As someone who has been chronically Very Online for many years1 this bit from Bo Burnham’s latest Netflix special really resonated with me. Both for the brilliant and spot-on “ha-ha” comedic description of the modern Internet and the terrifying spot-on oh-this-is-so-tragic synopsis of what the Internet has become and how it impacts us. I’ve watched it at least a dozen times. Content warning: NSFW language.2
via waxy
I don’t know if it’s my love of comics, my excitement for new movies in this universe, or the terrible fact that I haven’t been in a movie theatre in over a year, but this made me happy cry.
I’ve been at the Wikimedia Foundation for five years now. I don’t often speak publicly1 about what it’s like to work at the non-profit behind one of the biggest social movements, website, and community on the planet. Also one of the few that aren’t backed by squicky dude-bros who care more about money than humans. AAAAANNNYYYHOW, there’s something special about the number five and so here are my thoughts.
I think the Foundation is in a better position than in the past five years – both internally in how the organization is structured and work is managed, but also in what we work on and where our focus is. We’ve learned a lot from the lumps garnered in the past (deservedly or not) and with Movement Strategy and strong focus on Objectives and Key Results (ORKs) it’s more transparent (and apparent) that our work is tied to the needs of the movement.
Better, not perfect.
For example, the recent strategy and board work are both well-staffed – with regional support. The teams (from my perspective) are taking it slow and giving folks a chance to talk and listen. Doesn’t mean we’re going to do everything (we can’t) or hear everyone (we can’t) but that we are trying to acknowledge gaps and biases.
Product has been kicking butt in building tools that help. In particular the Growth team, mobile web, and the desktop refresh. I still love Community Tech after five years. I think I will after another five. If I were a billionaire they’d get 100 million a year just to do more of this.
I still feel like new teams/initiatives/people still sometimes get burned. Unclear expectations, combative community, crossed wires. We’re working on that. I am seeing less of it. Still a few spots of things we should be doing IMHO, but aren’t. Like Maps and visualizations. Like search and the portal. We need to make a decision about the weird stuff kinda floating out there.
Have you seen the multimedia search for Commons? It’s a media search that’s useful! No more “site:commons.wikimedia.org dog” searches on Google.
Onboarding staff new to this wacky world is a challenge. It’s inconsistent and it takes six months to even get up to speed – if not longer! I know smart people are working on this, so I have optimism for the future. It’s still going to be a struggle. We are a multifaceted organization2 and an even more multifaceted movement. And we’re continuing to grow. Obtaining knowledge about the river in which the ship is moving in, while the ship is moving, is tricky. Making this more systemic and process-driven will help, but we still have so much information about our volunteers and the relationship, in well, individual relationships with people. I mean, it should be that way. Humans connecting to humans, but hoo boy does that not scale easily.
Foundation is investing into listening. I mean, I’m on a team literally charged with improving Movement Communications. With Diff, and our needs assessment work, I’m feeling jazzed about moving the needle on the relationship with communities. The Foundation has been inconsistent in talking to folks and connecting our work to theirs. We need to be better storytellers, listeners, and force multipliers. Especially in emerging communities and places of the world where we have communities but know little about them (and therefore can not support them).
I feel like my work is contributing in a more strategic, positive way with Diff. Working with and amplifying the work of people where we can treat each other like teammates and not combatants. It’s encouraging and impactful. Fun Fact: Diff saw 86,865 views from 65,935 visitors in January. Higher than any expectations I had.
As I was drafting this blog post our ED announced she was stepping down. I’ve reflected on all that has happened under her leadership and I think it make sense to mention it here. Katherine has put the org – and by extension the movement – on a solid course.
I mean, the next CEO can step in and goof off all day for ~4 years and still leave successful – assuming they don’t muck with stuff too much. 😉
2020 sucked. I’m inspired by the folks who keep on trucking. And reminded by those that took a step back that you can’t keep others warm by setting yourself on fire. It’s amazing that folks have continued the amazing work, supporting one another, and moving the needle of trust and free knowledge. I was on the committee for Wikimedian of the Year and in all honesty I would have nominated everyone. They were all inspirational and all so human.
There are still folks who like to be edgy jerks and stoke the fire on the whole WMF/Community divide. I think it’s unconstructive. It’s also super demoralizing. It’s also something you can’t do anything about. But I have noticed less petty picking-of-fights over a lack of clarity and supposition with fear and doubt that The Foundation is evil. So that’s nice. I also am caring less about the loud minority of folks as I give more of my attention to those who want to work with me within the system. You know, like you would anywhere else in life.
Five years is the longest I’ve been at any prior organizations. It’s also easily the longest I’ve been in the same position. Or roughly the same position. Community-facing communications.3 Five is also half a decade. A lot can change in five years. When I joined the Foundation my youngest daughter was less than two years old. She’s now kicking my butt (and the world’s) as a smart six-year-old.
I still care and am still invested in my work and the movement. A little less than in the past. I don’t know if that’s me trying to learn how not to give a fuck or if that’s burnout over all the changes the last few years have brung. Ya’ll, the work is hard, the work is plentiful, and working remotely can feel isolating. Not gonna lie.
I worry more about my co-workers than myself. They’re the smart ones I rely on to appear intelligent. 🙂
Working remotely is challenging because getting an attaboy or acknowledgment of your work is really hard when you don’t see your boss in the hallway. This sort of encouragement, I know, is very American, but I like to have a sense of knowing where I stand in organization and how I’m doing with my work. So far, I think I’m doing pretty good. Still a struggle to be OK with ambiguity and chaos.
So yeah, let’s end this on an up-beat note. I’ve been working from home for five years now. Full-time. I’m super privileged to be able to afford the time/money/space to have built my studio. If you cannot do the same, I still want you to take your self-care seriously. Here’s some advice. Don’t feel bad if it doesn’t work for you. It sometimes doesn’t work for me.
So, five years down. Maybe I’ll do this again in another five?
The wild success of the Nintendo Switch has led Nintendo, along with numerous third-party studios, to practically trip over themselves in order to publish their franchises on the successful platform. For Nintendo the latest is the 15th installment in the long running strategy-RPG series, Fire Emblem. The latest game, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, was recently released and has been a critical and commercial success. This genre of game is very text heavy with just the dialog between characters matching or exceeding the word count of most novels.
As a fan of the series, and someone who has worn corrective glasses since elementary school, and an advocate for others I wanted to take a look at a particularly dim1 design choice in the latest game.
The fonts are tiny and faint.
The typographic choices in this game are irritating at best – for someone with good-to-slightly-below-average vision – to abruptly exclusionary to those with stronger vision impairment. I want to take this opportunity to critique the design choices. We’ll discuss how we can determine if this is problematic, examples of the issue taken from the game, suggestions for improvements, and a look into how this could be fixed while admitting difficulties. Most importantly I want to make a persuasive “Why?” as to spur the developers of this game – and any others reading – to actively improve accessibility in their games.
So please, set down the excellent Hogwarts simulator/Persona 5 cross-over for a minute, rub your eyes, squint a little, and settle in.
First, let’s learn a little about what a typical person can see at 20/20 vision.
This is a Snellen eye chart.
The way it works is that an ophthalmologist (eye doctor) places you 20 feet from the chart and has you read the lines until you are no longer able to distinguish the text clearly. The last line you’re able to read to a good degree is what your vision is scored at.
The eighth row down with the red line is what should be legible for folks at that distance with 20/20 sight.
According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, “A person with 20/20 vision can see what an average person can see on an eye chart when they are standing 20 feet away.”
Dr. McKinney, an ophthalmologist and glaucoma specialist at Eye Health Northwest in Oregon City, Oregon also claims, “that only about 35 percent of all adults have 20/20 vision without glasses, contact lenses or corrective surgery. With corrective measures, approximately 75 percent of adults have 20/20 vision”
So most people don’t have 20/20 vision. According to research from the National Eye Institute, “More than 33 percent were nearsighted and 36 percent had astigmatism, which causes fuzzy vision, the team reported. Another 3.6 percent were farsighted, meaning they can see at a distance but not up close.” 2
With assistance about 75% of adults can have 20/20 equivalent eyesight. That leaves out one in every four persons. This is assuming perfect math and statistical accountability. Those are large numbers of people who are impacted by poor accessibility design.
If you have poor vision or lost your glasses, your visual acuity would be worse. Let’s say it was something like 20/100. This means that the smallest line on the eye chart that you can read at 20 feet can be read by someone with perfect vision who is standing 100 feet away.
The E on the Snellen chart is about 3.5 inches tall. That makes the line of text demarcated at 20/20 appear at about .38 inches tall. Roughly equivalent to a font size of 42px – viewed at 20 feet.
Now let’s talk about what is accessible at the size and distance of typical electronic device usage, with an obvious focus on the Nintendo Switch.
From the Game accessibility guidelines, a set of guidelines created by a group of developers, specialists, and academics in 2012 states:
“Use an easily readable default font size”
…
“Small text size is a very common complaint amongst people with vision impairments, whether medical (such as long sightedness) or situational (such as small mobile screen, or a living room that does not physically allow for a large TV close to a couch).”
What are their recommendations? They quote the Amazon Fire TV UI guidelines.
“Amazon TV have 10-foot-UI guidelines that include text size recommendations, of 28px minimum when viewed on a 1080p screen. When viewed on an average size screen this tallies for what would be expected for someone with 20/20 vision while using the Snellen Chart. However because it does not take any degree of vision impairment into account, use 28px as a minimum rather than a target, aim to exceed it wherever possible.”
That last bit is most important.
“use 28px as a minimum rather than a target, aim to exceed it wherever possible.”
Most of this essay will focus on the frustration with Fire Emblem’s type choices in handheld mode. This is where the issue is most egregious and the easiest for me to simulate with screenshots. However, let’s talk for a second about what 20/20 means for someone sitting in front of a television.
According to Amazon’s guidance the minimum target is 28 pixels at 10 feet. That’s pretty close to half the size of 42 pixels at 20 feet. Close to what we’d judge “perfect” 20/20 vision at with the Snellen chart. So, while I’m using back-of-the-napkin math, this issue is not unique to handheld mode, and would benefit players using larger screens.
Microsoft, makers of the Xbox series of home consoles, also provides solid guidance around accessibility, including building your game with diverse visual acuity in mind.3
“Can you effectively play the game on a small monitor or TV sitting at a distance?”
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/gaming/accessibility-for-games
This is even well known outside of the video game industry. For web developers 🙋♂️ this is best represented in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. First published in 2008 (only a few years after the Xbox 360 and PS3 were released) the guidelines cover numerous points in regards to accessibility, including that of the appearance of text.
“Except for captions and images of text, text can be resized without assistive technology up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality.”
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#resize-text
The visual presentation of text and images of text has a contrast ratio of at least 7:1
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#contrast-minimum
App developers too have had guidance around the legibility of text in mobile apps. From Apple’s User Interface Guidelines,
“Use text size to help determine contrast. In general, smaller or lighter-weight text needs to have greater contrast to be legible. “
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/accessibility/overview/color-and-contrast/
Heck even printers have figured this out decades before LCD screens! According to The Print Handbook, a guide for people who print things, Designer Andy Brown states that if your viewing distance from your text is at 10ft (like say for a poster) your minimum text size should be 25pt. While points to pixels is not perfect, that’s pretty close to the Amazon recommendation of 28px minimum at 10ft. And Andy’s guide is not specifically for accessibility, just a general rule of thumb.
Let’s take a look at a few examples from the game.
These are taken directly off the Switch in handheld mode at 720p and are unedited.
As I mentioned earlier, if viewing this critique on a desktop computer, the images should be sized roughy at the same physical size as the screen on a Nintendo Switch. 4
Take a look at the text below the image in this tutorial dialog. 5
That text is rendered in a serif font, probably a variant of Times New Roman, in a size of 17 pixels. How do I know? I brought the screenshot into my image editing tool of choice, Pixelmator Pro, and measured.
Another example.
This is another screen where the font is 17px.
Now is a good time to mention that serif fonts, like the one predominantly used in Fire Emblem, are worse from an accessibility standpoint. Sans-serif fonts – those without the little strokes at the end of a letter – are generally better for accessibility.6
Another?
Ok, and how about some dialog boxes?
Well, here things improve slightly. The text is 24px in size. That is closer to the minimum recommendation of 28px shared above. The line height is about 1.25x.
Ok, but what about at 1080p. Well, I can’t take a native 1080p screenshot from the Switch. All screenshots (and video) are captured at 720p from the Switch. ಠ_ಠ
Which means that on one hand it’s hard to give examples from that resolution, but on the other hand that resolution is not as easy to portray regardless. When reading this article on the web you’re much more likely to be at a closer distance to your screen, similar to when you play your Switch. A 1080p screenshot would need to be viewed from a similar situation as you would a TV – further away with the image full-size on a larger screen.
The text is not just too small. Fire Emblem also has an issue with contrast.
The common appearance of text in-game.
The font is not a solid black, but for what I can only assume were design aesthetics – to give the dialog boxes a parchment-like quality – the type is a shade or two lighter brown color. On a light brown background.
That’s a contrast ratio of 5.7:1, well below the 7:1 suggested by WCAG.
This persists through nearly every dialog in the game: quests overview, dialog boxes, inventory menu, and even the calendar; which is not brown on brown, but light gray on dark purple!
Here’s a really bad (or good‽) example. Can you easily read the blue text in the lower left corner? Try opening this at full size too.
Well, let’s start at the most simple. Increase the contrast.
This is the same dialog mentioned before with Caspar. The only difference is I changed the text color to be a solid black. The font size is the same 24px.
Here’s another.
Here we can see the same improvement.
What if we actually made the font bigger? How much larger could we go? Let’s take another look at the dialog with Caspar.
The font is black and set to 28px – our minimum recommendations from earlier. I’ve kept the text roughly within the same margins as the original dialog and the same line height.
Again, with the other dialog.
Whoops! There are some challenges in just increasing font size.
What if we try and fill the space by increasing the font size and using us as much available space? Here’s a mockup at 32px.7
Again with the professors.
Even with expanded margins and line height, the text would need to be modified. Either larger boxes, or splitting up the dialog.
Note: A larger line hight along with better character spacing also helps folks with disabilities like dyslexia; which is not demonstrated in these mock-ups.
So it’s easy to arm-chair critique the many years of development a game goes through by a team of professional game designers. It’s a little more difficult to suggest solutions.
So in the spirt of being constructive, here are a few. I’m afraid many of them are in the game developer’s hands.
As a consumer you options are:
For the developers in the room, a few things to consider:
“So Nintendo just needs to make the text bigger?” Well, no. There is difficulty in this work; undoubtedly so when not considering this from the onset and having to react after a game has been published.
As pointed out, some text boxes are quite full even with the current, too-small, text. These assets would need to be changed and there are many different kind of boxes containing text across the game.
Breaking up these text boxes is not as easy as just setting a font size and margin. As the voice acting is tied to the text visible on screen, timing of the spoken dialog would need to be changed to match. That would require some very specific edits to the existing recordings at minimum, and may even entail re-recording lines (especially if there’s not a natural break in the spoken words as it matches the text on-screen).
At minimum, the developers could revisit the font used and increase the contrast. They could perhaps better fill existing text boxes that currently have room. Ideally they would increase the size as much as possible, mostly in menus and dialog boxes. Ideally, all of this and learn from this shortsightedness in preparation for their next game.
With so many games originating in languages other than English, and so many being localized into other languages, developers should establish a flexible system for displaying text in their game early in development. This will not only approve accessibility in relation to visual acuity as we’ve discussed, but accessibility in culture and context! Making it so you can accommodate multiple scripts and directions is easier to do along side considerations for accessibly. 11 12
I set out to create a fair and constructive critique of a problem that is not unique to Fire Emblem: Three Houses 13 and I hope I have done so. If you found this useful, please share. If you have suggestions, please leave a comment. If you want action, please contact Nintendo and your favorite game studio.
My response from a “Change my View” post on reddit. 1
What you are describing is proper journalism and an informed electorate (particularly the later part of this section assuming you’re in the US). News, particularly newspapers, are referred to as the “fourth estate“. Yes there is bias (even going back to the turn of the 20th century and beyond) but the general gist is that newspapers sit outside the government and act as a body that keeps politicians (and companies, etc) to task.
Citizens, particularly those who have the capacity to vote, have the responsibility to be well informed on pertinent matters. At the local level, state/territory, and country. You do this by reading multiple sources, remaining skeptical, and not giving into extremism (Strong beliefs loosely held!).
No one is going to be able to do this for everyone. It’s something you have to do for yourself. Here in the US one could even consider it part of the unique strain of individualism many hold so dearly. It is on you – especially if you are concerned about the future of your country.
“But Chris, That’s hard!” You’re right. Being an adult, and an informed citizen is difficult. Nothing worth doing comes easy in life. 🙂 Given that news media (news for entertainment), social media, and any person with a YouTube account often gets mixed up in popular culture as journalism it can seem as though journalism doesn’t exist. It does, but there’s just more crap to sift through.
Want to do something about it? Be informed. Subscribe to a local paper, maybe more than one. Curate what you read. Be critical of your own habits. Do some research. Here’s some resources I’ve found useful.
