Category: Development

WordCamp US 2024 – It’s been a while

Liminal Wapuu

This year I was fortunate to attend WordCamp US 2024 in one of my favorite cities, Portland, Oregon. I was not only able to attend, but was also one of the fortunate few selected to present. I heard tell that 350 folks submitted presentations for this event. I can only imagine the difficulty and work the volunteer organizers had in selecting speakers and am grateful for the opportunity.

It was an interesting intersection of my interests. For many years I was active in the local WordPress community as one of the event organizers for WordCamp St. Louis and the monthly WordPress meetup group. The pandemic put a big kibosh on my involvement and disrupted the community as a whole. It’s been five years since I’ve been at a WordPress-centric event, and this time I was there as a speaker. Life is funny that way.

I wanted to take a moment to jot down my notes and thoughts from the event. I learned a lot and met some interesting folks along the way.

Contributor Day

Tuesday kicked off the event with Contributor Day, which is a full day dedicated to improving WordPress. That could be contributing code to core, working on plug-ins, documentation, community building, or even video and marketing efforts. I ended up spending the first half of the day at the table for Openverse, a search engine for freely-licensed (Creative Commons) images and audio. Since I’ve contributed to Wikimedia Commons and work at the Foundation, I was curious to learn more.

I chatted with Zack Krida, Madison Swain-Bowden, and Krystle Salazar1 and learned more about their work. The project originally started at Creative Commons in 2017 as CC Search, and was brought under the WordPress umbrella in 2021. It’s integrated into WordPress, allowing authors of any site to search and use freely licensed imagery from Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, and more.

Openverse in verse

They face many of the same challenges Commons faces regarding reuse, attribution, NSFW content, and to a smaller degree moderation. They are mostly a front-end to existing repositories whereas Commons is a repository upon itself! We had some good chats, with far too little time to cover it all.

One WordPress-related pain point we shared was the lack of formal functionality in WordPress core for attribution and licensing information. Over the course of WordCamp US, I heard from no fewer than four presenters, along with a few side conversations, about how everyone ends up creating their own solution to manage these pieces of custom data. NASA, Vox Media, Disney, and others have all devised their own solutions. Even we at the Foundation, for Diff and the Foundation’s site, have created unique approaches—each a reinvention of the wheel. There’s a solid opportunity here to improve this in WordPress Core.

I was also able to reconnect with some friends from the St. Louis WordPress community, many of whom I haven’t been in contact with for five years. Pandemics, man. Jen Swisher, Joe McGill, David Smith, Mary and Dick, and Michelle were all regulars at WordCamp St. Louis back in the day. Maybe with things settling down, we might see more community building happening here in town…

For dinner, I sauntered out to Frank’s Noodle House and had a wonderful meal. I have a 99% success rate eating at restaurants that were formerly actual houses. Frank’s was no exception. 2

The pendulum in the Oregon Convention Center

Showcase Day

Showcase Day was a new addition to WordCamp US. It is described as, “an opportunity for creators to showcase some of their most innovative, interesting, and indubitably incomparable uses of WordPress”. So the coolest and most interesting uses of WordPress. I’d argue that they achieved this with the packed schedule. Here are the sessions I attended (so hard to choose!), with a few notes where I remembered.

Keynote: Reach for the Sky: A Magical Transformation with Gutenberg and Unlocking the Digital Evolution: Navigating the Gutenberg Era by Alexandra Guffey and Katrina Yates

These two back-to-back presentations – the first being the keynote of the day – covered how the Disney Experiences team used the block editor (Gutenberg) to design and develop custom blocks for their editorial needs. Two lovely folks from Disney talked about their strategy and approach. They created a main theme and used child themes for different sites. Each with blocks specific to those sites. A key takeaway quote from their work, “We are growing with Gutenberg instead of working against it.” Nice.

I also learned of the Gutenberg Storybook for WordPress components. A handy guide to know what components are available to reuse with variables and live code demos. A valuable resource. Instead of developing your own controls you can use these components to provide as close-to-core interface for editors as possible.

The Power of Extending the WordPress Editor: A Block Visibility Showcase by Nick Diego

Nick walked through a plugin he created called Block Visibility. It works with any block and allows you to adjust the visibility of blocks based on a smorgasbord of conditions. User roles, date and time, viewport size, and more. Along the way, I learned that the Group block can be made sticky, making it easy to create navigation items within the editor.

I also learned about how you can extend a WordPress block with custom functionality, which is a far better approach than creating a custom block from scratch, especially since core now contains many useful blocks.

Dynamic blocks also look rather interesting. “Dynamic blocks are blocks that build their structure and content on the fly when the block is rendered on the front end.”

My one idea for Nick’s Block Visibility plugin would be to incorporate visibility by language. So if the site language is set to Spanish, don’t show a promotion happening in English. Or if a block content is translated, show the appropriate language version.

Nick is also leading an Admin refresh and media library update to WordPress core. I’m going to be bugging him to learn more about that work soon. 🙂

I had lunch with some folks. Met TJ Mullinax and a few other folks. TJ is an interesting fellow. He lives in central Washington state and is a digital producer and photojournalist at Good Fruit Grower magazine. Which is a magazine about fruit cultivation with a history going back to the 1940s! They, naturally, use WordPress for their digital publication.

Reinventing Vox Media’s CMS: A WordPress Migration Journey by Thomas Stang, Anique Halliday, Stéphane Boisvert

This session was interesting because over the last twelve years Vox Media had built their own custom content management system called Chorus. They used it for all of their properties including Vox.com, The Verge, Polygon, and SB Nation. Migrating away from an in-house developed tool to an open-source project like WordPress is not only interesting from a technical perspective, but also from a business and political perspective. We now have one less CMS competing with WordPress, which isn’t great, but we also have another set of high-traffic and well-supported sites being built on top of WordPress.

From a community health perspective, I was interested in hearing about how readers of the websites handled this transition. It sounded, based on the presentation and conversations with the presenters afterward, that in most cases, folks didn’t even realize that a change had been made. In the case of Polylang in particular, the design of the site from the viewers’ perspective was exactly the same—a rather impressive magic trick.

Building a Block First Digital News Platform for Pew Research Center by Seth Rubenstein

I attended a session from Pew Research on how they build a new news platform using blocks – right before block patterns were a thing. Their blocks are rather complex items such as quizzes and charts. I was happy to learn that they give back by making their work available as open-source software!

Highlights from the Automattic Special Projects Team by Christy Nyiri

What a charming and whirlwind tour of the amazingly well-designed projects taken on by Automattic’s Special Projects Team! It was a very visual experience, so summarizing it too much here is a challenge and would not suffice.

I wish I had an ounce of the design chops these folks have. They showcased (see, it was Showcase Day) some really great designs and talked every so briefly about the work that went into each of them. Christy is a natural presenter and hit all the high notes.

A Technical Deep Dive Into Our Favorite Features of the New Harvard Gazette Site by Joeleen Kennedy

Joeleen led us through the work she and the fine folks at Human Made did for the Harvard Gazette. It was a great overview of the challenges of building something the editorial team can use that is flexible, but not so varied as to be inconsistent. I loved the little bit of genius for the dual-column layout on desktop and stacking the sidebar on mobile.

Speaking of Human Made, I wanted to take a moment to thank the crew for inviting me to sit with them at lunch – big middle school “someone asked me to sit with them vibes!”, so thank you – and for inviting me out for food and drinks. I had a great time getting to know them better as people. Wonderful people. KAdam, Joleen, Pam, Adam, Stuart, Kirsty, Jon, and Joe.

Conference Day 1

wp-admin as Mission Control by Gary Kovar

Anyone from NASA has an unfair advantage when presenting their work. I mean, it’s space exploration for Pete’s sake! Even with this frustratingly cool starting position, Gary delivered an interesting and informative dive into how NASA customized the WordPress dashboard to allow their editorial team to work quickly to develop news packages, articles, and the famous (and again, cool) Image of the Day feature.

The customizations to the dashboard have me thinking about how we might use that to make Diff, the community blog I support, more inviting and easier to use.

Building WordPress Websites with ‘Privacy by Design’ in Mind by Donata Stroink-Skillrud

Donata gave a really compelling and informative presentation on why you, average site developer, should give a hoot about GDPR, data collection, and user privacy. It was great to see someone who is not a designer or developer by trade presenting on their bailiwick and how it intersects with working with WordPress and the web. I found myself nodding at many of the points she made and internally yelling about the many clients I’ve worked with who have never considered privacy as part of their design.

This was the first day the Sponsor Hall was open. As I was wandering about during lunch I spotted a corner where a typewriter was set up allowing you to write some poetry. A gentleman was typing away and I asked if I could take a photo while they typed. They turned to me afterward, looked at my name badge, and said, “Wikimedia! I’m a Wikimedian!”. I had surprisingly ran into Younesh Dhaubhadel, a photographer from Nepal. He had participated in Wiki Loves Monuments in 2018 and came in second place in his region! Small world.

Decoding the Woo and WordPress Strategies of Industry Giants by Bryce Adams, Travis Lima

Brilliant title. While I don’t have much experience with WooCommerce, only using it on one site in my 15-year journey with WordPress, I do find it to be an impressive suite of tools for e-commerce. I love that it’s open-source, allowing company owners to control every bit of the experience without too many middlemen. This session was a grand tour of various implementations of WooCommerce and how the software can be customized to fit a seemingly endless set of circumstances.

Aside: I also learned about Universal Yums, which I just subscribed to. See! WooCommerce works! :p

Creating Client-Friendly Editing Experiences by Kristin Falkner

Kristin walked us through some great strategies for adapting WordPress to client expectations, reminding us that while we may be steeped in technology, some folks have actual work to do. 🙂 The ideas shared in this session have me reflecting on my own assumptions and how I might better communicate with and learn from those who use the sites I support.

One additional take away from this session was learning bout programs like Scribe and Screen Studio – apps that help create great video tutorials of software interfaces. This is something I will definitely include in any future client work.

After the group photo, I had the fortune to bump into Dinara Lima and her husband John Arthur Strauss. Both were, like me, carrying around some camera kit. John and I happened to be carrying the same camera, and we chatted for a bit. They came to WordCamp US all the way from São Paulo and were spending some time in the PNW area after the event.

Dinara made a nice video sharing her experiences at WordCamp US. Check it out!

Photo of group photo photographers photographing the group

Conference Day 2

How the Wikimedia Foundation Uses WordPress to Run an Open Community Blog for the Wikipedia Community and Beyond by Chris Koerner

Oh wait, this is me! I presented on our use of WordPress at the Wikimedia Foundation. How we took WordPress and with a few plugins, some customizations, and a bunch of tenacity made a multilingual, multi-author community blog.

The response to my presentation was really positive. People seemed inspired by the work we were doing. I had a few conversations with folks afterward about community building and keeping communities healthy. That giving some recognition and having awareness of other people can go a long way in building trust and mutual respect.

Unedited livestream


Releasing a Version of WordPress in 8 Hours or Less by Aaron Jorbin, Jonathan Desrosiers

This was an introspective review of just how interconnected software is. The speakers, Aaron and Jonathan, walked us through minute-by-minute, how a small but impactful bug was added to WordPress core and remedied within hours. I won’t spoil the cause, but some folks couldn’t update their sites because of it. Which is important!

It makes you think about how software can feel fragile and the importance of a robust, thoughtful community to help keep things going.

200,000 Games and Going: The Pandemic Kept Us Apart, But My WordPress Project Brought Us Together by Corey Maass

This was a really sweet session about how Corey built a digital board game during the pandemic that created a community and connection between people. A great example of going, “Huh, I didn’t think WordPress could do THAT!”. A great narrative and an interesting use of WordPress. :chefs kiss:

Enhancing WordPress Accessibility: Tools, Techniques, and Real-World Solutions by Jennifer Dust, Eli Frigoli

A great overview of the importance of accessibility and some useful tools to use – and avoid – to make your site more accessible. I found it particularly illuminating that automated “site checker” tools can give you a false sense of security, something I was not aware of and hadn’t really thought deeply about before.

This session reminds me that design for accessibly is not only for folks with a specific need, but for everyone. We all benefit now, and we’ll all eventually need some sort of aid as we age.

An In-Person Q&A With Matt Mullenweg by Matt Mullenweg

I actually went back to my hotel to watch this one remote. It was something. Terrible leadership from Matt and such a negative ding against WordPress as an ecosystem to invest in. I feel for all the folks impacted at WP Engine and beyond. Matt needs to log off and take a walk. Not being a jerk here, genuinely concerned for his well-being and the health of the community.

Misc Notes

I also learned – from which session I cannot remember – about work happening to allow WordPress admins to create and manage custom post types inside the admin interface. This is pretty cool no-code solution to something that a lot of sites need/use.

Custom fields and post types inside the block editor – with WordPress.com

Closing event at OMSI

This was the perfect venue to close out the event. A visually fun area to hang out in with dozens of built in ice breakers with all the various interactive exhibits. Kudos to the organizers for selecting OMSI and having it stuffed to the gills with food and things to do.

During dinner I talked with Ben from WP Engine who happened to see my presentation. We ended up at a table with fellow XOXO’er Tim Tate. Come to find out both Ben and Tim grew up in Boise! What are the odds. 🙂

Conclusion

I learned a lot from the different sessions I attended and appreciated all the speakers sharing their work so freely. I think the event organizers did a wonderful job in organizing the event. The signage was great. The rooms were well staffed. The audio/video work was flawless. Ok, there’s always a few hiccups. 🙂 Everyone I bumped into was friendly, and open to conversation. Five stars, would attend again.

One refrain I heard in talking to different people was the impact the pandemic had on a sense of community. How many of us are still recovering from that and how many were not present because of the now endemic nature of the virus. Five years later I felt like I missed a lot of WordPress events, but actually there haven’t been that many. It feels like we’re still getting back into the swing of things. For instance, it felt like there were fewer sponsors and vendors at WordCamp US this year than say five years ago. That could just be my subjective observation. I don’t know.

I have a lot of fondness for WordPress, both in what allows me to do as a professional, but in the strong sense of community and in the healthy way – I think –people help one another. Even while working under the horrendous umbrella of capitalism. It mirrors and mimics a lot of the work I do in the Wikimedia movement. I also like having another open-source web-based community separate from work to be invested in. So, I hope things continue to improve and maybe I’ll get back into the community in the future.

I took some photos along the way. A few have been scattered within this post. More are on Flickr.

Small Type in a Big Game

Fire Emblem: Three Houses suffers from accessibility hindsight

If you’re reading this on a desktop computer, this image is roughly the size of the Switch screen. Hold your Switch up to compare.

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 dim3 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.

How to measure “too small”

First, let’s learn a little about what a typical person can see at 20/20 vision.

Wikimedia Commons – CC by SA 3.0

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.” 4

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.

Accessibility recommendations

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.5

“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.

Oh, it can’t be that bad!

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. 6

Take a look at the text below the image in this tutorial dialog. 7

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.

I’ll be ready to fight as soon as I find my glasses.

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.8

Another?

17px again.

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.

Contrasting views

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!

Thankfully it’s just the days of the week that are low contrast. But look at that bottom banner text. 😬

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.

The Fire Emblem Awakening foot gremlin strikes again!

What does better look like?

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.

overflow: visible;

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.9

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.

What are some solutions?

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:

  • Deal with it, which is the least helpful and most “there’s not a problem” way to handle this.
  • Use a larger screen and/or sit closer. Affording to buy a new TV to play a video game, much less the space constraints of a larger screen, are out of reach for many folks. This also has apparent downsides according to my mother (and many medical professionals) circa 1990 when I was nine and sat inches from the TV. 10
  • Use the Zoom feature on the Nintendo Switch.11 This is clunky and feels very second-class.
  • Contact Nintendo and politely let them know of the issue. Pray to Sothis that they fix it.

For the developers in the room, a few things to consider:

  • Plan ahead for accessibility early in the development of your game.
  • Hire an accessibility consultant if you don’t have anyone in-house to help. They will identify more problems than just small text – from color issues, audio, interface elements, controls and more. Hire them early and throughout the development process – before you design yourself into a corner.
  • Learn from existing solutions within the video game industry and outside. Ensuring your product-that-appears-on-a-screen has legible text is much closer to solved than you may think!
  • Error on the side of caution – bigger text means a more inclusive game without sacrificing the enjoyment of anyone.
  • Make game-wide text adjustable if possible – some folks can’t see small text. Some like it big. Some prefer higher information density. Some folks have cybernetically grafted hawk eye implants. This requires more development time and adds complexity, but has a net gain of fewer white guys with opinions 12 writing critical think pieces on their blog and more people being able to enjoy your work.
  • Test in multiple play situations, with people of various backgrounds. Not all people who will be enjoying your game will be doing so in ideal scenarios. Play on public transportation with unpredictable ambient light. Visit a friend’s house with big TV. Visit a friend’s house with a smaller TV. Have your dad play it on his recliner in low light. Let him rest when he falls asleep. He’s tired.
  • Remember that not everyone will have a pair of headphones handy or can turn the volume up (or can even hear!) to listen to the audio. For many people of all kinds, the text is the primary method of understanding and enjoying your work. As you are developing, play the game without sound. Are there any nuance or cues missing without audio? Can you represent them on-screen with text or indicators? Are those visual cues legible‽
  • Developers often work in a well-lit office space in front of a nice 27+ inch high density monitor. Not everyone playing will be doing so in front of a 60+ inch HDTV on a couch perfectly situated like an IKEA display room. Life is full of variance and the Nintendo Switch is designed to be enjoyed within such variance.

“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. 13 14

Et Conclusion

I set out to create a fair and constructive critique of a problem that is not unique to Fire Emblem: Three Houses 15 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.

See also

Star Simpson – XOXO

Star Simpson builds hardware with soul, currently working on sky machines at Otherlab. The creator of the PLIBMTTBHGATY series of coding events and the TacoCopter drone delivery concept, Star’s latest project is Circuit Classics, reviving the hand-drawn circuits of Forrest M. Mims III as hardware kits.

If you’ve ever done something creative 16 you’ll know the alternating feelings of “This is crazy”, “This is terrible!”, and “This is great!”. I enjoyed Star Simpson’s talk on how that craziness is what often leads to some of the best things people have ever made.

I’ve languished in sharing more videos from XOXO, but this one is rather timely. Just the other day I learned that the circuit board designs Star talks about are now available over at Adafruit!

As Those Who Make

It’s not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with making (although it’s not all that clear that the world needs more stuff). The problem is the idea that the alternative to making is usually not doing nothing—it’s almost always doing things for and with other people, from the barista to the Facebook community moderator to the social worker to the surgeon. Describing oneself as a maker—regardless of what one actually or mostly does—is a way of accruing to oneself the gendered, capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.

– Why I am Not a Maker – Debbie Chachra

I make communities. I do it with other people. It is just as valuable as those who make the architecture, content, documentation, and software that these communities use and support.

Notes from the first Enterprise MediaWiki Conference

On May 22 – 25 I attended the first Enterprise MediaWiki Conference (EMWCon) in New York City. It’s a continuation of the similarly named SMWCon, but with a strong emphasis on all flavors of MediaWiki and how it is used in organizations large and small. I was able attend in my capacity as a staff member of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), but have had a personal interest in the MediaWiki community for a few years now. I thought it would be helpful to write down a few notes on my experiences and share those with folks within the Wikimedia movement.

At the conference I learned how folks are using MediaWiki, what difficulties they face in their use, and their concerns for the future of the platform. 17

Quick Take Aways

A few large points that struck me as worth mentioning.

  • There are many people using MediaWiki in interesting and unique ways. This is the 4th MediaWiki-focused event I’ve attended in the last two years and at each one I’ve discovered new uses in new industries. This time around? Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, a large banking company, and a large oil company all use MediaWiki in some capacity to help document and share knowledge within their organizations. This is on top of groups like Circ du Soleil, MITRE, NATO, and NASA that I was already aware of. I was also impressed by the half a dozen independent developers who support organizations in using MediaWiki. Some folks have smaller organizations with smaller wikis – which is impressive. It’s even crazier to think that this bit of open-source software can be used inside so many large, well-known, organizations – often to great success.
  • Users of MediaWiki – specifically those that write their own code – want acknowledgment. They want to know that the folks who are pointing MediaWiki toward its future are aware of these diverse use cases and keep that in mind when making decisions that would impact non-WMF-supported use.
  • They also want to know what the WMF’s plans are. They want to be reassured – and to be able to reassure others within their organizations, that MediaWiki will be around. A simple, high-level roadmap would do wonders here. There is a large ask of the foundation to make a decision on what sort of support will be offered – even if the answer is an uncomfortable “nothing” it would be better than the current strain of “Eh, we really don’t know.” At one point during the conference I made the joke that the WMF had ‘cookie licked’ MediaWiki. :p
  • I had one attendee, a long-time MediaWiki admin and community member, ask me, “Am I a volunteer? A contributor?” This is from someone whose organization has no less than 14 extensions on MediaWiki.org and who has contributed code to the core development of MediaWiki. They were not certain if their contributions were as valued given that what they work on has a much larger impact on third-party users than Wikimedia projects. People within the MediaWiki community want equal treatment and respect as developer contributors.
  • Lastly, the WMF should consider the impact this community has had in the development of MediaWiki as a popular and healthy open-source software. There is an incredible financial worth in the patches and extensions contributed by third parties. I mean, to be frank, we have people working at NASA and MITRE (among others) sharing their work with the MediaWiki community. The time and talent alone is something that should be considered a strength within our community.

MWF?

Another topic that has been gaining steam recently in the MediaWiki community is the idea of a “MediaWiki Foundation”. A non-profit organization that focuses on the core development of MediaWiki as an open-source software project – influenced by all parties equally. I think it’s going to happen in some capacity.

Generally speaking the MediaWiki community agrees it won’t be the big, giant, dramatic change like moving all of MediaWiki ownership out of the WMF.

Instead the focus will be on small deliverables. Right now the MediaWiki Stakeholder’s user group is looking for a small task on the wishlist, funding (passing a hat around!) and working to show that something was accomplished. Then, after being able to show their work, approach the WMF with a request for some of their time to discuss how they could work together. If you’re interested in following along, check out the MediaWiki Stakeholders’ wiki and the #mwstake room in the Wikimedia Phabricator.

A Real Community

While some wikis are internal and not public, the folks at the conference freely shared their experiences and knowledge for others to benefit from. One attendee described the community and our relationship with one another in an interesting way. We’re not competing with each other to ‘build the best wiki’ but we are competing together against closed, propriatrty systems of knowledge management that permeate organizations across industries. These systems have an antiquated model of documenting and sharing knowledge that is antithesis to truly sharing information to empower members of the org. For example, SharePoint sets permissions to be closed by default. You have to know the information exists, somewhere in the laybranith of SharePoint sites, before you can request access to it!

I think that this event acknowledges that we come together freely to share across industries and uses. It is endemic of having a natural community – not one forced out of branding, marketing, or sales departments within a for-profit organization.

Wikipedians in our midst

While the conference was focused on MediaWiki use outside of Wikimedia projects, attendees did have an opportunity to get to know more about the Wikimedia world and meet folks who are involved in related projects. One of our hosts, Pharos, is a long-time editor on English Wikipedia, president of the NYC chapter, and was a Wikipedian-in-residence at the Guggenheim Museum.

At the end of the first day the NYC chapter brought pizza and people together to talk about what they had been working on. I met no less than 3 individuals involved in Afrocrowd.org, a Wikipedia project I had never heard of until this event!

I also met a long-time MediaWikian, Frank Taylor, who was interested in the work the WMF was doing around emerging communities. He even offered to put the folks at the foundation working on this outreach in contact with folks he has worked with in Central and South America. Which is a kind and unexpected example of the communities sharing interests!

Conclusion

I encourage folks to attend future EMWCons (and SMWCons). They are a great opportunity to learn and share with one another, to create relationships beyond Talk pages, and to grow an already impressive community. In particular I would like to invite the following groups.

  • WMF staff who work on MediaWiki core development, planning, and developer relations.
  • People who use MediaWiki – or are interested in using a wiki!
  • People who want to encourage open-source software and free knowledge – even when the knowledge is shared not among the entirety of humanity. There is a very real halo effect in people using MediaWiki. The philosophy of the wiki changes organizations approach to sharing and working together. It breeds familiarity with many aspects of the wider Wikimedia movement. I know I’m only a factor of one, but my Wikimedia contributions are born out of the use of MediaWiki within a ‘closed’ organization. 18

See also