Rebecca Strang: 00:09 Hello and welcome to Playability, where we hold conversations at the crossroads of gameplay and accessibility. I'm your host, Rebecca Strang, and I'm joined today by Ertay Shashko, the host of Sightless Fun, a podcast about visual accessibility in board gaming. Welcome to the show, Ertay, Ertay Shashko: 00:27 Oh, hello. Glad to be here. Rebecca Strang: 00:29 Yeah, we're happy to have you. So let's jump right into this with talking about what accessibility in gaming means to you. Ertay Shashko: 00:37 Um, well, accessibility, I'd say the ability to play and more importantly enjoy a game. I'm saying more importantly enjoy because for instance, now that I cannot see properly anymore, I know the rules of chess. I know how the chest pieces move, but I'm not really able to enjoy it. So that game, even though the pieces are accessible, like you can distinguish the pieces, you can get different visas for black-and-white players. Because like the decision space is huge, the game is not fun for me anymore so I consider that an inaccessible game for me personally. Those people that are blind and can play chess competitively are amazing. I don't know how they'd do that. But, yeah. Another, like for instance, I go with a video game, well it's a card game, the last video game that I actually played was called Hearthstone. And as my sight was deteriorating, the contrast of the card text was good enough and the text size was good enough. But as it was deteriorating, I needed more time to read the card text during the game, especially after they like released expansions and stuff. Yeah. And because then I have to spend more time on the text and when you're playing competitively there's a timer. [Rebecca: mm-hmm.] So the timer starts pressuring you to make your move and slowly the game became less and less accessible as I lost my sight so I could play the game if I had enough time. But that time pressure just made everything frustrating. and in the end made the game inaccessible. Rebecca Strang: 02:21 Yeah. That's understandable. It'd be nice if games like that, especially digital games where there's a lot of reading that you have to do on those cards. If there was like a pause function for you to read through. [Ertay: Yeah.] The information and then continue into your decision making. Ertay Shashko: 02:37 Yup. Rebecca Strang: 02:38 So you host a podcast as well, Sightless Fun. So how did you get into creating content about visual accessibility and gaming? Ertay Shashko: 02:47 Yeah, so last year around June I was thinking about blogging, about my hobbies and like over the years I've had different hobbies that I was interested in. Like mainly it was photography, which is a bit ironic I guess because I can't really do that anymore. And I was looking for alternatives, like video games was also another one. And around the same time I got into board games, it was like around the beginning of 2018 and while like looking for new games to pick up, I ran into Meeple Like Us, probably the listeners here know about that side. Like if they're listening to this podcast they probably know about Meeple Like Us. [Rebecca: laughs] So it's a site where they share accessibility tear downs of games and to rate them based on their accessibility. And that's what basically inspired me to write about how I as a blind gamer play board games and what types of mods I do or share what type of information I'm looking for from my sighted friends when I'm playing a game. So that's how I first started writing articles and then decided to try podcasting. So yeah, and right now when we have about 16 recorded episodes and yeah, that would probably be more currently on our break. Rebecca Strang: 04:11 Awesome. And so when you're scheduling guests, what are you looking for as far as the guests that you're speaking to and the content that you discuss on the show? Ertay Shashko: 04:21 Yeah, well, uh, initially I wasn't really planning to have many guests on the show because I had my cohost Jed Alexander, we started the podcast together with, but after I believe four episodes, he really like ran out of time, didn't really have enough time to commit every couple of weeks to the podcasts. So basically I had to pivot and I recorded a couple of solo episodes, which I am not so happy about. Like it feels a bit weird to listen to myself alone, I guess, and not have that back and forth. So it was either like stop there or look for alternatives. And by that time I knew a couple of people who are blind and were in the hobby much longer than me. Like Ryan Beach. One of the people that you interviewed [Rebecca: yeah.] a few months ago. It's one of them, like I talked to him like what am I going to do? And yeah, I decided I'd like to look for blind gamers mostly and get their experiences like the games that they enjoy playing, the types of mods they do on their games and yeah. So generally it's been blind gamers and after I start basically like the second season of the show, I'd also like to find people in the industry that pay more attention to visual accessibility like [Rebecca: mm-hmm] mostly right now the things that are done accessibly are done by accident. I guess it's not like specifically designed for that. But, yeah. Rebecca Strang: 06:05 Awesome. And when you are looking for guests, what does that process like for you as far as finding your guests and scheduling them and setting up the interview? Ertay Shashko: 06:17 Yeah, well I usually like spend time on Twitter. Like most of the people I have found are through Twitter. I also ended up finding a guest - So I, this is actually an interesting story - I posted a question on an "ask me anything" thread on Reddit where the Spirit Island designer was doing an AMA and I asked him like how visually accessible he thinks the game actually is, like would a blind gamer be able to play it. And like he answered that he thinks it's a bit complex, like the decision space is too high, but with enough patience and sighted assistance it's definitely doable. Ertay Shashko: 07:00 And like maybe about study or four weeks later some random person replies to my comment, you're linking me to a BGG thread where another blind gamer was looking for an accessible rulebook for the game. So I like, well the publisher then responded to that they will prepare a word document of the rulebook for him. So I got in touch with the blind gamer and later ended up having him as a guest and he will probably be a returning guest. I really had a great time recording with him. His name was Chris. So basically the process is, I don't know, like if I run into another blind gamer, I just get in touch with them, ask them, whether they've heard about the podcast, send them a couple of episodes to listen to and ask them if they would be interested to talk about a topic or I don't know, their favorite game perhaps or how they basically play blind. Rebecca Strang: 08:00 Yeah. How you found Chris is really cool. That's one of the things I like about the board gaming community especially, I'm on Twitter a lot, too, and the community, there's really friendly and open and you can find a lot of great people there. Ertay Shashko: 08:14 Yeah, yeah, definitely. Like they always like if they see a person looking for something help, they are great with that. And pinging either me or Meeple Like Us, the Meeple Like Us Michael pings me like, this is the guy that can help you out. So yeah. Yeah, it's great. Rebecca Strang: 08:31 And so who is the target audience for your show as far as who you see listening to it? Ertay Shashko: 08:38 Well, primarily the idea is to introduce blind people to hobby board gaming. Well blind and visually impaired. Also I'd say that there's plenty of information there for game designers because in our conversations we mention like uh, things that will make our lives much easier when playing games and some of those things simply improve the game for sighted people as well. Like the most basic thing that just comes to mind right now is, I don't know, having distinctly size components for different denominations of resources. Like if you have one gold, five gold tangled if they have their own size or shape, it's looks much better on the table having different sizes rather than just to have on number one or number five. So I guess like game designers can also find good information as well. Ertay Shashko: 09:42 Like in one of our episodes, I was talking about quarterbacking in cooperative games. I believe it was episode four and I didn't really expect to get any messages, but I got a few messages from designers that people think that quarterbacking is bad and yeah, it is bad when someone's doing it, but what they don't realize is that games that can be quarterbacked are actually very accessible to a blind person because there's no hidden information and those games can easily be played by someone who is blind because a sighted person can easily assist and that sighted person is also in the game. They don't have to be just there to help the blind person. They're also actively playing the game themselves. So by mitigating quarterbacking you might end up introducing things that can make the game less accessible to blind people. So yeah, that's why I guess there's stuff for blind people. There's stuff for game designers and I guess for just the normal sighted board gamers who I don't know have a blind or visually impaired friend and they have never thought about inviting them over for a game night. Rebecca Strang: 10:58 Yeah, that's, I've never specifically thought about the quarterbacking thing that you mentioned, but that does make a lot of sense. Gaming with open information, having that to be easily something that somebody else could help if you had a question or needed to know what the state of something was. Ertay Shashko: 11:17 Yeah, yeah. Well they, they can like provide what decisions are open to you currently, [Rebecca: yeah] but as long as they don't like making the decision for you. Like that's, that's great. Like I enjoy playing pandemic a lot and I know what questions to ask now, and like the more you learn the game, you know what kind of information you're looking for and maybe sometimes I end up being the quarterback and make the decisions for the others. But yeah. You know, like as long the player is careful not to make decisions for other players in the game. Yeah. It's, it's not really bad if I gain is prone to quarterbacking because that means it's quite accessible to blind people. Rebecca Strang: 12:07 Yeah. And I find that they're generally easier to teach. I teach a lot of games because my husband and I host game days pretty frequently. And so games that have that open information where I can explain what decisions someone has if they're just learning a game, that is really helpful to be able to do that. So when it comes to producing the content for your show, what are some challenges that you face in getting the show from scheduling to live on air? Ertay Shashko: 12:39 Yeah, well initially when I started I needed my brother. My brother was helping a lot with the editing, but he also like didn't have enough time. I mean it was new, like we used Audacity back then and it was quite new to him as well. So I don't know, for a 40 minute episode he still needed like three or four hours and it was a lot for him. And, later I decided to - oh, I also forgot to mention like what we would do is to like, because he needed to spend the time and I wanted to help him, what I was doing was: first go through the episodes, like take note of the time where things need to go out or need to stay or things that he'd need to, I don't know, like merge, bring this from here to here. I would like spend, I don't know, an hour or two doing that. And then he would spent another three or four hours going through that following my notes and applying them. Ertay Shashko: 13:46 But later I decided to look into doing it to myself using a screen reader and I, I found another program called Reaper and there's an open source, I think, tool that's made specifically for Reaper to make it accessible using the screen reader. Oh, I ended up finding a tutorial by a blind podcaster about simple, like the basics of editing. And my brother helped me out with creating a couple of effect chains basically to automate the noise reduction, I don't know, the leveling of the different tracks so that right now that is pretty much one button press and applies it to the whole track while for the editing, I do it myself for the first episode, it took me, I don't know, I think it was episode nine and it was around 15 minutes or so. It took me around 10 hours to produce that 15 minute mp3 file. But right now I have got it down to about three or four hours for one hour of final audio. So I'm, I'm pretty happy with that. It's definitely much slower. And then, well what sighted people would do, because you can seem to like see the waves and see where, I don't know the ums that are uhs, I don't know the various noises that shouldn't be there are just with vision and I need to scan the audio just by listening to it. But it's, it's quite, it's quite nice now, like I'm got into that work flow. It works fine for me. So yeah. Rebecca Strang: 15:27 Yeah. That's great. You were able to reduce the time. That's pretty significant going from 10 hours to three or four hours [Ertay: for sure]. And I think that's one thing, you know, and before I started doing the podcast, I had never thought about how much time beyond the actual recording of the show it would take to actually make it listenable and getting it out there to people. But it's a lot of time. Ertay Shashko: 15:53 Yeah. Yeah. It is like planning initially, and, what happens? Like when you don't have any chemistry with the guest and you need to do the heavy lifting and most listeners can tell English is not my primary language. And that was one of the like fears that I had. Like what am I doing here? And you know, and when you get guests that like answers the questions, with just, I don't know, two sentences. And you planned that to be a five minute discussion. You need to do the heavy lifting. So it's not just like you plan for this and it will go as smooth as you thought it would. So yeah, it's, it's not easy. Rebecca Strang: 16:37 Yeah. The timing of content is always interesting. I mean for Playability we're typically 15 to 20 minutes. And it's interesting sometimes I've had it where I'm like, Oh, I don't know if we're going to make it that far. And then sometimes I'm like, wow, I could just talk to this person all day. We could just keep recording forever. Ertay Shashko: 16:56 That's true. That's true. [Both laugh] Rebecca Strang: 16:59 So what is one of your favorite things about producing content? Ertay Shashko: 17:03 Well, I enjoy the process itself. Well I almost also started with written articles initially and, well I knew I'd mentioned one of the challenges there were the photos themselves. I still need that to bother my brothers to take the photos and that's why that I have put my written articles on hold for now and focused more on the podcast itself. But as far as my favorite thing about it, it's meeting new people. I met a lot of people through the site, well the blog and the podcast itself. Like we got together multiple blind people and now we are hosting a group voice chat mostly now that Ryan Peach is hosting and we create the mailing list where we can share like what games we are currently playing and stuff like that. So I guess I believe like the podcast helped bring a few of us together like uh, I don't know, Ryan knew Nancy, another blind board gamer and he introduced me to her. Then a couple of other friends I introduced them to Chris with that I found through the BGG forum post about Spirit Island and now we have a small group together where we share are experiences like recommendations for games or how do you make this game accessible? Ertay Shashko: 18:34 Like I never thought 7 wonders would be playable with sighted assistance alone until like Ryan said wait, like the game mechanics are in a way that the game is actually very accessible without any modifications. Like, even though your hand is secret, because you will pass your hand to the player next to you that player can easily like tell you what cards you have in hand and when you choose that card, that card will be public anyway. So there's no point in having that card secret. So yeah, simple things like that are really nice, so meeting new people has been my favorite part of producing content. Rebecca Strang: 19:15 Yeah. I would have to agree. I've got to meet a lot of people, whether I am at a con meeting people or just the people that I talk to here on the show. Like if I weren't doing this podcast I might never have talked to you. [Ertay: Yeah, yeah, that's true.] Yeah. That's my favorite thing as well. So if people would like to find you online, either to just keep up to date with what you're doing or listen to the show or reach out to talk to you, how can they get in touch with you? Ertay Shashko: 19:43 Yeah, so you can find me on Twitter. I'm at sightless fun. Or you can reach me via email, sightless fun at outlook dot com and you can find the podcasts on www dot sightless dot fun. Rebecca Strang: 19:58 Awesome. And for our listeners, if you have any questions or comments you would like to share with us, please email us at playabilitypod at gmail dot com you can also find us on major social media platforms at playabilitypod. So thanks Ertay for being on the show today. It was great talking to you. Ertay Shashko: 20:17 Oh, well thank you. This was great. Rebecca Strang: 20:19 Yeah, and I hope this episode helps you play with a new perspective.