 Coming up on DTNS, Microsoft wants to be your new way to manage photos, why you should keep an eye on China's Kuaisho and how video games are made and accessible. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm from Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us today to talk about accessibility in video games, design lead at Bungie, Jennifer Ash, and UIUX lead at Bungie. Andrew Davis, welcome both of you to the show. Thanks for joining us. Hi, thanks for having us. Thanks. Yeah, this is the third day of Accessibility Week. So you guys are the peak at the very middle, holding Accessibility Week together. We appreciate that. We were just talking a lot about taco time, the taco chain on Good Day Internet. If you'd like that wider conversation, become a member of patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. As part of enforcement action taken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security, the U.S. seized more than 30 sites operated by Iranian government-run Press TV and social media channels affiliated with Iran-backed militias in Iraq. The seizure notice cited both civil and criminal forfeiture laws and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which grants the U.S. president the power to regulate international commerce in response to threats to U.S. security. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a live audio room that the company is in the early stages of building camera-based search tools. And as an example, explained how in browsing Instagram, visual search could find similar products available somewhere else on Instagram and let users find products using their cameras or images from the camera roll, a little visual search for shopping. Zuckerberg also said Facebook shops will arrive on Marketplace and WhatsApp soon. And upcoming shop ads will let businesses target ads based on people's individual shopping preferences. EA intends to acquire Warner Bros. Game's Playdemic Mobile Game Studio, makers of the popular golf clash game, and an all-cash deal worth $1.4 billion. AT&T plans to make the remaining Warner Bros. Game's portfolio part of the recently announced Warner Media Discovery merged entity. Lenovo announced the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4. It's a 16-inch workstation with 11th Gen Intel H-Series processors, up to a core i9, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, two solid-state drive slots, up to 600 nits of brightness in the display, and a 90-watt-hour battery. Pricing starts at $2,149, and it's set to ship in August. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman found references in Peloton's iOS app code that the company is working on a digital heart rate monitoring armband. This would sync to the company's fitness equipment, as well as with phones, and integrate with Peloton's existing heart rate zones to give feedback on workout intensity. Peloton acquired Atlas Wearables last year. Look at Mark Gurman branching out from Apple leaks to Peloton leaks. That's interesting to see. All right, let's actually talk a little bit about Apple's new report on sideloading. So the Epic Apple lawsuit, which we've talked about quite a bit on the show, also touched on the idea of forcing Apple to allow other app stores or allow the ability to sideload apps onto iOS as a potential remedy. Well, we don't know yet how the judge is going to rule on that particular case, but the EU and the US are exploring the idea of forcing Apple to allow sideloading. In the US, it's part of the proposed American Innovation and Choice Online Act. In Europe, it's part of the proposed Digital Markets Act. Feeling that pressure, Apple released a report Wednesday called Building a Trusted Ecosystem for Millions of Apps. In it, it argued against letting users download apps directly to iOS devices without using Apple's App Store, aka sideloading. Apple made the argument that security would suffer, not only because people might sideload a malicious app, but even non-malicious apps outside the App Store might be subject to more security vulnerabilities because they don't need to meet App Store standards and review. Apple says that's why we do it, trying to keep it safe. Apple also says it worries that malicious actors might trick users into thinking that they're downloading from the official Apple App Store when they aren't, something that would be impossible today because Apple doesn't allow anything besides the App Store. Apple also says it believes phones are different than laptops because of the sophistication level of the users, and the fact that there are 10 times as many iPhones as Macs and the amount of sensitive data stored on phones is a lot higher. So these are fairly familiar arguments, but they were well laid out, I think, in the white paper that was released. They have very pretty graphics, as you might expect. It's a well-designed white paper as well from Apple. I don't disagree with anything Apple said. Certainly having Apple review and have standards is going to be more secure than sideloading. That doesn't mean that Apple never has an insecure app slipped through because nothing's perfect, but you can definitely, and I think Craig Federighi has even said this publicly, you can definitely find more malware on a Mac than you can on an iPhone because they don't lock down a Mac, and you can sideload apps, it's not even called sideloading on a Mac, it's just kind of the way the Mac works. I do think they exaggerate the effect. When you look at Android, yes, there are more malware out there, but there are things Apple could do that Android doesn't do to fight that like they do on the Mac. They could say, by default, you can't get anything out of, except from the App Store, unless you know what you're doing, you can then go in and choose stuff. And I think that would, if they just did what they did on the Mac that they do on iOS, most people would never sideload because they just wouldn't want to bother to go through the hoops. So I do think the motivation here is probably more about preserving the monetization aspect of the App Store for a defensible reason, which is security, but I don't get the sense that iOS would suddenly become, you know, wastelands of insecurity if they allowed sideloading. To me, it seems like, to me, it's simple math. It's like, will they make, does Apple equate that they would make more money having a more secure platform? Actually, you know, the PR is, we are more secure than anything and it's across the board, not just the App Store. So they already pushed that as a major thing. I think they think that that is worth more money in the long haul than suddenly letting sideload happening because I don't think sideloading is a thing that many people are interested in. And while I agree with Tom on every point he made, I just think it's that simple economic math. I mean, they're going to make more money with a secure system. They already do. It's kind of their thing. And to change that probably means, you know, they're not going to make much. They're not going to make more or significantly amounts more or else they do it. So they won't. Yeah, I think the whole security thing, it's such a convenient way to say we just care about your security. You don't want this to become some sort of Wild West scenario where you have no idea what you're downloading and who's behind it and you're going to get all this malware and stuff. It's like, well, sure, no one's going to say, no, we want that. We definitely want that. We want it to be, you know, just a much more of a mess and it would be more of a mess, I guess. But, but yeah, I think this has a lot more to do with Apple's bottom line, especially because iOS itself is so well done. It's very secure in a sandboxed. And even when malware does slip through the app store review process, it's hard for it to do the kind of damage and get the kind of access that that it would want to because of just the way iOS is constructed. Well, let's talk about photos. Organizing photos is a lot of work. And with Google pulling the plug on unlimited storage, a lot of folks are reexamining how they manage their photos. A lot of people are sticking with Google, but some people are taking the opportunity to say, maybe I'll go somewhere else. Microsoft would like you to consider OneDrive as an option and is updating OneDrive on the web and Android 6 or higher to add basic photo editing features to OneDrive. So you're in the drive and you don't have to open another app. You'll be able to crop, rotate, flip images as well as adjust brightness, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadow, saturation, warmth and tint. Basic stuff, but nice to have. You can also cast your photos from OneDrive to Chromecast and create a folder that sorts photos by source. So you want all your screenshots in one folder, maybe all the stuff you got from WhatsApp or text message or social media, et cetera. The editing and casting features support JPEG or PNG files. But for now, they're limited to personal accounts. They'll come to business and enterprise and education accounts as well as iOS later this year. So that might be an option for some. Ars Technica, on the other hand, suggests maybe you want to put it all in-house. Alex Kretschmar has a thorough look on Ars Technica. I highly recommend reading it. It's a good article. About what you might need and what options are available if you just want to run an app yourself and do all your photos on your own computer. His top choice is Photoprism. It's an open source app that uses Google TensorFlow machine learning to classify your images by subject, detect duplicates and extract location data. It also supports WebDAF, which is useful for keeping in sync with other photo prism installs. So if you have it on multiple machines, you can keep them all in sync as well as keep it in sync with any self-hosted cloud platform you might have on NextCloud. It works with that as well. I was curious seeing all this news how you all organize your photos these days because the answer for me is short. I don't. I have a big photos folder and I don't do anything to them. They're all just in there in a mess and I probably do something about it some days. Scott, sound like you were probably in the same boat as me. Yeah, I'm not only in the same boat. I'm literally in the same exact boat. Paint, name, everything. That boat, you and I are on that boat because my whole thing with photos has always been, I don't always like gallery stuff. I don't necessarily care about an AI saying, these look like they were all taking at the same party on the same date or any of that stuff. Just not interesting to me. And I know that we are probably in the minority here. I have no qualms about that. But I really just like the idea of I want to preserve these memories. I want to put them in these digital boxes and then I want to back up those boxes and I want to have it local and I want to have it on the cloud and I want to have it everywhere. So that 20, 30 years down the road, all my photos are somewhere. I don't really care about all that other stuff. So I don't use iCloud photo stuff. I have Google photos for a backup and that's it. So I have like a third option where it all goes there. And I might do that here just to have it synced. Got some space on OneDrive. Why not? Well, I don't think I'm not the target here, unfortunately. I'll bet there's lots. Sarah, I'll bet you're probably Jonesed about this idea of keeping track of all this stuff in this way. Well, you use an iPhone, right? Yeah, I do. So when you say I don't use any of that iCloud stuff, I'm like, that's the easiest one. Yeah, it is. Now, iCloud is for the storage that I need. It's not free. In fact, it's not free. Well, no, it's free at a level that's too low for me. But I pay a nominal fee per month and that's really photos backup. That's mostly what I'm paying for. Everything that's on my current phone, which is a few years old now, but has a lot of storage. I mean, every photo since 2010 is on this phone because I do an iCloud backup every time I get a new device. That's also all in iCloud or it's in my photos app if I open it on macOS. But, and I was thinking about this because there was a time when Google Photos was just one of many options that you had if you wanted to do backups. For a while, I was auto backing up everything I took on my phone because that's just sort of become my dominant device that I take photos on to Flickr. I was backing up to Amazon Photos, which by the way, you can still do if you're a Prime customer and it's unlimited photos. So if you're like, hey, it doesn't exist. Well, if you're a Prime member, I mean something to look into if you're not doing it already. And I believe I was using Google Photos at one point and I don't know, my account caught disconnected, but I was of the mind, let's say, you know, sometime early in the last decade where I was like, just upload them everywhere, why not? It's free. If they all go down somewhere, at least they'll be somewhere else. And I kind of stopped caring about that. I don't know if it's not wise to really care about iCloud as my only backup storage situation, but it's never failed me. There are a few categories, you know, where it's like the selfies category and I look at some of the photos and I'm like, oh my gosh, these are like weird pictures I accidentally took of my own face. I don't need these in here, but otherwise I feel like it categorizes things pretty well. Jen, do you manage photos? Do you take a lot of photos? Is this something you think about? I feel like I'm in a very similar boat to all of you as well. Like I've had photos. Yeah, maybe it's slightly different named in color, but I definitely did Flickr in the past. Like some of them are on Flickr, some are in Photo Bucket. I found that recently. I was like, oh wow, got to get those off of there. And then also like, yeah, but then trying to figure out what's the backup best plan for that because at one point I had a phone that didn't have enough storage. So like how do you manage that? So then you start investigating like Google photos was the easy one because I'm on Android. And so like I've thought about it, but they're kind of everywhere and there's like some are backed up on hard drives and some are backed up on the cloud, but there's I don't, I certainly don't go through and try to categorize them by any means. It's, and now it's more about having the ability to share easily. So I will have to say like Google photos has popped up there because I can share an album with the family and be like, oh look pictures of like my kid, my cat. Like it's super simple. So that's important. But before that it was like, there's somewhere and I hope I don't lose them because they're not nearly as easy to find as like the physical items that we used to have. So yeah. Andrew, tell us that you have, you have the perfect system that we can all just imitate you and take it. No, it's pretty messy. I have an iPhone and I use iCloud to back that up and keep all the high res on a MacBook at my desk. But then same with Jen, we want to share the photos and all of our family uses Google photos for that. So then I need to take the iCloud and get those uploaded to Google photos so we can go sort them through there and send them out to the family. I have found one of the nice things on that and I think multiple services do this. They'll show you like on this day last year and show you like, oh, that was the day we took our kids out to the park and seeing those memories pop up in that sort of kind of automated way is nice instead of taking it on ourselves to like, oh yeah, we should go look at old photos. Like this presented to you in email or some sort of notification. Yeah, no, I like those apps too. So we'll send us folks, your photo organization methods, feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Meanwhile, we have a new service for you to start making videos for that you'll have to keep track of later. Oh, indeed. In fact, you may have heard of KuaiShow, but if you haven't, keep an eye out for this one. It's the maker of a popular Chinese video sharing app. In fact, a lot of people are using it. KuaiShow announced Wednesday that it now has 1 billion monthly active users across its various platforms in China, as well as its international apps, Kuai and Snack Video. For comparison, TikTok owner Bite Dance reported 1.9 billion monthly active users across its platforms, and Tencent-owned WeChat, which is the app for doing pretty much anything in China all in one, has 1.2 billion. KuaiShow plans to spend $1 billion in the U.S. this year to challenge TikTok overseas, while TikTok oversees the U.S. being one of those places, starting in South America and Southeast Asia. Yeah, they're going to spend $1 billion in U.S. money in South America and Southeast Asia is what they're targeting. But yeah, they may eventually come to the U.S., which is why you want to keep an eye out for these, because when DuYan was a video app on the rise in China, if you had kept an eye on that, you wouldn't have been surprised when they bought musically and put it into TikTok and became a sensation. It's not a guarantee that this will happen, but it's one of the rising stars in China. So something to pay attention to, because I don't know that it affects your life, but you will maybe know when this thing shows up and everybody's suddenly using snack video and you're going to be like, oh, yeah, KuaiShow. I saw them coming. Yeah, didn't it feel like, I mean, it felt like TikTok kind of came out of nowhere for a lot of people, but it's the same pattern, right? They're a huge investment. Stuff starts to happen. Then we all go, what's TikTok? I'm not ready for another social network. This sounds lame. And then it takes over everything. So I've learned not to, you know, to badden eye on this stuff. I kind of keep an eye on it and see what happens. Yeah. What I'm trying to kind of trying to figure out is, okay, I get the idea, and I gather there are already a lot of users. KuaiShow is, yeah, it's definitely one to watch. It seems from what I've seen of the content that's being created and shared on the platform, really similar to TikTok. And that TikTok has more users. Sure, you know, under twice as much, but both companies have, you know, by all standards for an app, you know, that's gaining traction. A lot of users, what, you know, at that point, what happens, you know, I always kind of think of like, well, it's YouTube versus everyone else. Like, who's everyone else? I don't know. Vimeo kind of had to pivot and do something different even to play along, right? There's really nothing like YouTube, but you wouldn't compare YouTube and TikTok, really. If anything, YouTube is trying to keep up with TikTok when it comes to, you know, be in the new, new, new. So, yeah, I'll be interested to see what KuaiShow or any of the apps that it's either already has or is working on in the future to stand out and be cooler than TikTok, because I don't, I don't know how that happens. Well, folks, if you want to expand your Spanish language tech skills, Dan Campos is here to help. Hello, friends of DTNS. It is time for The Word of the Day, brought to you by Noticias de Tecnología Express. Today's word is archelugio. It can be translated as gadget or device, and it usually refers to artifacts that have a certain level of complexity, like the gadgets or electronic tools that we use today. Archelugio can also be used in an expected way if you want to imply that somebody is cheating by using their calculator instead of doing the math in their head. After all, what kind of trickery is that? You can learn this and more words by listening to Noticias de Tecnología Express, available every Friday. According to the nonprofit foundation Abel Gamers, close to 46 million U.S. gamers have a disability. That's a lot of gamers out there, but how do companies incorporate accessibility into their games and what guides those design decisions? That's what we've asked Jennifer Ash and Andrew Davis to talk about today. And let's start with this. At what stage of game development does accessibility become part of the discussion? Ideally, accessibility considerations are brought up as early as possible in the discussions. We've found, from experience, it's often more expensive and more time-consuming to retrofit accessibility functionality into an existing game. When they're brought up either at the beginning of game development or feature additions to a game, the team can incorporate it a lot easier when building that functionality and those features. Yeah, it makes sense that you wouldn't want to tack it on later. It'll be easier to have it in as early as possible, right? Yeah, absolutely. But at the same time, it's never too late to start is the other thing to keep in mind is ideally it's right off the bat you're thinking about those, but that's not always the case. So it's a matter of thinking about what opportunities do we have and just keeping that in mind as development goes on as well. I assume that helps. Oh, sorry. I had a question about one of the most basic ones. For colorblindness, this is an option you find in most games today. 10 years ago, you barely saw it, or somebody would really make a big deal out of if they did have options for colorblindness. These days, it seems like it's everywhere. Do you think you have to approach a project now with that list of whatever kinds of accessibility options you're thinking of? You need to have that in mind no matter what, even if it affects the design of the game that may be, I don't know, color-based, for example, if something about colors is used in the game, how much does that affect your design? It can be quite a bit. If you're relying solely on colors, like you're cutting out a large percentage of your possible audience, like what's the, it's like 20 or 30% of players have some form of colorblindness. So if you're relying just on that, it can really have an effect on the number of players who can dig in and really enjoy your game. What are some of the other accessibility concerns? We need colorblindness being one of them. What are the accessibility concerns in game design? It's a really wide field. Some of the areas that we've focused on, at least early on, are things around visual acuity, colorblindness, subtitle options, like making sure that text is readable in your game, both in just standard UI screens and subtitle support, making sure that we have options to change the color of the subtitles, increase opacity, change size, things like that. And then I know Jen did a bunch of work towards controller remapping, sort of the functional inputs that players have. Yeah, and that took into account things like cognitive and mobility disabilities, because not only is it the actual controls themselves, which is part of gameplay actually making those decisions, but it's also a part of how you present those choices and how people can change those settings is also part of the consideration. So that's an important... It's not just visual, it's also mobility, and how do you make this as simple as possible? How do you make things usable as possible, which comes down to being able to correct your errors or change things to make fit what you need and try them out? And so there's a bunch of different factors that can play into different approaches you can have for approaching these accessibility features. Players can have disabilities that affect all of their senses. So anything that the game is like outputting visual touch and audio, all of that could... Video games can take those into account when designing features and trying to support these disabilities. Who gets to test this? How do you test to see if what you're doing is working? There's a variety of different ways you can approach this. So there's no one answer. Some examples that I've seen and heard about, you use internal participants, so you reach out to your employees and see who's affected by certain things. What are some things that we can bring you in to have you try this out desk side? That's the quickest solution, of course, available to you. But also you can source panels of participants from people like Able gamers and special effects setup panels and can connect you with different people with different disabilities to test out features. You can also reach out to local groups. There are people with disabilities, people that are hard of hearing or veterans or things like that, that they can reach out and be like, hey, we've got a game company or a company that's really interested in having you give some feedback. Are you interested? And then you can obtain people through those as well. So there's a lot of different methods to try to get at what you're trying to understand, but there's also just the fact that you can integrate it into your game design as is. Because there are standards for that, things like that? Yeah, there can be guidelines that in talking with accessibility consultants and organizations like Able gamers, you can come up with guidelines and then at that point, you can get your internal test team to test, well, anybody in the game company design and test to run checks against what you're making and see if they meet the guidelines that have been set out to support some of the accessibility concerns. And to be fair, this is a pretty known area in software, so there's a lot of guidelines already out there from major companies that post like, here's website accessibility. While it's not the same, it's still like, how do you view text on a screen? It's still text on a screen, so you can still kind of reach out to do that, but other larger companies like Microsoft have already put out guidelines for games in specific. So you can, and that's fairly recent, they updated those and made those available. And there's also a lot of special interest groups out there for games. So like the International Game Developers Association has a special interest group specifically for game accessibility. So they have a conference every year that they present different topics at. Also this kind of overlaps with user research and user experience design. So like the Games User Research Summit this year had like, I think like at least three different chats about it, different talks, and that was really exposed. Recent games that came up as well as board games of how do you approach accessibility, testing for it, things to be aware of, and how to set those up. So like there's a variety of different ways that you can start with understanding your guidelines as best practices when creating things as well. It sounds like this has become industry-wide. This is not something that just a couple of companies are doing. Yeah, that's right. It's definitely become a lot bigger of a focus in the last two to three years. Like before you'd see a lot of, there'd be an advocate in the company or a few, and it'd be just kind of an understood like, yeah, that's important, but recently now there's actually like teams being built at larger companies and individuals that have specific roles that take on this focus. So it's not just ad hoc kind of representation. It's actually a focus and understanding about how does this fit in. So if someone wants to get into the game design accessibility field, how would they do that? That's a good question. Neither of us are specifically that role. I think I would start looking at understanding like a lot of it comes down to user experience design, understanding like human ergonomics, human factors, and I would look for the game accessibility special interest group and really see like, reach out to them and understand what of the individuals getting jobs in this space, what's a common trait or role? Andrew, anything to add? No, I mean, for me it's always been trying to be sort of the best ally as possible. When you hear about players with concerns, don't take it for granted. Take it seriously and see what you can do as coming from the UI side of things. What can we fit into the schedule and help these players out? Yeah, and we mentioned it a couple of times in the course of the conversation here, if you are interested from the accessibility side, ablegamers.org, definitely go check that out. Seems like you guys work with them quite a bit. Yeah, we're in touch with them pretty regularly as consultants and just generally bouncing Q&A sessions off each other. Excellent. Well, thank you guys for sharing your knowledge and insight on that. It's a great reminder that accessibility isn't just about word processing and more practical things, but it's important for having fun and playing video games too. All right, Sarah, let's check out the mailbag. We got an email from Guy who had thoughts on our conversation last Friday's show and Amber Mac was joining us on that show and we were talking about Apple saying that it embraces failing internally and the public doesn't see all our failures but trust us, we have stuff not coming to market all the time. Guy says, Apple can allow themselves to actually develop a whole product and then simply write it off and not ship. With smaller companies, the best way to succeed is to move fast and fail fast. You think of a product or a feature for that matter, develop its MVP alongside with relevant metrics for success and ship it in order to get the real customer feedback. If you're wasting a lot of time that's burning through precious cash, perfecting a product internally to avoid failing, failure is almost guaranteed. Well, thank you Guy. Appreciate that personal expertise and insight as well. Keep those feedbacks coming. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Indeed, we also like to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today they include Robert Hillman, Tim Ashman and Johnny Hernandez. Also a special thanks to Alex McQuilkin, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you, thank you, thank you for all the years of support, Alex. Thank you, Jennifer Ash and Andrew Davis for joining us on the show today and making a little bit more sense of accessibility in gaming. Jennifer, I'll start with you. Where can folks keep up with your work? I'm on Twitter, if you want to check me out. Jennifer Renee. Excellent. Andrew Davis, where can people keep up with you? My Twitter, personal Twitter is agd10man, but also would hope everybody's playing Destiny. Check it out, that's where most of my work is shown at this point. Excellent. Someone who might be playing Destiny is Scott Johnson. Besides that, what else have been going on with you? Well, I do like Destiny a lot and it has great UI, so well done. Yeah, I've got a lot going on as usual. If you want to keep up with my goings on, you can find it over at frogpants.com. In fact, if you're like, hey, I'd like to hear more gaming content. I've got three shows that are 100% gaming focused and you can find them all at frogpants.com slash podcast and for everything else I'm on Twitter as well. You can find me at Scott Johnson. You can find us live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Join us if you can. Accessibility week continues tomorrow. We're chatting with on this. Accessible programming language Quorum and Justin Robert Young will join us as well. Talk to you about that. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club. Hope you have enjoyed this program.