Hello,

I played this game when I could see a bit better and for most of the things on this site, I still can play with a screenreader. I have never seen well but I like that I can play a virtual pet thing that is still quite active and vibrant.

However, I think there are a few things that could easily be fixed to make the game better for screen reader users. I have told the blind gaming community I am part of about this game and so I want it to be as good for them as it can be.

1. descriptions of the pets: I know what some of the pets look like in general because of when I could see a little better. But a lot of them have been added to the game since I last played, I forgot what many look like, and so at pet creation or something, a sentence or two describing the pet and its background would be very much appreciated. I know what a harvester looks like, but a stranger might not. And what "dawn" "storm" or "vibrant" coloration looks like wouldn't make a lot of sense if you didn't have a translator somewhere to tell them. A short description in words of what NPCs look like would also be great.

2. I can play the battle mode now, but right now it is shooting in the dark. You have element symbols on weapons and armor, but you don't differentiate. My screenreader always reads the element symbol as "element" with no further detail so I always have to guess. If you could relabel those icons to say something like "water element" or "water" for example, that would be very helpful and such things ought to be easy to do.

3. I really would like a wardrobe I can use, right now there are almost no buttons or icons in that that are labeled so I cannot create my avatar as I want it. that one admittedly is going to be harder to do.

I don't want you to fret over the flash games, they aren't necessary and the blind are used to being cut out from them, but the rest of the stuff would be helpful. Some descriptions in words of what pets look like and what certain colorations and potions mean as well as characters, only a couple sentences or so would be fantastic! and getting the element symbols for battle labeled with different icon names that a screenreader would pick up would make battling a lot easier. There's a trial version of JAWS (a commonly used screenreader) you can pick up for free and run for 40 minutes at a time to make tests.

I couldn't even grasp the basics of the avatar system so I'm not sure how you would go about fixing it.

Just a few things I'd like to make this community more fun and open and accessible.

My uncle is blind so it really warms my heart to read your post, I support it with all my heart, accessibility is important and every website needs to do the maximum that it can to be accessible for the blind. So thank you for this topic and bringing it up! :)

I figured that the guys here would be accepting, this seems like a very open and welcoming community.

I like what I'm hearing and am very glad it is being taken so well.

sorry, hadn't been on for a couple of days. I'll tell you about some of the things I've noticed.

1. quests are very easy to do and doing them along with the shop search thing doesn't need any changes. Items work very well also except for the following.

a. when you get a reward from Major drills, all it shows is a wishlist button icon and doesn't actually say what item you got. It usually tells you in other quests when you do things. This fact of only showing the wishlist icons is also a problem for the fragmentizer.

2. the wardrobe is completely unusable. It may seem strange that a blind person would care about what an avatar would look like but I still would like to dress one up.

3. there is no separation between the different sorts of battle items so I don't know what elements things are.

4. I haven't really had a chance to do the wishlists, but I'll let you know once I learn.

5. shopping is easy and works well.

6. I'd really appreciate knowing what the pets look like. I played it when I could see and for example know what a harvester looks like, but a lot of the pets are just nonsense words to me. I don't need a lot but a few sentences, or even one or 2 would be enough. Same for some of the colors that aren't obvious. For example, I know that "dawn" means pink, but not everyone would and either through memory of sight for those who once saw or just knowing what things are supposed to be certain colors, blind people would care. But I've already brought this up.

7. the flash games do not work. This is not your fault and probably can't be fixed and the blind understand that. All I ask is that things like Major Drills could stop asking us to do them, or perhaps you could put up a player preference option that would not have things require us to do flash games.

8. The Ruffie Raffle does not work. It should be simple enough to put markers on the cards to make them clickable. I haven't tried many other games.

9. I haven't tried the vending machines yet but I'll let you know when I do.

10. bird watching is tricky but I can do it. The birds appear on the page after the subeta map button on the top near your notices in the same place every time. But you can't know that it is there automatically without at least going through the page. You can find it but if you're not expecting it you won't notice.

11. a lot of pages have headings on top of them such as the subeta map and most of the quest pages. It is quick to navigate a page using the heading shortcut that Jaws users use. Some pages will make you have to crawl through the add and sidebar though if there is no heading. For example. The bird watching page has no heading. What we then do is we hit control end and work our way back up.

12. If you are going to run tests with JAWS, remember that blind people do not use the mouse, so if you can't do what you want with the keyboard alone, there is a problem. The demo will come with instructions on how to navigate the web and such with the Jaws commands. You'll also want to make heavy use of built-in windows hotkey commands. For example alt+d will get you into the address bar in ie or firefox while control+l will do that in chrome. For the most part JAWS works best with internet explorer though Chrome is starting to get better. Oddly chrome crashes anytime I try to use it with JAWS and Chrome. Firefox used to be good for the blind but it is actually getting worse. I play Subeta using IE and down the road I will probably switch to edge.

That's all I can say for now. Feel free to ask me any sort of question in the future, and no question is a bad one. I'd rather you ask than have you make assumptions or do something either unhelpful or unnecessary.

I'll add headings to my list of things to update around!

oh, one more thing,

on the news page when you advertise new items. All I get are "wishlist" buttons and don't know what the pictures are depicting. So for example I know of the fitness tech stuff from last week but can't read those icons you put up to know what is in that series.

Alt text as a whole on site would be great. I'm visually impaired but not to the point of some people. Anything to help players who have vision problems I'm always going to support.

I've spent a very long time at work making university websites accessible when they were not originally designed with accessibility in mind AT ALL and it's an ongoing struggle :D Good luck! We found the SiteImprove extension on chrome very useful for finding issues on pages, and it also links you to solutions for the issues it flags. I hope this might be of some help c:

That's wonderful to know, thank you. c:

actually I found some more trouble on the site

despite what I said before the tabs at the top of the screen really don't do what they are supposed to do.

for example, if I click the interact tab, it takes me to the forums, and I recently learned there are other options that I can't access. as things stand, there is no way for me to get to my S-mail at all. I also can't do anything with the personal tab except for going to my inventory. just selecting those seems to take me to the first option on the list if they work as I think they do.

also for the pet and color descriptions, probably writing one for each combo isn't necessary, If I know what chibi means, and then I know what a tutami looks like, I can do the math and put them together.

I have seen the way you have fixed up the graphic and item name thing on the news page and elsewhere and really like it. I haven't tried the fragmentizer since last time but the galaxan wastes with feeding those minions doesn't work. I get wishlist icons but can neither see the minions nor know what food they want. It is completely uninformative.

The tabs at the top of the page are very unfriendly (I typically use subeta via mobile, and if I didn't have a Note 8 with a built in stylus that part of the site would be utterly unaccessible that me too lol).

That said, while I 100% support that being more friendly there is a sorta work around for it that hopefully you can access (if not maybe a staffer can make this work for you too). If you go here: https://subeta.net/preferences.php?act=sidebar you should hopefully be able to add the widget for "navigation". That'll add a sidebar with links for almost everything found in the tabs at the top of the screen (like sMail & inventory and many others).

[QUOTE]also for the pet and color descriptions, probably writing one for each combo isn't necessary, If I know what chibi means, and then I know what a tutami looks like, I can do the math and put them together.[/QUOTE]

That's a good point.

Really, outside of Blob and Nostalgic, I don't think every single combo needs a description :D

hello, I have a couple more things I'd like to discuss that have come up since last time I posted here.

1. the Ruffie Raffle is unplayable with a screenreader. It says to pick a card or something but there is nothing for the screenreader to pick up on. If you put buttons on the cards, even invisible ones as you do in shell spotter, this would probably fix the problem and make Ruffie Raffle playable. As things stand, I can't and thus either have to buy very expensive lifelike dolls from other players or get them gifted, and I'd rather do that myself.
2. the drag and drop option to get your weapons for a battle does not work with a screenreader. I have made a weapon set, but cannot select it before going into a fight, No matter what I tried I always stepped into battle with no weapons, turning the fight into a joke where I just got beat up on. as I couldn't fight back. in MOrostide this kept me from doing the plot as I had to fight a monster on the first day and even though it was very easy, I was unable to do so even though I was superior to it in stats in every way.
3. I think for events, it was a nice touch to make it so you could skip the visual stuff, but not so fair that you got penalized for it for example there is no way whatsoever that I could've done the dial thing on the first day of Morostide and had to skip it. I don't know how much I lost. If it wasn't much, no big deal, just noting it.
4. I got into some trouble in Morostide also because of the design of the world map. Although Skelly manor appeared on the Shadowglen map under the normal list of alphabetically arranged locations, the woods did not. Luckily there is a weird imagelink option thing where it did appear and the graphic had a sensible enough name that I was able to guess from the supposedly behind the scenes thing.
5. In Morostide, when you had to click buttons to find your way back to the tomb or something you had buttons that said things like "maybe this way?" and such. If those corresponded to cardinal directions or there was a map or graphic, or direction of walking, those would've been helpful as I wandered for quite some time, mostly hitting stuff at random until I made it back.

also the wardrobe is still unusuable. It will not register that it has loaded items when you go to look at them. so I can't do the wardrobe by myself.

That's all for now, sorry for dumping all of that on you at once and sorry for being silent for so long. Thanks for hearing me out.

I think we just slid under the three month cut off point and I'm not going to let this die.

I would happily help you with navigating the site if it meant that you could pick up on things with the screen reader.

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And, staff: volunteer positions to help add alt text in so the site is able to be navigated by those with vision problems would go a long way and take far less time than one person doing it. The Morostide plot this year was... bad, to say the least, for execution and how it took until the second time with the gauges to get a vertigo warning. Vertigo that I have and had triggered by the first go around WITHOUT the warning. I know that color blind and blindness options are a long, arduous project but that shouldn't be an excuse for not keeping an audience that otherwise wouldn't be able to play.

I agree with on allowing volunteers to write image descriptions for users who use them. Perhaps having one staff person edit/approve each submitted description would help make sure they're up to a certain standard would also be useful. Personally, I'd be happy to help out by writing up descriptions!

That's some awesome work you did putting this altogether - I hope these have been getting worked on!

+1 i havent checked, but does every image on the site have alt texts? i know thats a huge problem with contemporary web dev. i used to get on people's cases about it all the time.