Hello,
I’m loving the general direction the character builder is taking. Using it back when it was running more slowly was giving me difficulties with my screen reader because I found that it was making my assistive tech freeze quite a bit, but that’s cleared up significantly now. I went ahead and just started from scratch to build a level 1 character and went through very similar steps I did last time I made a character. Some of my observations may be similar, but I feel like I was able to do more this time around so there’s some new stuff here as well. Here’s a list of things I found weren’t working properly.
Best I can tell, the pop-up that comes up when deleting a character is not accessible with screen readers. I was able to fumble my way through it but I had to get sighted assistance to tell me I was supposed to type the character name before deleting it. Any other pop-ups like this one will likely be similarly problematic. There are a lot of these in another similar character builder which shall not be named which prevent me from using it at all, which thankfully is not the case here.
The ”Select Your Game System” and “Select Your Portrait” list of options to choose from still have no labels for screen readers. Portrait’s obviously aren’t a big deal but this still needs to be fixed.
In fact, labeling in general is an issue. It’s not unusable but it definitely needs to be fixed. For example, I’ve currently got the option to select a feat pulled up, and here’s what I’m seeing with my screen reader. There’s a Heading called “Select Feats.” Directly after that is a link that says “Character Builder” folled by an unlabeled control that is identified both as a Button as a Link. I’m pretty sure that control will back out of the feat selector based on its positioning but I have no idea. In the column headers for the table the “Name” column header has two unlabeled Buttons by it. I’ve clicked both and best I can tell they do absolutely nothing.
I chose the Versatile human heritage and it presented me the list of General feats from highest level to lowest level. This seems like a weird way to go since a heritage is only taken at level 1 and thus you only qualify for first level feats. I would think you’d go from lowest to highest level. Furthermore, Skill feats also have the General trait and thus can be taken with this heritage. Those should definitely be in this list as well. I’d love a way to hide options you don’t meat the prereq for. I see that when choosing your first level class feat it only shows you the options you qualify for so it looks like this isn’t a problem everywhere in the builder.
I’m creating a Fighter and there are 10 choices to make at level 1. I’ve made them all and it shows that, but by “Fighter Initial Proficiency” it shows “0/1” and it looks like I’m supposed to be able to make a choice here. Clicking it doesn’t do anything, and I don’t think there’s actually a choice for that anyway. Probably just labeled weird or something but figured I’d point it out. Update: You’re supposed to choose either Athletics or Acrobatics to be trained in at level 1 for a Fighter. Weird that it won’t let me click that “Fighter Initial Proficiency” thing to make the choice.
Weirdly the Human Natural Ambition skill feat looks like it’s giving me two class feats. The “NATURAL AMBITION - SELECT FEAT” option appears twice in the table on the Ancestry page and it shows that I have two more choices to make. Also choosing this feat still just presents me with an overly massive table of all the class feats available sorted in descending order from level 20, which is crazy because I only qualify for level 1 feats. Hopefully at some point this table will filter based on my choice of class, since I have already added Fighter as my class before trying to choose the bonus class feat. In addition, going to a different page of feats appears not to work yet, so the Natural Ambition feat just doesn’t work at all since I can only choose from one of the feats on the first page and they’re all level 20. The filtering by class thing might take some time to work out but hopefully you can fix the inability to go to a different page of feats at some point. Just for further detail, I’ve clicked to go to page 25 of feats and the pagination controls indicate that I am in deed there, but the list that is showing is still all the feats on the first page. Clicking to go to any other page has the same effect. This issue was there a month ago when I last built a character.
Update: I swapped out Natural Ambition for General Training, and it only got rid of one of the instances of telling me I need to select a feat for Natural Ambition. It looks like this might be another thing that’s just displaying incorrectly though.
On the character sheet, I don’t see a way to set a different skill for Initiative. It seems to use perception by default but in 2e you can use Stealth or sometimes another skill based on context. I know you could just click that skill in that situation but then if you have any bonuses specifically to initiative like the Incredible Initiative feat they won’t apply.
Best I can tell things seem to be labeled pretty well on the sheet. The dice roller is kind of weird and has some unlabeled controls but I’ve never seen one of those be great for accessibility with screen readers so I’m not sure what to do there.
Just a general accessibility tip, you often have headings inside of tables in this builder and on the sheet, which is a bit weird since I can navigate a table with different screen reader commands rather than navigating by heading. Since I can’t really tell what your pattern is for the level of heading you assign to each thing, i.e. a level 1 heading, a level 2 heading, etc., the fact that there are so many headings on the page kind of clutters things up and makes navigating from heading to heading slower than it otherwise would be.
My Shield Block and Sudden Charge feats are both showing up twice under the Skills & Actions part of the sheet.
Equipping an item doesn’t immediately place it under “Equipped.” I generally have to go to a different tab of the sheet and come back to have it move there.