Hello all,

Due to several problems sighted people are having with the new web client, we have restored the old version.

However, this is only a very temporary solution. We are actively looking for sighted or partially sighted people, who could help us debug the new web client. They must have sight, and it's even better if they don't use any screen reader.

If you know anyone who could help, please tell them and encourage them to come as soon as possible.

If no one is willing to help, we will still eventually release the new version definitely, no matter what.
So please, please, come on, before it's too late. This is the last call.

Thank you very much !

Must they have some kind of programming knowledge and what would they need to do exactly. I have some people in mind

Hello,

IF they have programming knowledge in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, that would be perfect! But it isn't required.

We have to find what cause the new web client to work so badly when the screen reader isn't active on mobile. We also need to find why text size has become so small.

The problems concerns mobile essentially, so we need people with mobile phones or tablets. But maybe it also occurs on PC/mac, we don't know.

If they are callable on skype, whatsapp, or whatever, somewhere on friday or week-end, that would also probably help a lot to be able to make tests in live. But again, this isn't required.

In fact we are so desesperate that any info could be useful, anyone could help. The more people there are, the better chances we have to find a solution.

I’ve just messaged the person that I think can help. Will keep you updated.

I understand what you said, but what about the visually impaired? Are you just doing this to see? Look at the empathy there! imagine yourselves! Why don't you leave it the way it is! total lack of respect.

Hello,
@ChevroletOnix maybe you misunderstood something, but the intention definitely wasn't to leave anybody behind.

The new Web client was in beta testing for 4 months, and the developer asked for feedback from sighted users. For simplicity, when we say sighted here, I don't mean excluding visually impaired, anybody was welcome to join, including low-vision people.
Unfortunately, there was very little feedback from those users. Thus, the new client eventually had to be released, as it is not feasible to wait forever and finally do nothing.
As it happens, it seems like it brought a much worse experience for them, the most prominent issues being reported that you could not click on any buttons/the text was too small, thus the decision was made to return to the old one.

Of course, the intention is to fix this, and make the Web client better for sighted and visually impaired users. If you are one yourself, and have the time to do so, you should indicate your interest and provide feedback. The intention is never to release something broken on purpose, simply, there was nobody to tell the developer that it's broken, and if you use a screen reader exclusively, you have no way to know this.

If you could indicate a little better where you felt the lack of respect/what was the misunderstanding, maybe I can provide additional clarification.

Thanks for your understanding.

A little bit of my reflection on why I think this was a failure:
If we think realistically, the majority of sighted people who come to play here do so to play with their blind friends. We probably have a few users for who this is not the case, but I assume the number is not so big.
These users probably never visit the forum. You just come to play a few games, and you are done. You don't know what is going on, or that there is a beta test you can help with.

I really believe we need a better way to indicate important/useful news. Even for blind players, there is a huge number not following the forums for this or that reason.
I don't want to hijack this very useful topic though, so let's not discuss this further here, but as an example: If we imagine that you know there is a beta session going on today, everything is great. You will sign up if you want and help to test.
However, let's assume you were not active for 2 months and completely missed this announcement. The topic is way down on the list of recent topics now, it is not very likely that you will browse through 30 different topics to find this one and then know that a beta test is ongoing.

In short, the forum is extremely useful for everybody who is very active, but it is not useful for everybody who is just a casual user but would still like to follow the news, especially considering we lost email subscriptions.
Some kind of mechanism to deliver the important news via the client is, in my view, very much needed, similar to the announcements we had in the past on the main room, but a little better organized.

Ok, but I can't participate in the beta test since they said that places are limited! But what will be the difference between the web client you are launching and what the current client would see? I played with my mother, who is a psychic, and she said she was able to see calmly! So now it wouldn't make any difference to anyone! do not you think? So I don't see any reason to change the web client now!

Hello,

@Nikola:
That's also the thinking we have had yesterday with other admins and helpers.
Most sighted users are indeed the girl/boy friend, or brother/sister/mother/father of a blind person. There are no sighted people here without any close relationship with a blind person, or maybe just one or two in the whole playroom if ever there are.

So yes, we completely failed in our communication. But at the same time, I don't know well how we could reach all those who never or rarely read the forum.
E-mail isn't very practical, as it can quickly be taken as spam.

@ChevroletOnix
If I say that we are eventually going to put the new version only no matter what, that's because 1/I'm totally disarmed against the problem, 2/I'm angry about the beta-test failure, and 3/I don't want to wait again forever if there is no progress.
My wording is maybe bad, I'm sorry about that. of course I well hope to find a working solution way long before forcing anything unpopular.
But at the same time I want to move on, because tehre are a lot of things coming: cards against humanity, windows client update, arcade mode news...

Concerning beta, there is no limited places of any kind. At this stage, for our current particular problem, any information and/or good will is welcome.
Partially sighted users are more than welcome, too, of course! They should be there to tell us about text size and help us fix possible color/contrast issues.

However, the problem we are currently talking about now only occurs when the screen reader isn't active, so we specifically look for fully sighted or partially sighted users who don't use a screen reader. The non-usage of screen reader is the determinant point here.

It's always easy to complain, much less to help.

hello,
for the question of what's new in this upcoming change, you can read the related news located here.
http://qcsalon.net/en/forum5000000/topic121882
edit: nikola is right about forum post, beta anouncements like that should be sticky, otherwise there are a high chance to get missed by the users who is not very active, and this is the case of many users who can provide many technical details.

Hi people, I don't have really much knowledge. But I did wonder, would it help to start a playroom group on Facebook? Or twitter/exe? I'm not sure how you spell its current name of that social media platform. Perhaps you could get more partially sighted people or sighted people interested in joining. This could solve your problems maybe, I don't know. It's just a suggestion, no more than that.

Hello Aminiel, my friend has knowledge in both HTML and CSS, is fully sighted and also speaks french quite good. If you want we can do live tests together this weekend
He's a programmer so that would make things quite easier. If this sounds good to you you can message me and we can try to help fix this thing.

I know my friend who is partially sighted. He might do it. He can code in html, css, JavaScript, java, python, c, c++ and is a bsc it graguate. His name is varun. I have told him to join qc.

@Aminiel
In order to deliver a message to those who do not know the forum, or are not active in it, You could add something like important news in Playroom, so that very important news appears immediately after login as a dialog the first time the user logs into the game in this day, or provide a shortcut to read the important news, although I find the first suggestion more effective because it forces the user to read.
Note: in some other games, this feature is called message of the day.
It can also be developed to include paid advertisements on this platform, which has become the most famous platform for gathering blind people :) .
And also, this feature can be developed to include announcing tournaments by users with a short message, with the approval of helpers to this message after verifying it, of course.

It can also be developed to include paid advertisements on this platform, which has become the most famous platform for gathering blind people :) .

That's an excellent way to make sure that nobody will ever read the message of the day. If it includes ads, people will just start to skip it by default.

Anyway, in general, message of the day is more or less something I had in mind when talking about important news being more a part of the client, but obviously with no annoying spam. We don't have to worry about that in any case since the Playroom is not that type of application.

@Nikola No problem, it was just a suggestion.
This can be removed and only important Playroom news and tournaments that organizers want to announce outside the forum are included.

I think it is easier to say non-screenreader users required instead of level of sight if you are asking for a particular group of people.

I know there is a small number of non-screenreader users that do use the PR and maybe there will be more in the future.

The RNIB on their website have the following links at the top of the page and jaws reads link high contrast, link normal text, link large text, link extra-large text. High contrast is adark background and normal contrast is a light background. Maybe this would be helpful for some users.

When we went to PR 2 to PR 3 then things changed too. Printe was smaller, and colours were duller plus the boxes we type in shrank.

If you want to reach a larger group of people then in-boxes can be used especially as this is a one-off event.

Hello,
do you think that the inability for sighted users to click an item could be related to the changes you have made to the drag and drop feature?

The reason I say that is because I was basically able to reproduce something very similar, even with VoiceOver on, and it may help you with debugging.

Essentially, try to connect to the new Web client, and in the main room, just long press any option like "Create a new table". Don't use the VoiceOver triple tap gesture, double tap and hold, wait for the VoiceOver sound and lift your finger right away.
If this works the same as it does for me, after you lift your finger, it will no longer be possible to click anything like join a table, or any other option.

For some reason, doing the VoiceOver back gesture (two finger scrub) restores the full operation of the menu, but of course this is with VoiceOver only.

I link this to the sighted users issue because the behaviour is the same. I tried to turn VoiceOver off, click something random in the menu by memorizing the location, turn it back on, and got exactly the same issue. Nothing in the menu changed, and further clicks no longer worked even with VoiceOver, but again, doing the VoiceOver back gesture fixed this problem.

Of course, on the old Web client the problem doesn't happen.

Maybe it will help to be able to do more testing yourself and possibly find where the issue is.

Hello,

GG Nikola! I don't know if it would explain everything for sighted users, but I have just fixed it now.
Thank you.

Hey there! Even though I'm visually impaired, I have enough sight to understand text on screens without a screen reader, I even turn off my screen reader quite often. So I can help too. If you need my help, feel free to message me, I've got a lot of free time available so, why not?

Hello,

Yes, why not. I'll write to you privately.

Just to let you know, I have made some changes on the dev website. If anyone can tell if it's getting better or worse, I would be happy. I'm now trying to remove entire CSS files with the hope to progressively track down the part of code that cause probles.

There are two big mysteries at this time:

• Why text size is much smaller on the web client compared to the rest of the website, up to the point to make web client more or less unreadable ?
• Why web client buttons are working or appear inoperant at random ? It seems that the bug found by Nikola and fixed isn't the whole story.

Thank you for any help you can give.

Sure, I'm waiting for your message. I also have a friend who is a graphic designer, I will let him know you need help too.

Greetings,
I hope you are doing well. A sighted friend has reported the same issues with the Web Client which were previously reported above, on iOS 17.4. I believe I might have a theory as to what may be going on. Would it be possible to have read only access to the code base? As you might be aware, Apple has made several changes to the WebKit engine, which is the source for the live riegon bug reported in another topic. As the same issues do not seem to be occuring on Android to the best of my knowledge, this might be something else that may need to be resolved by Apple.

For what it's worth, when you fixed the bug I mentioned on the 3rd of March, I was able to click on everything without VoiceOver enabled. However, then on the 5th of March you mentioned that the issue still doesn't seem resolved in all cases, so I re-tested, and since then I again never managed to activate any element in the game toolbar without VoiceOver. This is still the case today.
Was there possibly another small regression somewhere between these two days?

Finally, again on the 3rd of March and earlier, when the bug was still not fixed, clicking on items in the actions toolbar was possible, only the game toolbar seemed to be affected. However, now, even the items in the actions menu don't work, which is what makes me believe that a completely different regression was introduced which was not here before.

As usual, this isn't just random testing, I always try it on the old Web client as well for comparison, and obviously on the old one I'm able to achieve the desired result (turn off VoiceOver and click on the menu item I want).

I also don't believe this has anything to do with any changes in iOS 17.4, because the issue was reported even before 17.4 was released. The ARIA live regions bug is a completely unrelated case to this, in my view, and reproduces equally on both the old and the new Web client.

I'm going to try and definitely confirm whether the issue happens on Android with the exact same idea, turn Talkback off and click on a menu item then see if a new menu opened, but on the 3rd of March when I reported the original bug, I reproduced exactly the same results on Android, so at the time I don't even believe it was iOS exclusive. Of course, on Android other browser engines are perfectly possible, so it's worth indicating the browser used, in my case it was always the default one, Google Chrome.

Hello,

It is definitly not related to iOS 17.4, as the problems were present before it has been released.

Nikola, yes, if you can check on Android and confirm or not if the problem is only on iOS, please.

That whole thing is always quite a mystery. I still don't understand why text size is smaller on the web client than all other pages. I still don't know if the clicking problem is related to that inconsistent text size, or not at all.
Someone also reported on the french side that on the friend list page, all names aren't written with the same size.

I'm getting mad.

Hello,

This post is quite a lot of brainstorming, so let's answer the most important question first, and later you can pick if anything else has any significance.

Nikola, yes, if you can check on Android and confirm or not if the problem is only on iOS, please.

As far as I have tried, I reproduce exactly the same problem on Android. Turning TalkBack off, it is impossible to activate any element.

Other than that, nothing special happens, and what I write below was tested again on my primary iOS device.

I will first try to write something actually useful, and then just some random observations.
Through various tests and attempts to make the click work, I have discovered something interesting.
You probably know that for sighted people, to drag and drop an element, you just do a single long click, wait a little, and then move your finger to the desired place.
Well, on our Web client, this doesn't apply, and even without VoiceOver, you must double tap and hold, and then move the element. By the way, the beep when you are outside of the game zone was extremely useful to discover this and definitely confirm when it is or isn't working even without VoiceOver.
I was hoping great, we found a miracle solution, you must double tap an element to activate it, unfortunately, not at all, activation of an element itself does not work even when you double tap. I tried all sorts of combinations, double tap and hold, single click and hold, etc, but no success.
On the old Web client, I presume this is working correctly, because there if I try the same thing, double tap and hold an element, I basically activate that element twice, so probably a single click and hold to drag works there. Of course there is no beep when you are outside of the game zone there so I can't give a definitive confirmation, but I can give a quite reasonable confirmation thanks to my second test.

1000 miles quick gestures: In short, long click+swipe left to draw a card, long click+swipe right to discard.
New Web client, no matter what I do, even with a double tap and hold, I can't get the gestures to work. I can easily cause the beep outside of the game zone to play, but not to use these gestures. I am definitely doing them correctly, because if I turn VoiceOver on, I perform the gesture on my first try and it works fine.
Old Web client, single click a card and hold+swipe right, the junk menu appeared immediately on first try.

This led me to another interesting idea, maybe the wrong element is somehow being clicked. I thought to myself, let's enable the browser speech synthesizer feature, that way I will know exactly which option I am dragging and will get feedback as I move my finger even without VoiceOver.
Alass, not possible, the drag and drop messages are always live regions and need a screen reader active... Without VoiceOver, no way to get any feedback on which option is being dragged.

I tried to make some sense of it, but unfortunately, the results I got were extremely random. Certainly being blind doesn't help to test this. I was a little curious if clicking on the chat edit box works, but unfortunately this element seems to be extremely small, and even though I consider myself good at this kind of spatial awareness, this is really too difficult to do without speech feedback. It appears to be somewhere in the bottom left corner, but only a really tiny part of the screen, and next to it there are a lot of elements such as the send button, whatever is the first menu item of the actions menu at the time, etc... To make the matters worse we of course also have the Safari toolbar right next to it, so there is a good chance I will just activate one of the browser buttons.
The ideal solution is use PWA mode, but in PWA mode, on iOS 17.4, the menu disappearing bug appears to be a lot more annoying with VoiceOver. If I try to explore the screen a little it causes the menu to no longer be spoken by VoiceOver, not sure, maybe even to disappear from the screen completely, or something. It gets even more weird because the fix you have made to this problem works but only partially, focusing the phantom game element restores the menu if you wait a second, but only if you focus it backwards (by swiping left to it(), swiping right to that element never restores the menu, but I don't want to confuse multiple bugs here, and I myself don't really understand how to explain it well, just the menu seems less reliable.

Obviously it is not so useful, but turning VoiceOver off and then using a Bluetooth keyboard to activate menu items works normally. So this really appears to be a touch screen specific issue.

Hopefully you will be able to make some progress with real sighted testers. Have you tried some temporary debug messages such as having the TTS speak which menu item was just activated or play some interface sound when something is clicked?
Of course this is just random guessing and I have no idea if any of it will be useful in the end, and I think we went as far as possible when it comes to blind testing in any case. Let's hope a solution can be found.

have exams now I know a partialy sighted friend who does not use a screan reader. will ask to try joining to client and talk or play with me so we both can figure out the problem. after my exams and share any feedback.

Hello,

@Nikola: following your observations, and my own ones, I have made a temporary change that you can try and tell me how it goes.
I have exagerated the hold / long click delay. You must keep the finger 600ms on the button after the end of the VoiceOver dududum sound to make it be considered as a long click. I insist, the end of the VO sound.

I suspect that the previous setting (60ms) is too short and that might explain why any click without VO doesn't actually work all the time.
The behavior of the long click recognition has changed after I have fixed the drag and drop bug, because I precisely messed up with it. So it would also explain why it seemed to work better before the fix.

Try and tell me if it helps, or not. OF course the delay is an exageration that won't stay at the end.

Hello,
Now we have a difference of behaviour on iOS VS Android, and I have also discovered another hopefully interesting clue. The behaviour is very different depending on whether we are clicking inside a standard menu, or a grid, such as Connect 4/Duck racing duel keypad.

Standard lists

iOS: The single click works without VoiceOver. It would be good to confirm with a sighted user if this is definitely fixed. I have another observation, but I'll return to iOS in a moment.

Android: Here unfortunately the situation is worse. The single click without a screen reader still does not work, and the old bug is back. The old bug is that even with Talkback, if we long press an element, the click is broken forever even with Talkback until the restart. Drag and drop is also now broken with Talkback, I waited for a longer amount when making the long click just in case, but definitely no use.

Getting back to iOS, I observe something strange that I never saw before when I make a long click without VoiceOver.
For example, in 1000 miles, long press a card and wait keeping the finger on the screen to take the new delay into account, once I lift my finger and enable VoiceOver again, I didn't get the context menu as expected, but rather the card that I just long pressed is no longer a button, but a checkbox, and this checkbox is checked.
If I click on it, it just acts as normal when you click a card, and then once the list is refreshed there are no more checkboxes and this is a button as usual.

Sometimes it is possible for the single click to stop working again, but I don't observe this always. I noticed it only once after trying to drag the players around and configure the teams (without VoiceOver), but for the next 3 tests I didn't reproduce it.

In summary, on iOS, everything works without any problems with VoiceOver, but long clicks still don't seem to be handled correctly without VoiceOver.
On Android, nothing works correctly when it comes to long clicks with or without Talkback, and single clicks work only with Talkback, as long as a long click was not previously performed.

I'm sure there is a good reason for not doing so, but have you considered just using the exact same logic from the old Web client in terms of handling single/long clicks? On there, both on iOS and Android, I obviously get perfect results.
The main issues on the old one were for blind users in terms of drag and drop, but they weren't related to whether a long click was handled or not, just about the DND feedback messages not being translatable and the beep when you are dragging outside of the game zone.

Grids

At least I found a very good way to test this for myself, exactly the kind of debug sounds I was talking about, the Duck racing musical duels are a perfect opportunity to experiment. You get a grid and get different sounds based on where you clicked even without a screen reader, and in the sorting duel even a different action if you make a long click, so it's one of the best blind testing areas.
In grids, everything is actually perfect, both on iOS and on Android. As long as you take the new longer delay into account, both single and long clicks are handled without any problems, so whatever you are doing different in a grid makes everything work as it should.

In fact, there is a slight difference in a grid VS in a standard list even for blind users.
In a grid, with VoiceOver, if you touch a spot, for example, let's say A1, VoiceOver just says A1. But, touch the exact same spot again, VoiceOver now says "Selected A1".
Touch another spot, it is not selected. But again, touch the same second spot, VoiceOver announces it as the selected one.

In standard lists, that doesn't happen. It may be a completely useless one, but perhaps it has something to do with why clicks are working perfectly in grids.

Anyway, that's everything so far. Let me know if you have any other ideas.

ya with talkback I have noticed in duck racing chalange its not possible to long press in android. I used firefox, google chrome and Microsoft edge.

Oh ok, naturally the one test I forgot to do gives another interesting discovery.

Apparently, a long press with Talkback in a grid is handled as if we long pressed an item twice.
The first long press event happens when we double tap and hold the item, and then the second event happens whenever we lift the finger from the screen.
More concerning is the fact that after all of this happens normal clicks are now broken, even with Talkback.

To be clear that part could be true even outside of the grid, I have no way to confirm or deny that. I'm not convinced because in other games we don't get a context menu at all though, in other games it seems just like it doesn't work at all, unless it's fast enough to open the context menu and immediately close it by long pressing whatever the first item is. In that case it would basically mean that it's a double long press on Android rather than no long press at all.