Re: developers and empty promises
I see this whole debate in three or four flavors.
1. Developers who want to include the visually impaired among their customers and make every effort to make their products accessible to them. The accessibility components of the product may or may not be in place when the product is launched, but if the developer is serious about their commitments, they eventually will be, all it takes is some patience.
2. Developers who's products aren't accessible to the visually impaired, but the developer is willing to consider making their products accessible in future releases. Again some patience is needed, time will tell just how serious the developer is in including us in their product designs. Some developers will follow through, some won't. The best way to deal with these is to vote with your wallet by supporting those developers that are willing to add accessibility into their product designs, and boycott those who won't.
3. Developers who simply r efuse to consider making any changes at all or give any consideration to making their products accessible. While patience won't resolve this situation, neither will verbally abusing the developer, that will just make them more determined to ignore us. The best way to deal with this type of developer is to boycott them. Besides the problems the clients frequently cause, it's one reason why I won't consider using Steam. Why should I reward Valve's very wrong attitude towards the visually impaired community by patronizing their service?
4. And then there are the developers that promise great and wonderful things in the works, and then start ignoring us while at the same time taking our money for preorders that will never matterialise. Breakerbox Studios and their Steam Punk Neverland and Watch Tower Chronicles is a perfect example. He came on the forums promising all kinds of wonderful things and even said that for the low price of $25 you could reserve your c opies of both games. That was two years ago. Has anyone who paid the $25 ever received their games? They also said they had playable demos of their games for us to try before buying, yet at this time all of the playable demos that did exist are no longer downloadable and attempts to get a response from them regarding this have gone unanswered.
The people complaining that code 7 isn't accessible on launch need to open their ear and listen for a change. There are only two people behind the Code 7 project and two people can only do so much. They aren't a Valve or an Electronic Arts with hundreds of coders available to do the work. It's just the two of them. Grow up and cut them some slack and be thankful that they are working on making the game accessible. As they have said, accessibility wasn't in the original tgame design plans. They could just as easily have ignored us and Code 7 would be for sighted players only.
I for one am very thankful that I hav e Code 7 to look forward to and intend to support these developers by buying the game when the accessible version is released.
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