Hello,

I am sighted person and using playroom web client on my Android phone is recently really painfull for me. For some reason it keeps crashing my phone browser and eventually freezing/lagging the whole phone. I noticed the problem being worse with history accumulation, or even more with each reconnection (I managed to lag my phone by only few rows of chat which I could fit on the screen, but like 4 reconnections). The only temporary fix is to refresh the website (if the browser still reacts) or restart the browser, both of which may be a problem, since the phone reacts really really slowly (might be like 10 seconds to only exit the browser after pressing the "home" or other button which eventually may let me clear all the running apps or something). The other problem of this fix is that history is completely lost, so if someone messaged me something important, then sorry, it's gone.

This never happened to me with any other website, nor even with the old web client, which I used on even older and much slower phone back then (It was just troublesome to click on the topmost button/link, but overall it looked nicer).

The other problem I have with the playroom (generally, but it's much worse on the web client with phone) is the ubiquitous "gray spam" of who joined who at which table etc. that cannot be turned off by any way. It's really annoying especially while chatting with someone. Joining or creating a free table is not an option on phone, since it often gets lost due to frequent reconections. Even the desktop client function to avoid spam is pretty useless for me, since it actually doesn't remove it, just makes your screen readers ignore it (which I obviously don't use).

Could something be done about these problems? Please.

Note that I am using the "Display version for PC" function in my phone browser while using playroom web client, since otherwise the buttons are placed right over the chat history window, therefore covering it and making it unreadable, so it's not accessible at all. I think it would be wiser to put the buttons above or bellow the chat window. Yet, in my opinion, it would be better to make phone version somewhat similar to how it's displayed on the PC, just with smaller narrower collums so it fits on the small phone screen hold on width (that is longer side in horizontal, not vertical position), with left half reserved for chat history and right for buttons. The old web client could have been quite easilly adjusted this way...

Note 2: Right now I am using a Zenphone (by ASUS) with 3 GB of RAM (pretty enough for most of the stuff), Android 8.0 and the corresponding Google Chrome browser, if this is helpful.

Hello,

Thank you very much for your message. I must admit that I'm terribly sorry about the issues you are signaling.

I'm sorry first because I don't have any android phone, and so am unable to test myself. Any fix take a lot of time for that reason. I'm still a little surprised because I know that several regular users, as far as I know, play on the web client on their android phone without a so major problem. Of course it isn't ideal and it won't ever be as good as with the windows client, but, to my knowledge, it works and it isn't that bad.

I'm sorry a second time because as a blind, it's very hard to make something visually happealing or even consist, because it's difficult to test alone. I perfectly know that the appearance is basicly awful, but it isn't always easy to ask sighted people for help. Sadly, telling that this thing should be moved at that particular place isn't sufficient because I'm even unsure of the code to do it right.
If you are ready to give us help on the visual appearance of the playroom, it would be precious for us. We sometimes get criticism because we are doing anti-accessibility, while actually we are trying to do our best with what we know, what we have, and can safely do.

I feel terribly sorry a third time with your third point about specific messages you aren't interested in. I feel even a little stupid in front of the obvious: that's exact, you can make the screen reader ignore thoses messages, but they are always displayed. I'll try to do something to fix this.

However, I don't know really to what you are refering to when you say the old web client. The web client hadn't changed much since 2 or 3 years.

Again, thank you very much for pointing all that out.

Thank you for your reply.

"Old" web client indeed is how it looked like before the update 2-3 years ago or something. I remember it.

Anyways, I guess blind android users use the playroom as it comes, that is buttons over the chat. I suppose the screen reader (talkback in this case) detects both chat history and the buttons and it doesn't care that it's one over the other. The problem might be exclusive to the PC version displayed on phone, which I am using for obvious reasons (there is such option in Android Google Chrome browser settings, I don't know how it works with iPhone Safari, I would have to steal a friend's iPhone to test..). Anyways that might explain why others are not experiencing any problems. 

I am not sure what exactly causes the crashes, I guess it somehow overloads the phone, but I am not sure why is that happening, since the "old" web client was basically only the PC version and it worked just fine. And what's more, it's just a simple text, not a huge graphically demanding game, where it would not surprise me. I also noticed that the PC version on phone is pretty buggy - except for the crashes I can sometimes for example type in the chat history window (which I cannot do on actual PC). Sorry for giving maybe too many unnecessary details, that's just my scientific nature.

As for the appearance, it's not that totally awfull, it's just simple. When I saw the website (and the web client) for the first time, it actually looked quite okay for me. It was not just black and white something, like some other websites made by blind people are, it had colors! (and still has them) Fancy graphics isn't really necessary. Some people even say that the beauty is in simplicity.

I can indeed try to help you with the visual feedback. I guess it's not easy at all to develop something like this, especially if one cannot try and see for himself how it looks like (or the way of doing so is very limited).

Hello,
you may be experiencing phone crashes because of the sounds. It could sound unbelievable, but some Android phones still face issues with web audio.
However, I am not sure if you can in fact prevent sounds from loading on the new web client. In audio settings, it's only possible to mute sounds, which probably still loads them, unlike the old client which had a checkbox to disable sounds.
Generally, the new web client offers more possibilities, but has a few issues even for blind people. For example, the history bug isn't really specific to sighted users. It's interesting to hear that you can't see the history, for a long time I thought that was a Talkback bug, but since the history moved to a read only text box it is in fact not possible to read it on Android in most cases, Talkback simply skips over it, which makes sense now that I know it is not on screen either. You are also right, it is entirely possible to type in this read only history box on a PC, I believe only on the top of it, did it by mistake a few times.
I do primarily use an IPhone now, but do have a secondary Android I use for testing, so it's not a problem to see how any future fixes work. If at least the history part could be improved a little, that would be great. If this doesn't prevent channel and view settings from working, I suggest going back to the old way, a history heading with simple history items, not inside a read only box. This also causes minor Voiceover Safari crashes on the Mac when the history has too many items, since it's trying to process the entire text box at once, and it's entirely possible to shift tab to it by mistake and cause a crash. Previously, you would just read the history when you are interested by going to the game heading, and navigating to the left of it for the most recent items.
Curiously enough, the history box indeed behaves normally and works this way while on an IPhone, but that just prooves the unfortunate inconsistency with different devices and browsers.

Hello Nikola (and Aminiel),

First let me point out, that the chat history actually is there, but was parly (not completely) covered by the buttons to join a table or display the friendlist. Now I noticed that it got changed - the chat history "box" now ends above the buttons. From my perspective it looks quite okay, I have just 2 comments to it. First, since the history window is now pretty small, it's even easier to get lost in gray spam and miss a message (something to hide it would really help there, but that was already mentioned before). Second, what I consider worse, is that I cannot scroll the friendlist at all, once I open it, so I cannot even reach the cancel button at the bottom, same goes for list of online players, tables are actually fine due to short names (I can catch only space without text to scroll, and list of players fills the collumn completely). So I will probably stick to the "version for PC" option.

As for sound hypothesis, I cannot confirm it, but I muted the sounds of whole web in my browser a while ago so I don't think that's a major problem.

Anyways I think I figured out what's actually happening there (PC version on phone from now on). Let me explain. The chat history "box" works as a selectable box, the same is the whole web client box (which contains all the items). By touching the chat history, or any other place (except any button or the chat message window), selects one or the other, which causes lag, that can be removed by selecting the chat window (to write messages) or by clicking on any button. The lag is bigger after touching the chat history, rather than a free space under buttons, and depends on how long the history log already is (and maybe on number of reconections but I couldn't confirm it). At one point, when the chat history is already very long and is selected by touching, it lags a lot, or eventually causes the browser to stop responding or to completely crash. I think it's similar to what you described. I agree that changing the way the history is displayed to the way somewhat similar as how it used to be years ago might solve the problem.

Note that I also had a problem with my phone, reacting a bit show to nearly everything, which could contribute to the problem, but I managed to solve this problem, and after that I successfully managed to crash my browser by touching the chat history as described above.

Edit: I actually have one more comment to how phone version of playroom looks like. For some reason it displays an error message on top, over the chat history window: "Notice: Undefined offset: 5 in /home/web/qcsalon.net/www/detect-browser-and-os.php on line 172". It's displayed only on phone and only when the browser is set to display phone version (after switching to computer version it doesn't appear anymore). I suppose it refers to a certain place in the code.