStation 5: The Accessibility Review

Pros:

• The integrated screen reader is available across the PS5 system and comes in multiple languages, which can be adjusted for speed, volume, and choice of male or female voice.
• There are a number of global settings to accommodate different types of colour blindness.
• You can set a ‘game preset’ for game difficulty ranging from Easiest to Hardest, which should map to the standard options in most games. Similarly you can indicate a preference for subtitles, inverted controls, and audio language, which games should obey automatically.
• There are options to increase text size, and to remap your controller.
• 3D Audio, alongside supported headsets, give surround sound to the player, enabling blind players to pinpoint with accuracy where enemies are (as well as improving the experience for everybody).
• The new DualSense controller has a built-in microphone, which can be used for voice-to-text. Haptic feedback in the controllers is designed to immerse the player, but can be disabled if uncomfortable.

Cons:

• The controller is larger and heavier than before, and the accessible ‘Back Button Attachment’ accessory for the PS4’s controller doesn’t fit on this one.
• The ‘zoom’ option that allowed screen magnification on the PS4 has not yet been carried over.

Under-Engineered Responsive Tables

• Adrian Roselli describes how to create an accessible table that scrolls horizontally on mobile. You need to put your <table> element inside a <div role="region" aria-labelledby="mycaption" tabindex="0">, where “mycaption” references the <caption id="mycaption"> that should be inside the table. The tabindex satisfies WCAG Success Criteria 2.1.1 Keyboard, and the aria-labelledby satisfies 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value. For the CSS, apply overflow: auto to the table, and don’t forget to apply a focus style.

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