Accessibility guidelines and support

[lazerwalker]

We want everyone to be able to play Little Warioware! However, we have a tension to resolve: adding a11y features to a game often requires a lot of effort and expertise to do well, while we also want to lower the barrier to contribution as much as possible. How do we walk this line?

We'll need to tackle each type of accessibility affordance on a case-by-case basis, but this is the general prioritization approach I think we should take:

1. If we can solve this programmatically for all games, do that!
2. If we can programmatically detect this will be an issue, let people know when they open a PR.
3. If we cannot programmatically detect issues, depending on the severity of the problem, require manual testing in PR
4. Depending on the class of issue, either block merging until it's been fixed, or have allowlist metadata that microgame devs can actively add to their game to say "my game is accessible for X purposes", and have an in-game global option to exclude microgames that don't have that flag (e.g. "this game does not require audio". This should be an allowlist rather than excludelist since people who are too lazy to add appropriate metadata are more likely to not include a11y features.

I'm going to start manually enumerating a11y concerns and how we should map those to this framework.

Some of these will be direct actionable tasks we can make issues for. A lot of this will rely on shared functionality that we can create issues to build.

[lazerwalker]

Photosensitivity

• We should not merge any games that might cause epilectic seizures, hard stop. This is probably the most important thing on this list. There are technical tools to determine this, given video footage we can programmatically capture; I don't know if they are free or easily integratable into our pipelines. It's possible this will need to be a manual step.

Color Blindness

• We can use https://github.com/paulloz/godot-colorblindness to render games with filters representing common types of colorblindness (oh hey @paulloz ;)). Ideally, a bot would programmatically take a screenshot of each microgame with each filter and drop those screenshots into the PR body. Barring that, we can make it easy to apply the filters when manually testing a PR build.

• We can have a metadata flag representing "this game has been tested for color blindness". For games that haven't been tested, we can apply an automatic shader such as https://godotshaders.com/shader/colorblindness-correction-shader/ if the player enables it in the menu (and not apply it to games that have been approved)

Low Vision

• We can make sure the menu support screen readers, and offer (but not require) hooks for microgame devs to support screen readers (TODO: I don't actually know what Godot screen reader support looks like)

• We can support font scaling across the game, and require microgames either support font scaling or have a minimum font size that's very large (i.e. a game with only big header text is fine). This presumably needs to be manually checked. I think whether we require this or have an opt-in flag is an open question.

• We can encourage appropriate contrast ratios. For now, I think it's fine to eyeball "the contrast is too low". Xbox Accessibility Guidelines include suggested ratios for different text sizes.

Deaf/Hard of Hearing

• We can have a metadata flag to specify "this game does not require audio".
• We can provide system-wide volume control that separates out background music from SFX, to let people make SFX louder if necessary for a11y purposes. We can provide our own audio hooks for playing sound effects and background music that supports this global volume level. If we can build automated tests to check for non-compliance, great, but otherwise this can be a reasonable part of code review.
• I don't actually know if we're going to allow custom background music within microgames (in WW that exists at a system level), so this might be simpler if we just need to enforce "always use our SFX functions"
  An alternate path would be to support audio subtitles, but that seems like a lot more work / something to revisit in the future

Motor Accessibility

• At a system level, allow input remapping. I think it's acceptable if we establish through visual language that the inputs are "directions" and "the one button" rather than e.g. provide an API to let microgame creators display the correct keyboard keys that are currently mapped (this is also the correct choice for touch and gamepad control)
• Let players specify the game's tempo / how long each "beat" is. Slowing this down will make some (not all!) games easier for folks with issues with fast-reaction inputs
• At a microgame level, allow metadata flags to specify "this game does not require fast inputs" and "this game does not require holding down buttons"
• Eventually we can talk about more fine-grained motor input issues and how we might programmatically mitigate them, but this is a complex issue

UI Navigation

• The entire game's UI should be navigable by keyboard shortcut, using sequential focused input navigation. Outlining best practices is beyond the scope of this discussion; https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/accessibility/xbox-accessibility-guidelines/112 contains good info

Reduced Motion

• We should have a systemwide "reduced motion" flag that minimizes things like screenshake. This may be a case where it makes sense to add adherance to it as a requirement rather than an opt-in "this respects reduced-motion" flag, but I don't know.

Mental Health Considerations

• I'm not sure what (if any) accommodations we want to think about for neurodivergent players, but noting that here anyway
• If somebody submits potentially triggering content in a serious/non-troll-y way, we may want to discuss a content warning system? To tackle when/if that comes up
• This may also be worth considering for common phobias, such as spiders, clowns, snakes, and trypophobia-style holes.

[lazerwalker]

This isn't meant to be exhaustive, and I'd love to hear other folks' ideas. It's sort of frustrating this is a comment only I can edit, but feel free to reply with your own thoughts!