There’s this historic house in my home city. Not the most culturally or historically significant, but old by US standards and a handsome specimen of its time. It sat catty-corner to the warehouse/mailroom my dad use to work from before he retired. In 2016 it was purchased and renovations began. My dad would watch the folks work and was curious about the house. We were able to find the completed National Register of Historic Places Registration Form online for the home and learned a lot about the house from the research work within.
About two years ago I started a draft article about the house for Wikipedia 1 and used that document as a foundation. At the urging of a fellow Wikimedian I attended an editing party last week and got the article in a good enough state to move to article namespace on English Wikipedia. It now lives at Dr. George Ashe Bronson House.
At the same time I applied for a library card through the Wikipedia Library to get access to newspapers.com. I wanted to see if I could find out more about the owner of the home, Dr. George A. Bronson, a predominate local dentist. I did, and added a few additional citations to the article.
Shiro Miyake’s Wash U Yearbook Photo
Along the way I found out about the history of the Japanese garden the doctor built on the premises. Called, “The Oasis”, it was designed by Shiro Miyake from Nio, Sanuki, Japan. 2
Miyake came to St. Louis as part of the Japanese exhibit for the 1904 World’s Fair. He was a dentistry student at Washington University and graduated in 1909. He worked with Dr. Bronson to build the garden as his “houseman”.
According to old records from Washington University he was the Sergeant at Arms during his time at the school and his favorite occupation was “grinning”. His favorite song? “Just Fill Them Up Again”.3 And his ideal [person] was “Battling Nelson“.
While Miyake himself is not notable enough for his own Wikipedia article, I like that I was able to find out a little more about him through online resources and include his contributions to this well-respected garden in the article.
I recently got a little external enclosure to use with a SATA SSD that was going unused. Nothing fancy, this one if you’re curious. I’ve been using it without issue with the short cable that it came with (and a USB A to C adapter) to connect to my 2019 Macbook Pro.
Today I was being lazy and instead of getting my butt out of my chair to get the cable from my bag, I just grabbed the closest USB-C cable to transfer some files to the SSD. The cable I happened to use was the one that came with my 2020 iPad Pro 11″. Hooked it all up and started copying over some files. Usually an operation that takes a few minutes. Ten minutes later? Still transferring. Confused I loaded up Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and ran some comparisons for fun.
iPad Pro 2020 11″ cable
That’s not right! 41 MB/s is super slow. So I tried the cable the drive enclosure came with.
SSD enclosure cable
439 MB/s! Ok, that’s much better. Then I tried a few more cables. How about the nice long and thick USB-C cable that came with my Macbook Pro?
2019 Macbook Pro 13″ cable
Yikes! Super slow. For giggles (and it’s what I had laying around) the cable that came with my Pokeball Plus.
Pokeball Plus cable?
Again, super slow. These cable are just for charging, not for data transfer. To illustrate how slow, here’s a test using my external spinning disk Western Digital 4TB drive.
HDD drive cable
Not as fast as the SSD, naturally, but 100 MB/s faster than using the wrong cable on the SSD. 🙂
I know this might be common knowledge for some folks, but I was kinda surprised. Use the right cable folks!
Way back in 2011 I was lucky enough to win an iPad 2 at a conference I attended in Boston.4 I used the heck out of that thing. We had already bought my mother-in-law a first-generation iPad at this point so I was familiar with the device, but having one of my own was great.5 I could use it to share photos with family on its large screen instead of my tiny iPhone 4s. I could read comics, surf the web, all the stuff iPads are known for. Then in 2013 I upgraded to an iPad Air. So thin. So fast! In 2016 Jackie and I traded in our Airs and we both got the then new iPad Pro 9.7. A pressure-sensitive stylus? Four speakers! Be still my beating heart.
As phones got bigger, laptops lighter, the iPad became something of a strange in-between device for my uses. I ended up not using it much for a span of time. In 2016 I sold my iPad Pro for the same price I bought it for! That’s how amazing the resale value is on Apple products.
Enter 2020. We’re stuck at home more than ever and nothing (temporarily) soothes the soul like buying a new gadget. I’ve been eyeing the new round-rec iPad Pros since 2018. Something about them is very Padd-like – even more so than past generations. It embodies the idea of a simple blank slate that can do whatever is needed at the time. The “naked robotic core” as John Siracusa puts it. I like that in the last year Apple added cursor support to the OS. I’ve also taken an interest in trying to flex my creative side more often by drawing.
But new gadgets are expensive. What is a man to do? Well, in my case it was turning to a life of crime to sustain my gadget habit. Ok, not really. I turned to something far worse. Collectible card games.
You see, dear reader, at the turn of the century I was enrolled in the local community college as a theatre major. As a theatre major you are invariably in the company of fellow nerds.6 At the time, Pokémon was very nerdy, and very popular. I mean, it was popular for kids, but nerdy for college-aged kids to be into. You might known Pokémon from the video game series or the popular kids TV show. What you might not know about is the Pokémon TCG (Trading Card Game). The TCG is a game you play with cards of various Pokémon in a 1:1 battle. The more cards you collect – read: buy – the better you can build a deck of cards. It’s fun, addictive, and apparently, lucrative.
Over the summer of 2020 I was moving stuff around in preparation for moving into my Tiny Studio. In a cabinet I found my old Pokémon card collection.7 Out of curiosity I looked up how much some of the more rare cards were going for online. Long story longer, I sold about two dozen 1999-2000 era cards on eBay for close to $2,000 total. Ha, who says nerdy hobbies don’t pay! I later found out that 2020 was a gold rush of collectors coming into adulthood and prospecting cards from their youth. I got lucky.
So here I am, owner of a new iPad Pro 11” with Apple Pencil 2, and Logitech Folio Touch. This is my review on what I think of it a few months on. I mentioned it earlier, but one of the reasons I wanted to get an iPad now was that the OS for iPad now supports keyboard and cursor input. This means I can use it like a traditional computer with a physical keyboard and trackpad via the Folio Touch.
Up until now I didn’t actually own my own computer. I mean, I have computers in the house. My wife has a nice 2017 iMac and my work has provided me a 13” MacBook Pro. Neither though are my computer.8 This iPad is. For what I need, it works pretty well.
The iPad Pro
This thing is fast. Faster than my new 2019 Macbook Pro 13” in many instances. It’s beautiful to look at with it’s 120Hz screen and it’s beautiful to touch – with a solid, light case and thin bezels.
Everything – mostly text and buttons – look super big and beautiful on this screen. As a man approaching 40, I like big buttons and text.
There’s a trend in modern video games where they often have smaller and near illegible text for important menus and subtitles. I want more folks to take a page from past devices where they had lower resolution screens and had to use larger text to make it legable within that lower resolution. Keep that going even if we have super-high resolution 65”+ screens. Because not all of us do and not all of us can see so well.
Thankfully the iPad embraces big text and even allows you to customize these options to a great degree.
I’ve been using the Pro to edit photos. I can plugin my USB-C SD card reader and suck in the 40MB RAW files from my DSLR super fast. Again, faster than importing to my Mac. And bam, they’re ready to edit. I use Pixemator Photo, which is grossly underpriced at under $10. The features and performance are top-shelf. I was editing a group of these RAW images, making a few slight color corrections and crops. When I went to export, in bulk, it was so fast I thought the operation failed half-way through. Nope, they were all exported, just faster than I anticipated.
Face ID feels futuristic. When does this come to the Mac‽
Logitech Folio Touch
When I ordered the iPad I also ordered one of Apple’s Smart Folios. I thought that I might just buy a bluetooth keyboard and lug that round if I needed a physical keyboard. After a few weeks I felt like the Folio wasn’t offering much protection and the idea of carrying around a separate keyboard soured. I looked into what was available and learned about Logitech’s Folio Touch. A rugged case with a connected full-size keyboard and trackpad. No batteries to charge and backlit? Sold.
I’m really digging the keyboard and trackpad support in iPadOS paired with a keyboard case. It feels like a Mac Jr. The keyboard uses a nice traditional scissor mechanism with a surprising amount of travel. Most keys are full-size and the transition between my desktop keyboard and this one feels pretty natural. There are many common keyboard shortcuts between he Mac and iPad, so the learning curve has been minimal. The trackpad and it’s multi-touch gestures works just like the one on my Mac, albeit smaller.
I will say that initially I felt the trackpad support was a little iffy. Sometimes it was difficult to get the Dock to appear when you mouse to the bottom edge of the screen. Scrolling was a bit jumpy. Since getting the Folio Logitech has released a firmware update and Apple pushed a Smart Connector firmware update too, both of which have lead to a more predictable experience.
I do worry how well the case will wear over time. Particularly the edge of the kickstand as it will see the most friction from opening and adjusting on a surface, and the hinge mechanism itself. When I fold the keyboard back to hold the iPad like a book the keyboard automatically deactivates which is good. It’s really easy to fidget with the keys as you hold the device in your hands.
One thing I had to deal with when I first got the case was a stuck “I” key. The key would stick in the down position randomly. I chalked it up to a manufacturing defect and started the process to return it with Logitech. However, I like to try and figure things out on my own. A gentle pry on one corner of the key and some compressed air fixed it. I surmise that a small bit of plastic from a mold was stuck on a part of the key mechanism. The warranty is for one year so, that’s nice if I do need it. So far, so good.
The case is on the heavy side. Combined with the weight of the iPat it’s not as heavy as a laptop, even a laptop on the smaller, lighter end of things. With the case and iPad it weighs in at 2.06 pounds. The iPad itself is 1.04 pounds. For keyboard use, this is fine. For portably this is fine. For holding in your lap watching a movie or reading, it’s a bit of strain on your wrist. A brand-new M1 MacBook Air is 2.8 pounds in comparison, but I can’t draw on its display (or fold it flat to read with).
Concerns
Remember, I’ve used the iPad as a tablet for years at this point. This is my first time trying to use it as a laptop-like device. A keyboard-attached device? We need a better name than tablet-with-a-keyboard-and-trackpad attached.9
My concerns and frustrations are notably in this weird between-space where the the iPad currently lives. Let me illustrate a few examples.
The browser agent for the iPad tells websites to load the desktop version of their site. This is fine in most cases. But on Wikipedia I get the desktop version, but Page Previews (the little pop-up that appears when you hover over the title to a liked wiki page) isn’t activated. The newest iPadOS (as of 13.4 specifically) does support cursor-based input and can support hover states. It will take some time for developers to fix this, if at all.10
It’s an example of the difficulties of the iPad being both a very popular device and the people using it with a cursor/keyboard input device are rather small in comparison to say, well anything else – much less smartphones and traditional desktop computers.
Another niggle. Not having a physical, or even software, Escape key is bugging me. For instance, many dialogs on web pages and in software can be dismissed by pressing the Escape key. There isn’t an Escape key on any made-for iPad keyboards or cases.11
Through modern computing history the Escape key is always up in the top left corner of the keyboard, so there’s an inherent ease and muscle memory to just *boop* the Escape key to dismiss dialogs. No Escape key in the iPad world. Just a little 🔲 square icon to return to the home screen. Ask me how many times I’ve *booped* that key in error.12
I use Wikipedia a lot. No surprise, but it’s true! When viewing media at full screen on the ‘ol pedia, the MultimediaViewer allows you to Escape back to the article you were browsing. On the iPad I’m stuck with a little “X” button I have to mouse over and click or, sigh – I know writing this out sounds super lazy – reach up with my hand and touch. Now, I’m able-bodied, but I do think this is an accessibility issue for folks so my complaint isn’t totally selfish and lazy!13
If it isn’t clear I’m a keyboard shortcut junky. I love not having to move my hands from the keys. A lack of Escape key is frustrating. I am happy however that iPadOS has a system-wide search bar. I used Quicksilver for years before switching to Alfred. Using a Mac without search utility is maddening. Thankfully iPadOS uses the same Command+Spacebar to invoke its Spotlight search, making the transition to using this much easier. And Spotlight has come a long way. It’s actually pretty useful. All my files, Notes, contacts, and bookmarks are indexed and a web search is a quick query away.
Desires
I’d love if I could connect the iPad to an external screen and use that screen as a secondary, extended, surface. Heck, I’d love it if when connected to a 16:9 ratio screen that the content would use the whole screen – even if just mirrored. Games, apps, and the OS should adapt to the connected screen. Right now they appear as a mirror of the iPad screen locked at a 4:3 ratio.14 I know videos will play at the correct ratio and I’m sure there’s more than enough horsepower in this device to power a 4k display. It’s funny that you can use the iPad as an extended screen for your Mac and can plug your iPad in to an external monitor over HDMI, but can’t extend your desktop, err tablettop.
I still, after nearly a decade of use, want to see some of the boring features of the iPhone come to iPad. A calculator. A weather app.15 Widgets wherever I want them on the home screen. Battery health.
And most importantly, Low power mode. This feature is a life-saver on the iPhone and while the iPad isn’t as critical or portable, it’s much desired to eek out just a little more when you’re away from an electrical plug.16.
Conclusion
Having this iPad since October I think it’s pretty close to a perfect device. It’s great as a stand-alone computer for my light needs.17 It’s flexible for the various uses – web browsing, photo editing, typing (This whole thing was written on my iPad!), playing games, drawing, etc. It’s fast and snappy. Some compromises, sure, but the size, speed, and flexibility are unmatched. I’m eager to see more refinements with the iPad software to make it even easier to use as a primary device.
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 dim18 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.
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.” 19
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).”
“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.
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.”
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. 21
Take a look at the text below the image in this tutorial dialog. 22
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.23
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.
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.24
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. 25
Use the Zoom feature on the Nintendo Switch.26 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 27 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. 2829
Et Conclusion
I set out to create a fair and constructive critique of a problem that is not unique to Fire Emblem: Three Houses 30 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 wife recently returned from a trip to Amman, Jordan. While she was there, she took the opportunity to pick up some local sweets to bring back and share.
They were very flowery and tasted a little like cologne smells. 🙂 The package the candy was in had a label. It was entirely in Arabic. Since neither of us can read Arabic, we were not quite sure what these were called. 31 Google Translate to the rescue!
Great, “(Fragrant comfort)”. Well, that sounds – and tastes – about right. But it doesn’t quite feel like a solid translation. The Google Translate app is pretty amazing. Almost all text was identified. I used my finger to highlight just a portion.
But wait, Google Translate gives you text you can copy.
“(Fragrant comfort)” reads as ( راحة معطرة )
I punched that Arabic word into Google and saw some familiar photos. I was on the right path!
But Google still didn’t tell me what this candy was called. All the results were in Arabic! But look! Toward the end of the search results on the first page. A link to the Arabic Wikipedia entry for راحة الحلقوم
So in the span of a few minutes I was able to quickly translate a language I do not speak into a text I could copy (perfectly I might add) and search, and using the interconnectedness of Wikipedia was able to find out what the candy is called in the language I’m most familiar with.
