A New Look and Feel
The last time this website had a visual or structural update was in 2018. That’s almost a decade ago.
Over the years, I have become increasingly frustrated with WordPress, which was the blogging software I’ve been using since 2010. As my own assistive technology (AT) use has transitioned from screen magnifier to screen reader, WordPress became more and more difficult for me to use.
Between WordPress plugins and their constant demand for your attention (and your money), a platform that needs constant maintenance, and old parts of the website literally breaking so hard they took the site offline for a day, I was done with it all. It got to the point where I just plain dreaded logging in to write anything.
What I Did
I converted the entire website to static HTML files instead of the WordPress components that it had previously been built on. The content is now all the same, but it feels a lot snappier to browse because the HTML was built before your computer ever requested it.
With WordPress, which uses a language called PHP, the old site generated the code that you download each time you requested it (well, it’s a bit more complicated than that; sometimes it would cache pages for a while and deliver those instead). But if my PHP version was ever out of date (which it was), or if a WordPress plugin you use is ever abandoned and becomes outdated (which happened), things could break catastrophically (which also happened).
There were moments where I had to weigh the trade-offs between simply abandoning the site, which I obviously hadn’t been maintaining very well for the last few years, or making a major infrastructure change. So I made a major infrastructure change.
Anything Missing?
I was able to convert basically the entirety of my old site. All of the blog posts dating back to 2010, all of my games dating back to 2012, all of the free downloads like the Large Print Yahtzee Scorecard, and all of my media are still here. If you find anything missing or terribly broken, please reach out. I think I managed to do a pretty thorough conversion, and caught some long-outstanding bugs while I was at it.
What’s missing, though, are all of the interactive widgets and components that weren’t getting any use anyway. There are no more comments, no social widgets with numeric share counts, and not as many little icons or graphics hanging about. Overall, the look is simpler, but the load times are definitely faster for it.
If anything is missing, it’s stuff that won’t be missed.
The Road Ahead
To be frank, I don’t know what Accessible Games looks like going forward. Taking just one glance at the posting history is pretty revealing on its own – there have only been a few posts whatsoever over the last few years.
Between health issues, getting laid off from my day job, and needing to find some way to make ends meet, Accessible Games was sadly de-prioritized. As much as I love this job, there just isn’t a sustainable income to be had on indie tabletop games. I knew that when I was dedicating all of my waking spare time to Accessible Games, but now that I have to be my own employer full-time, it’s just not cutting it.
I’m not completely giving up though. This year, we published Accessible Gaming Quarterly Issue 14, and I hope to have Issue 15 out by the end of 2026. I already have several articles from a few different contributors, so we’re looking good to hit that target.
I’ve also been building a solo, dungeon brawl RPG for the last couple of years. It’s called, tentatively, Dungeon Brawlers. The game is an homage to 16-bit video game beat ‘em ups like Streets of Rage and Golden Axe and will be published under Paizo’s ORC license if ever I get it to that point.
The thing holding me back from publishing has been the fact that traditional print and PDF publishing workflows are costly, and I have no budget to spend on it. I still owe two issues of AGQ to my Kickstarter backers from AGQ Year 4, and there’s no way I’m going to ask people for more money while that’s still outstanding.
But I’m kicking around the idea of publishing it as an entirely HTML-based product like an SRD website. That would significantly reduce my costs and allow me to put something out into the world again, which I very much miss doing.
What about Survival of the Able?
If you recall, I had big plans for Survival of the Able. I wanted it to be more than a one-off product, and there were even some initial concepts for other settings. Todd Crapper (who did the layout) and I had also kicked around ideas for taking the SotA engine and building another game out of it. The game was high concept and had a lot of potential.
But around the same time I started having issues, he ran into some of his own. Things just never pulled together.
Will SotA survive in the future, or will it succumb to the zombie apocalypse? Only time will tell.
Until Next Time
I’m not sure when the time will come that Dungeon Brawlers sees the light of day, that SotA gets a sequel, or that Psi-punk gets its long-overdue evolution. What I do know is that I’m still slowly plucking away at AGQ and will hopefully, one day before too long, have something more to offer the Accessible Games community.
Until then, I’m still advocating for accessibility in other industries. Right now, I’ve focused on offering accessibility consulting to web developers and instructional designers. I also advocate for moving accessibility up the organizational ladder and into the rooms where businesses make decisions about accessibility, because I’m passionate about creating a world where everyone gets a chance to participate.
I still blog regularly, but since it’s more about leadership and learning design than gaming, I’ve moved those articles to Substack. You can follow me at Growth for ALL.
I’m also active on LinkedIn, where I share accessibility advice and musings. You can find me there at @Jacob-Wood-Writer.
I’m also building a platform that empowers instructional designers to create accessible e-learning courses without the inaccessible tools they’ve been forced to rely on for decades. It’s ambitious, but so am I. You can check that out at Superable Learning or you can view some of the sample courses I’ve built myself at Superable Accessibility.
Finally, if you or your business ever needs accessibility consulting, I’m available to help run audits and tests of your websites, products, and operating procedures. I help move the conversation into the rooms where decisions are made, because product engineers only have so much authority over what they can do to make things accessible. What we really need are budgets, standard operating procedures, and culture initiatives that move entire businesses forward. You or your team can reach out to me through JacobWood.me for that.
Oh, I guess that wasn’t “finally.” Because I’m also starting a podcast with my friend and colleague, Dr. Nicole L’Etoile. That podcast is called “Beyond Alt Text,” and it’s for the people who care about accessibility but don’t want to be the only ones in their company who do. As I write this we haven’t released our first episode yet, but when we do it’s going to be at BeyondAltTextPod.com.
Phew. No wonder Accessible Games has been slow lately. I’m only one person with only so much time in the day, and I have a lot going on. But that’s the nature of being your own boss.
If you want to get in touch, whether it’s to submit an article to AGQ or just to catch up, use the contact page on this site or find me on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear how things have been going with you, too.