Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
The engine is cocos2DX.
It's not a case of choosing the wrong engine, or only looking at a subset of engines, or anything like that. There isn't any decent engine that is compatible with screenreaders, unless you count HTML wrappers. Unity, Unreal, Cocos, Corona, GameMaker, Unreal, take your pick, they're all a black hole for screenreaders.
If it was fixed, if engines output their UI in a way that screenreaders could actually see, the implications would be pretty staggering. For many games the bulk of accessibility is making sure that elements are sensibly labelled, which developers do anyway, so you would see many many many more games that are accidentally mostly accessible, with just optimisation needed rather than throwing everything in the bin and starting from scratch.
Lots of people have been asking over a very long period of time for engine developers to fix their screenreader incompatibility, but to put it bluntly, they aren't interest ed. Or more accurately, don't see it as enough of a priority. 'sounds great, but, you know, we are very busy, we do have lots of important things that we need to work on' 'we'd love to but we have a big new releaes coming up and there's no way we can think about other things' 'you're more than welcome to do the work yourself then we'll see what we can do about integrating it'
That last one is the approach that the trese brothers have been taking, trying to do the engine developers' job for them. But it's low level stuff, not really what game developers do normally, and they don't have the time or money. They shouldn't need to spend time and money on doing it either.
The reason you see any accessible games at all is due to people developing natively, i.e. without using any engine. Unless you're doing that, all of the Apple guidelines in the world are of no use to you.
So natively means coding from scratch for each platform you want to develop on, and also having to spent a great deal of time building things from scratch that engines already do for you. That's just not a reasonable ask for any developer who wants to launch on more than one platform or has anything vaguely complex in their game.
So please please be patient with developers. The Trese brothers have done nothing wrong here, they've gone over and above to try to rewrite the engine to support screenreaders, but it's beyond their capacity and not something they should have to do anyway.
It's engines that you need to direct your frustrations towards. If a developer says they can't make a game due to technical/financial constraints, ask them if it's due to engine incompatibility. Then ask them to make a feature request from the engine developers. Then contact the engine developers yourself too, let them know that it is important and why.
I work across all diff erent areas of accessibility for all kinds of impairment, and in my humble opinion engine screenreader incompatibility is easily the biggest issue in game accessibility, it's pretty scandalous.
It is so frustrating to see game developers who want to make their games screenreader accessible being blocked from doing so, and so frustrating to see relationships between gamers and developers mistakenly harmed as a result.
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