Oh for an accessible New York Times Crossword Puzzle

TRULY,  RantWoman leads a wild and crazy word nerd life.

 

RantWoman COULD be fishing on the internet for details about the unprecedented 20-round 8-person tie ending the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. Wow! You go kids! RantWoman foresees some kind of rules change before next year, but you go kids! RantWoman long ago made it to the MT state finals two years in a row, but rather than get carried away either waxing nostalgic or trying to use all this year’s finals vocabulary in idiomatic English sentences, RantWoman has bigger fish to fry.

 

In particular, RantWoman has been messing around with the New York Times crossword puzzle app for quite awhile. RantWoman definitely appreciates time wasters on her phone for those many moments when doing something obsessive will distract her from some other thing she definitely needs NOT to obsess about.

 

 RantWoman definitely likes the concept of crossword puzzle app on phone enough to be willing to think about spending money on it. However, RantWoman asked some of her blind peers whether they like Crossword puzzles. Yes! Therefore,  RantWoman refuses to spend money until accessibility issues on her mind get fixed enough that RantWoman can recommend the app with equal enthusiasm to both blind and sighted groupies. To that end, RantWoman is taking advantage of the daily Mini and such puzzles as the app sends her for free and serving as crash test dummy for #a11y accessibility on her Pixel Android phone.

 

RantWoman realizes as she writes, she COULD try the app on either an iPad or on Chromie the Chromebook, or probably on her out-of-date Kindle Fire, but RantWoman is not going to do that, for one thing because RantWoman thinks the navigation issues on her mind will be common across platforms. RantWoman wants to outline her gripes and hand the thoughts off to someone with fresher experience writing code than RantWoman has. RantWoman would also suggest involving people who have less vision than RantWoman or no vision at all in testing. With those caveats, here goes with the suggestions.

 

Low hanging Fruit:

There is an unlabeled button in the lower right corner of the word list screen. That button will pivot the clue listing from horizontal to vertical and vice versa. Label the button.

 

Autorotate: do not disable autorotate. RantWoman has fat fingers. RantWoman realizes that autorotate has pluses and minuses as far as screen real estate, but RantWoman also has fat fingers. RantWoman thinks more space to work with letters especially in long words would be a great gift.

 

RantWoman sometimes has trouble getting letters to register in the squares. RantWoman cannot tell whether that is because of having TalkBack and vibrate on touch on or a general problem. Fix it if possible.

 

RantWoman notes coders will have to pay attention to having focus in the word but needing to use the keyboard outside the puzzle. RantWoman is unclear what if anything needs to change for accessibility issues.

 

RantWoman also wants an option for moving around in a word. Sometimes RantWoman can tell what the end of a word should be but cannot get there because of leaving something at the beginning unfilled. Fix this.

 

The puzzle comes with two viewing options, one that shows the whole puzzle and one that just lists the across and then the down clues. RantWoman tends to use the latter for one thing because the letters do get read aloud if one runs ones fingers over words.

 

What RantWoman wishes would happen:

When the puzzle navigates to a clue, it should read first the clue and then something about the number of letters and what combination of blacks and filled letter spaces are there.

 

RantWoman  Thinks it MIGHT be interesting for shorthand to have three tones, one for blanks, one for if a space is filled, and one for when the word or puzzle check process finds an incorrect letter.

 

Then RantWoman would like a choice of navigation patterns: either move through every word or skip and only show words with blank spaces. The only show words with blank spaces option is efficient but it can skip words where the across plus down work has resulted in clear indication that something is wrong.

 

In the scroll past every word option, RantWoman might like just to hear in order the number of beeps of each type with the option of stopping, hearing the clue and any letters, blanks and letters marked incorrect.

 

RantWoman finds it especially puzzling when the puzzle is nearly full and Rantwoman either wants to find empty squares or to find words with incorrect letters in them. RantWoman also thinks maybe this problem needs more thought after making some of the accessibility improvements suggested above.

 

There. Happy coding? Leave a comment if there are any questions and please specify whether the comment should be public or just read and responded to by RantWoman.