Dev Blog: Accessibility

[Kandarin]

We've recently had a number of new players join us from a community of visually impaired gamers (if that's you, welcome!) who shared feedback on the experience of playing Nexus Clash with an audible interface. In game design as in the design of the physical world, it's very often true that what's good for disabled accessibility is good for everyone, and this has provided some valuable insight into what works and what doesn't in the Nexus interface.

Interface quality-of-life is always a topic of interest to the dev team, as is accessibility to players who have limited means to access the site smoothly for any number of reasons. None of us are really interface design experts and the site looks a bit backwards (though there's some promising stuff going on behind the scenes toward improving that), so we're always interested in finding the ease-of-use changes that we can do. The dev team tends to make updates in large irregular patches instead of little changes here and there, so this thread is about documenting issues on our radar and looking for advice and feedback on improvements related to this topic.

Accessibility topics that the dev team are aware of (and thinks we can do something about) are listed below. To keep this post short and simple, they'll be explained in subsequent posts:
* The game should have more keyboard shortcuts.
* Move buttons should show map directions.
* Pets should give more indication as to who their master is.
* There should be more ways (besides name color and going to their profile) to tell if a character is an ally or enemy.
* The game should tell you when you enter or leave water or other hazards.

[Kandarin]

Concern: The game should have more keyboard shortcuts.
Why that's a concern: This impacts everyone; because Nexus refreshes with every action, it's often necessary - and tedious - to navigate to the same place on the page over and over again to do some repetitive action. It'd be much easier for every player if more actions could get hotkeys.

Also it would be helpful if there was a hotkey to refresh the page; most browsers do this, but for most browsers that means repeating the previous action.
What we can do about it: Adding more hotkeys to Nexus game actions is usually pretty easy, and we've already started coding in more hotkeys. The only limiting factor is that some hotkeys may perform some other function in many browsers and so cannot be used. For instance, as handy as it would be to set Alt-D to bash a Door, in Chrome this button jumps to the URL.

It would be very nice to allow numpad numbers to work as movement buttons, but Alt+Numpad triggers ASCII characters for Windows users, which is probably most people. If there's an easy way around that we'd love to hear it.

[Kandarin]

Concern: Move buttons should show map directions.
Why that's a concern: This one pretty much only impacts visually impaired users; if the move buttons all say Move, it's not clear which direction you're going in.
What we can do about it: In a recent update we changed the buttons to show compass point directions. The buttons are still the same visual width, so it's no change for sighted users but helpful to anyone with an audio interface. The only thing we missed was the copy of move button code for moving inside large buildings; this will be easy enough to add. (Edit: A pending patch change is in that makes this apply to large building interiors.)

[Kandarin]

Concern: Pets should show who their master is.
Why that's a concern: This issue impacts both visually impaired users and mobile users, the latter of which is most of us. Desktop users can tell whose pets are whose with hover text, but most mobile users can't tell that. Your character knows whose pets are whose, but in a raid you may not know that until you hit the petmaster and get killed. Who owns what pet should be readable in more than just a hover text that most players can't get to.
What we can do about it: Probably the simplest way to do this would be to add the name of the master to the end of the pet targeting dropdown. This would cut down on friendly fire as well.

[Kandarin]

Concern: There should be more ways to distinguish allies/enemies.
Why that's a concern: This is a longstanding issue for colorblind use - friendly is green and hostile is red. Likewise, neutral is grey and hostile is black and in some lighting it's not always clear which one you have.
What we can do about it: The game should say whether someone is an ally or enemy somewhere besides that color. As to how to do that, we'd be interested in suggestions.

[Kandarin]

Concern: The game should tell you when you enter or leave water or other hazards.
Why that's a concern: It's noticeable now because we're observing visually impaired players entering water and having their characters drown, because the only indication is a little status effect somewhere on the screen. This has highlighted that for everyone, it's easy to only notice when you're in a hazardous terrain that slows you down once it's already taken a bunch of Action Points.
What we can do about it: At the very least, when you start Swimming you should get a message that tells you about it.

[Badziew]

[Badziew]

[Badziew]

[Badziew]

[plscks]