Accessible Solitaire

The Accessible Solitaire app has been designed to provide a fun experience for all players.

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Where should Accessible Solitaire go next?

Hi, I’d could really use your help.

I’d like to start planning my work on the Accessible Solitaire app for later this year. I’ve a lot of work ahead to try to make the app more reliable, but I’d really like to try to improve the app in the ways that are most important to players. I suspect that I won’t be able to improve some of the things I’d really like to, such as some of the screen reader announcements following actions in some of the games, but I do want to focus where I can on what’s most important to players.

One important area that I’ve definitely neglected relates to the game-playing experience for players who are partially sighted. I originally added two features which were suggested to me, these being a press-and-hold (when a screen reader’s not running) to have a large pop-up of a card shown, and a setting to change the colours of the four suits. Unfortunately both of those features turned out to be unreliable, and I’ve had to temporarily turn them off. In addition, often the visuals shown for partially covered cards are tiny, which can make the game unusable. So if players feel that I should concentrate for a while only on the experience for partially sighted players, I could work on that.

And if anyone has suggestions on how the experience might be improved for players who use their voice to play the game, or a switch device, I could work on that instead.

I do already have quite a list of bugs I need to work through but given the limited time I can spend working on the app, I’d like to concentrate on what’s most important to you. I think over the last few weeks usage of the iOS app’s dropped by about 30%, and so if the app’s got some problems which prevent people from enjoying the game, I’d like to try to fix those problems if I can.

Any suggestions you can provide would be very helpful and appreciated!

Guy

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One response to “Where should Accessible Solitaire go next?”

  1. Guy Barker Avatar
    Guy Barker

    After posting my request this morning, I’ve heard back from a number of very helpful people who in the past have provided me with invaluable suggestions on how the Accessible Solitaire app might be improved. I’ll consider all that was suggested and work out a plan for addressing their great ideas where I can.

    The four things I should work on first are as follows:

    1. Add an Undo button to undo the most recent move. This would only undo the most recent move, but that still might be helpful if a card was moved by mistake.

    2. Add a menu item to restart the game currently being played. The menu item in the app today called “Restart game” actually starts a new game. So maybe I should have a “Restart game” item that restarts the current game, and a new item called “Start new game” which starts a new game with newly dealt out cards.

    3. There was a request to bring back the feature to change the colours shown for the four suits, but only if that didn’t destabilise the app. So I’ll investigate if I can do that. Unfortunately that feature previously led to the app crashing for some players, but not for my own device, so it made investigating the problem a bit tricky.

    4. One player raised the idea of reducing the number of actions required to move a card, by having a card move in response to a double-click in the Windows version of the game. I updated the Klondike app on Windows a while ago based on a suggestion from a player, such that a key press of numbers 1 to 7 selects the topmost cards in the dealt card piles, and a press of S moves the selected card to the target suit pile. That update reduced the number of steps involved when playing that game with the keyboard, and I’d be happy to explore how else the games in the app can be made more efficient to play.

    Some players did point out that the app needs work on bug fixing and preventing crashes. One player found the app crashes trying to move a card in the Grandfather’s Clock game. So in addition to the above features, I must spend time trying to understand why the app can crash for some players, but not on my own iPad mini or iPhone simulators.

    Other players raised the idea of adding more types of Solitaire games to the app, such as Golf Solitaire. This is good to know, but I really must make the app more robust before adding more types of games. The app already has a more varied range of games than the software was really designed for, and that’s partly why the app can be so unreliable today. But all being well, once I’ve made the app more robust, I can have a think about adding more types of games.

    There was also one comment relating to languages, such as German. While I could use Google translate to find translations for the whole app, I’d rather have translations provided by a person who’s interested in playing the game themselves. So if anyone would particularly like the game in another language and would be ok providing the translations, hopefully I can build a new version of the app in whatever language you’d like.

    Anyway, thanks for everyone who got back to me today. You’ve given me lots to think about over the coming weeks!

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