In this post we’ll cover some information and challenges in creating an accessible autocomplete box. A good autocomplete box is accessible by default and will allow all users to navigate intuitively, either by keyboard or mouse. Many of you may have used an autocomplete box before and not even realized that the keyboard shortcuts intuitively used were also there to allow impaired users access to the same functionality.
Tag: HTML
Borders with Cut Corners in a Post-HTML5 World
In previous articles focusing on the technical side of creating Tau Station, we’ve discussed how our team is working hard to utilize inclusive design, how they’ve created an authoring tool to provide meaningful choices for players, and about their focus on writing clean database code. Today, we are going to discuss artist choices about borders which make game’s user interface (UI) visually complex and interesting, while still allowing the art assets to be usable in a variety of situations.
Tau Station has many different types of artist elements that use non-standard borders and edges. A design like this can be implemented in a variety of ways; with an older approach, which utilizes files in a PNG format, and which only consist of the file having one layer, or a newer approach, which is more complex, but which utilizes more layers and which is less limiting. We will focus on a new(ish) technique which seems to often be overlooked by many front-end developers, even in 2017.
Continue reading "Borders with Cut Corners in a Post-HTML5 World"
Inclusive Design in the Inventory
One of Tau Station’s goals is to build a game that can be accessed by all players. For the UI Team this means focusing on usability and accessibility.
We are working hard to implement Tau Station’s Inventory.
Interstellar Travel for All – A Socratic Exchange
In one of our recent posts we described some of the work we’ve been doing to improve Tau Station’s star map. This week we’re going more in-depth about the process and will even show some of the code we’re using.
Initially, a canvas map was all we offered the player.
But as we said in the last map post, a canvas is only selectively accessible, and doesn’t work with screen readers or in browsers that don’t support JavaScript. Thus we wanted to reduce the star map into its basic HTML representation, so that we could progressively build it back up into a canvas rendering.
When we approached this, we asked ourselves one question:
What is this thing, and what does it do?
Ok, so maybe two questions.
Continue reading "Interstellar Travel for All – A Socratic Exchange"