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Hattrick and the blind

Written by ShaunJ

Hattrick is one of the best written sites for blind managers. This article will point out what makes Hattrick work for blind managers and what not. Also what can be done to keep it accessible and what needs to change if there should be any changes.

This is my own personal opinion and not that of a specialist in the field of accessibility.

Thank you to Nickus de Vos of BigBoys United who helped with this article.

As a blind person, the concern is always whether a site will be accessible enough to work on it, and in the case of an online game, to be able to do all the things sighted people can do, all the necessary and important things at least.

In Hattrick the important things would be setting a lineup, selecting your bench and your tactics, setting up player orders, reading what happened in the match, look at your match ratings, setting up training, visiting player pages, series pages, improving your stadium and visiting the transfer market and the different conferences.

Hattrick has always been a very accessible game in my opinion. The layout is very good and the use of headers helps with quick and accurate navigation. There are no fancy graphics that one must use to read the information one is looking for, it’s plain, simple and very accessible.

Lineup Interface

The most important feature has to be the interface for lineups and tactics. The main interface is a field with the different areas where your players can play. This interface is not at all accessible to blind users as we cannot use the mouse in such a way as to click on players and drag them to their positions, nor can we use the keyboard to do this. This doesn’t work at all with the lineup or the bench and tactics.

The interface that can be used by clicking “If you can’t use this interface click here” is perfect and must never be taken away. The use of combo boxes allows us to place each player where we want him as the mouse is not needed at all, and combo boxes are very useful and accessible. So please HT, don’t ever remove this interface, we need it and love it.

Graphics

Graphics can only work if they are labeled, that way we know what the graphic is and whether it is important and what it means. This also counts in the case of buttons.

Flags are labeled with the countries name and the graphics for the search, TM, HT Live, etc and that way we know where we are going or what info we need. Labeling each graphic is very important.

Perhaps here the star ratings for ones players can be labelled differently, at the moment it says star instead of yellow star.

New Visual Features

If at all possible I only ask that any visual feature be either accompanied by textual descriptions or that a specific area is made available where text can give us the same information that sighted people can get from the visuals.

Example, the new feature where new managers will be able to look at different positions for one player on the field will not be accessible to blind managers as the field cannot be seen. Perhaps a text description can be placed on the player page that will indicate which positions are suited for the player.

Conclusion

Hattrick is very accessible and no serious changes are currently needed as the few things mentioned above are not crucial to a blind managers enjoyment of the game. The new features are also accessible so far, just keep accessibility in mind with every feature that is introduced.

If the HT developers are ever in need of blind Beta testers I make myself available and Nickus de Vos of BigBoys United will also happily help out.

The below websites will give better explanations and information on internet accessibility and why it is important to blind people.

(http://www.gwmicro.com/Developers/Web/)

(http://www.webbie.org.uk/webbie.htm)

(http://www.w3.org/WAI/)

(http://www.BlindAccessTraining.com)

Hattrick is one of the best games out there. Keep it up