Feeling a bit hype.
So while I was doing my work stream yesterday, I was waiting for tests to run and playing around with the website version of the game. Right now, there's a really annoying feature that whenever you type a command that has a long response, the response just shoots up towards the top, so you're stuck reading the bottom. If you want to read the entire response, you have to scroll all the way back up.
In my high thoughts, I was like "yo, can't I just scroll back up for the user using JavaScript?". I had some trouble getting it to work on stream for a few different reasons, but it turns out the answer is "yes!" The big thing I was overlooking on stream yesterday was that when the header is shown, I need to adjust where I scroll to. So once I fixed that, it worked great!
The next thing I wanted to do was to hide the command prompt when this happens and re show it when you get to the bottom. This took a bit more playing around and I had it working with various dynamic event listeners, and it was good!
But then I started wandering off on a few other easy things. For example, I was considering setting up some placeholder text in the command prompt using the placeholder attribute of the input element. However, the first article I found on that was essentially a long article being like "please don't do this", and one of the reasons why was due to accessibility!
I think the case is a bit over-stated, and there's way to maintain the accessibility, the complaint in that regard was about one particular anti-pattern. But that got me thinking about accessibility so I decided to download a screen reader and see how it works with the game!
The good news on that is: not bad! I spent most of my time trying to understand how to use the screen reader program, but once I did, I had a workable, though admittedly clunky way to play the game with a screen reader... that broke due to my new change hiding the prompt.
So I undid the change hiding the prompt, but kept the scrolling, because that is the best of both. Writing this up I realize that I now likely have some other code I can remove, but I'll get to that later.
Either way, it's making me excited for other changes to improve the website experience. There's a handful I think I can do pretty quickly, so I will.
