When Josh Wardle released Wordle in October 2021, not many people could have predicted what kind of internet phenomenon it would become. In just a few weeks, the game spread across the globe, and millions of players around the world have played the daily word game and shared their results with friends. With acquisitions being so common in gaming recently, it did not take long before Wordle was scooped up by The New York Times. Though this has some players worried about the future of the addictive game, many see it as a sign that it will likely become a staple among word-based games much like crosswords and word search puzzles.
As many gamers enjoy Wordle and stretch their vocabulary to try and figure out the daily answers, it may be worthwhile to bear in mind that a core aspect of the game is rather inconvenient to some people. While gaming moves towards making the platform more inclusive, it is important to note the unexpected factors that need to be taken into consideration.
Wordle Encourages Players to Share Their Answers
The mechanics of Wordle are relatively simple. Players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. Along the way, players are given some help: With each guess, letters that are contained in the correct word are colored yellow, and letters that are contained in the correct word and are in the correct position are colored green. Letters that do not appear in the correct word are colored gray. Each day, players around the world try to guess the correct five-letter word, and the next day, the word changes.
Much of the game’s popularity can be attributed to the fact that players often take to Twitter to share their results to brag about how quickly they figured the correct word out and challenge their friends to do better. To prevent players from spoiling the game for others, when players share their game online, they can post gray, yellow, and green emoji blocks that represent how one's playing board looked at the end of the game. Hence, players can illustrate how long it took to them to guess the word, and what strategies they used without spoiling anything for players who have yet to try the day's game. It is a simple but effective solution, but it does bring a few problems.
Emojis Are Not Always Convenient
Many players may not think twice about the fact that Wordle uses emojis when sharing results, but they can be unpleasant for people with seeing impairments who make use of text-to-speech applications and screen readers when browsing social media. When coming across posts sharing Wordle results, such users only hear "green square gray square yellow square" and other similarly meaningless strings of words. This can make people with seeing impairments feel out of the loop on a trend that everybody else gets to enjoy.
A very simple solution for this is to, instead of posting emojis, post a screenshot with some text below instead. Alternatively, players can use a browser app called Wordle Accessibility, found at wa11y.co, which converts Wordle results into a string of useful text. For example, if a player has the correct fourth letter in the first line, the app will write "Line 1: 4th perfect."
In a few years, gaming has come a long way in terms of accessibility and through an increasing range of accessibility options, more gamers than ever are getting to experience the joys of gaming. Wordle is an interesting game because it tests gamers mentally, and it features a social aspect too. Inadvertently, some players have been left out of the social portion of the game, but it takes a simple fix to change this.
Wordle is available now on all browsers.