Who Knows the News

Unscramble the news headline! Both desktop and mobile browser friendly, and designed to be highly accessible. También jugable en español.

Instructions

Why are you reading the instructions? Just start playing the game! (There's an interactive tutorial)

After picking a topic, the game randomly selects an article from a Google News RSS feed. Then, it's up to your powers of contextual deduction and an unscrambling mind to restore the original headline. As a winning bonus, you get the pleasure of visiting the original article where the headline came from (if you want to, of course).

Once the game is started, you can use any method to unscramble the headline by swapping two characters at a time:

1. Type the two letters in a row you want to swap on your keyboard
2. Press the two letters you want to swap in the virtual keyboard onscreen
3. Tap letters in the headline itself
4. Use your arrow keys and [enter] to select and then commit to a swap.

The first letter you select is your "mid swap" character, and is displayed on the keyboard with a blue highlight, as well as in the headline itself via underlines for each matching character. These underlines show all the letters that are about to be swapped with your next selection. Type the same character twice to cancel a swap.

The headlines coming from Google News RSS feed only undergo filtering for ease of playing the game and to prevent repeat plays. This game in no way shape or form suggests or claims that headlines and articles chosen are an optimal representation of current news, good sources, or anything of the likes. No filtering is done to favor or exclude any specific publishers.

Accessibility

Great effort was put into the accessibility of this game:

• You can play entirely with a keyboard without any mouse inputs (press "backspace" to exit a page, arrow keys to change selections, and enter to confirm)
  
• Multiple ways to play: The primary game screen can be played many different ways (see instructions above) - whichever way you find intuitive, go for it! You can even mix and match how you select your "mid swap" character from your final swapping character.
• Responsive design means that it works both for desktop and mobile web, adjusting layouts for screen sizes.
• Audio feedback for button presses and menu actions also help indicate interactive components of the game. 
• Sound may be disabled (top right).
• Special care was made to ensure everything has sufficient contrast and not relying on colors alone.
• Multiple languages: Both English and Spanish are currently supported (note: the actual headlines of the tutorial section still need to be translated to fitting Spanish phrases, and currently there is an issue with one font displaying characters with accent marks; both will be fixed later)
• Finally, great and user testing went into make sure the onboarding tutorial works well, while providing you options to solve a puzzle (at the cost of a lower score by revealing characters using "Give hint").

Privacy

The game will save a cookie to your browser in order to function. This is used to save the state of e.g. which puzzles you've solved already (so you don't get repeats), what state of the tutorial you are in, and other settings like whether you have sound enabled. No third party cookies or tracking is done. In the future, an anonymous identifier may be saved to enable features like High Scores and optionally choosing to share your own score. 

Created for the 2021 Charity Firejam.

Given the theme of "everything changes", what changes more often than the news? In fact, even the logo itself means everything changes: ∀ is the mathematical symbol for "All", or everything in a set, while ∆ (delta) is typically used in physics and math to represent change.

Made by Patrick W. Crawford, credit to TheKindKitten for helping with early playtesting. More credits built into the game itself.