Gaming World is easier to use with a keyboard or a screen reader now, and here are the numbers

Critical accessibility problems on Gaming World went from 792 to 9. A skip link, labelled controls, visible focus and readable colours, plus what is still wrong.

AI-drafted from 3 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

If you use Gaming World with a screen reader, a keyboard, a zoomed-in browser or high contrast mode, the site should behave better for you this week. Here is what changed, how it was measured, and what is still broken.

How we measured

The checker is axe-core 4.14.0, a free, open-source tool that loads a page in a real browser and tests it against accessibility rules. It was set to use its rules for WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 at levels A and AA, plus its own best-practice rules. The current standard is WCAG 2.2, which keeps all of 2.1 and adds a few criteria. Axe's 2.2 rules are not switched on yet, so read these numbers as 2.1 AA, not a 2.2 pass.

The first check covered 78 pages, from the homepage and news to the writers' desk and the admin panel, with a test account signed in where a page needs one. Axe counts every element that breaks a rule, so one unlabelled button on 20 pages counts 20 times.

A checker cannot judge whether a picture's description is any good, so the pages were also walked through by hand with the Tab key, looking for anything out of reach.

What the first check found

• 792 critical problems, 145 serious and 3,810 moderate.
• 782 of the critical ones were in the admin panel, most of them on one screen, the permissions table, where no tick box had a name a screen reader could read out.
• The other 10 critical problems were on public pages: pictures inside reviews and features with no description, and a sort menu on the reviews page with no label.
• Almost all the moderate problems had one cause: no main landmark, so a screen reader had no quick way past the menu.
• Most of the serious problems were colour. Our buttons put white text on a light blue that measured about 2.5 to 1 in the dark theme. WCAG asks for at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text.

What changed

A skip link. Press Tab once on any page and a Skip to content link appears in the top left corner. Press Enter and you skip the menu. Every page now has a main landmark, and the two menus have names (Main and Admin) so a screen reader can tell them apart.

Controls with names. Sort menus, tick boxes, switches, progress bars and the text style menu in our editors now say what they are. The file pickers, including the screenshot box on the game submission form, can be reached with Tab and opened with Enter or Space.

Focus you can see. Buttons, links and form boxes show a clear ring when you reach them with the keyboard, in both themes. Pop-up windows keep the focus inside them and hand it back when they close. The small notices that slide in at the bottom are now read out by screen readers, and links inside paragraphs are underlined, so colour is not the only clue.

Readable colours in both themes. Buttons now use a darker fill behind white text that stays above 4.5 to 1 whatever accent colour you pick in the theme menu. Light mode links were a pale blue at about 2.4 to 1 and are now a proper dark blue. The green and amber we use for status labels in light mode now come in at about 5 to 1 on white. Form controls follow Windows high contrast colours and stop animating if your device asks for reduced motion.

Pictures and captions. Our editors now ask for a description of every picture, or a note that it is only decoration, and a writer cannot hand in a piece until every picture has one. 76 pictures in older reviews and articles still have no description. They are listed and will be written by people who know what the pictures show, not guessed by a machine. Our video player can now show captions and has a CC button, ready for the first videos we host with a captions file.

The numbers after

The same 78 pages of the live site were checked again on 24 October, in both themes. In the dark theme, where the first check was done:

• Critical problems went from 792 to 9.
• Serious went from 145 to 7.
• Moderate went from 3,810 to 14.

All 9 critical ones are the same thing: older pictures in a review and a feature with no description, which is the list of 76 mentioned above. The admin panel went from 789 critical problems to none in both themes, and its light theme from 372 serious problems to none.

Light mode is behind. It has the same 9 critical problems and 36 serious ones, every one of them a colour that is too faint, 20 of them on profile pages. That is the next job.

Keeping it this way

The checker is now part of our own test tools, and it has a strict mode that fails if it finds a single serious or critical problem on the pages it is pointed at. Today, though, someone has to run it. It is not yet wired into the script that puts a new version of the site live, so it cannot stop a release on its own. That is next, along with the WCAG 2.2 rules.

If something does not work with your setup, please tell us. There is a bug report button at the bottom left of every page, and you can also find us on Discord. Tell us which screen reader, browser or zoom level you use.

Sources

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 (W3C)
• dequelabs/axe-core (GitHub)
• Gaming World changelog (Gaming World)

Image: Gaming World