ABOUT · ACCESSIBILITY

Accessibility

This site is built to work with a keyboard, a screen reader, a phone, and reduced motion. This page says what it does for each one and where it still falls short.

The keyboard

Everything in the galaxy works from the keyboard. Tab moves through the crest, the links under the name, the search, the rail of stations, and any card that opens. Enter or Space presses what has focus. Esc closes what is open or flies back out over the core. The left and right arrow keys step from one station to the next.

Single-key shortcuts make it faster: 1 to 6 open a station, 0 returns to the core, plus and minus fly in and out, T starts a tour, M opens the manifest, A turns on the sound, and / moves to the search. A switch in the manifest turns all of them off. The choice is kept on this device, in the same place the games keep their progress. With the shortcuts off, the arrow keys, Enter, Space, and Esc still work in the galaxy and in both games.

Career Quest flies with the arrow keys, docks with Enter, and offers every action as a button. Its duel is played with Tab and Enter. The Homeworld Run steers with the arrow keys and jumps with Space.

Screen readers

The galaxy is drawn on a canvas, so everything on it is also on the page as plain HTML. The rail lists the six stations. The manifest lists every piece of work as a button that opens it. Ask Zen searches the board and answers from the résumé and the case studies.

CAPCOM, the voice in the lower left corner, is a live region. It speaks when the board comes up and when a visitor does something. Lines about the weather, such as a meteor shower or a comet, are shown and not spoken.

Both games label their controls and their dialogs. Every dialog returns focus to whatever opened it. Career Quest can also fly itself: WATCH IT docks at the six jobs in order and holds each one on screen. PAUSE holds a job for as long as it takes to read. The Homeworld Run is a race against the clock, so it has a second way through. TOUR THE SEVEN PLACES reads each place as a card.

Motion

With reduced motion set on the device, the galaxy stops turning and drifting. The opening is skipped, pages change without their transitions, and the meteors and comets stay away. The Homeworld Run keeps its race and drops its loops and its camera roll.

Reading

On the case studies and every other page of words, reading text is 16 pixels at a line height of 1.618. It does not get smaller on a phone. Text over the galaxy carries a dark halo so a planet passing behind it cannot wash it out. The main pages are checked at eleven screen sizes, from a small phone to a wide monitor, for text that overflows or is cut off.

Where it falls short

• The galaxy itself is a picture. Its planets, orbits, and weather have no description beyond the lists above.
• The Homeworld Run cannot be raced without seeing the track. The tour of the seven places is its alternative.
• The two videos on Towing the Fleet Forward have no captions yet.

Something that does not work

Anything on this site that does not work with the way someone reads or browses is a bug. Send the page and what went wrong to zacharymgeller@gmail.com.