Dear staff of itch.io,
Hello, my name is David Keatts and I am a blind python developer. I have been on itch.io for about a week now and have published 2 of my projects.
Since I am blind, my development nfocus has been mainly on what we in the visually impaired community call "audio games. ". Audio games are games which can be played without the need for a screen or monitor.
In my short time as a member of your community, I have to say that I am deeply impressed with the level of accessibility available on the site.
You are to be commended for all the effort you have put into itch.io.
Please accept my thanks for this.
I would also like to take this moment of your time to request a couple of small features be added to the developer dashboard and the site itself.
When uploading projects, I have noticed that you require a cover image and offer the oppurtunity to upload screenshots. This is good, but I would also like to see an option added so we can add a description tag line to the images. This will help people who rely soley on screen readers to get a sense of what is going on in images displayed on your site.
For example; visiting www.ceruleanbluesoftware.com, my image at the top of the page carries a caption which reads "An image of a cartoonish boy with blue hair. He holds a white cane and wears a black suit."
I think this small addition would go along way towards enhancing not only your site's accessibility, but help broaden itch.io's audience of both gamers and devs.
My second request might be a bit more time consuming to pull off, but I would also like an option to view large drop-down menu's as checkboxes instead. Especially when selecting tags and metadata for my projects. This wuld make it alot easier for a blind dev to know exactly which tags or items are actually being selected or unselected. I had to do some fiddling when messing with these options and I think i might have missed a few that could apply.
The way it works now is like, I scroll down upon the option, hit space on the one I want, but get no feedback on if it was selected or unselected. I have to save the changes and then view the page. If I could tell while actually selecting the options, It would speed things up a lot. It would also help keep me from misleading people by mistake if I am modifying a published project, because there is a chance I might have selected a tag without realizing it.
Thank you for taking time out of your day to read this and thank you for taking my thoughts into consideration.
Most especially, thank you for providing an accessible forum in which I can easily publish my work. I am proud to be here and grateful you offer itch.io!
-David Keatts
Cerulean Blue Software
Cerulean@CeruleanBlueSoftware.com