As a sighted developer to a blind consumer, asking one of you who knows how to write code to join the team would probably not have worked.
The problem is that making a visual game blind accessible isn't just hard, it's really, really, really hard, and sometimes outright impossible. A good example of outright impossible is Minecraft; sure, you could probably build something that is sorta a little like Minecraft for the blind, but it wouldn't be "accessible Minecraft". It would be "a completely different game that's accessible". I've had a lot of trouble getting this across to the blind community, in particular to those who have been blind from birth. There's just no analog for vision, there's no generic mechanism to convert vision to text. There are certain types of visual game, certain types of visual interfaces, for which there just isn't any way to generate blind accessible data that people can understand. Minecraft is one of those games. The good news is that flight simulators are a lot easier than Minecraft: instead of impossible, they're just really hard. When flying, there's a concept known as 'flying on instruments', which basically means you can only use the instrument readouts from the dashboard, unless you're landing. For 'flying on instruments' mode, I could see some sort of setup where a reader could read out the instruments one at a time. For small aircraft, that would probably only be about a dozen or so instruments, so you could probably get a feel for what the aircraft is doing in 30 seconds once you got good at it. That's good enough for everything except takeoff and landing. For blind accessible takeoff and landing, you'd probably need a 'default on' autopilot for every aircraft that can handle it for you. I'd expect moderately good blind players to be able to taxi and take off once they get the hang of it, but only the most advanced would be able to land safely. Both takeoff and landing happen on the order of seconds, and keeping up with the instrument readouts fast enough is going to be really hard. But as I mentioned above, a game like this isn't flight simulator anymore - it's "flight simulator in instruments only mode with assisted taxi, takeoff, and landing", and that's a different game than what Microsoft probably wants to build. Adding blind developers isn't going to help, because making it accessible at that level means building a different game from what flight simulator already is. -dentin Alter Aeon MUD http://www.alteraeon.com On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 8:55 AM Ron Kolesar <[email protected]> wrote: > > L say, that they should have gotten our input when they started the project. > > From one blind consumer to another, it would have been easier to ask for one > of us who knows how to write code to join the team for accessibility, instead > of plugging in accessibility after the program has been written. > > Take a look at FSX? > > Many thanks for the reply. > > Ron > > > > From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Joshua > Tubbs > Sent: Friday, April 2, 2021 8:46 > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [blind-gamers] A question for my fellow BVI Pilots. > > > > Ron, when they say accessibility has been written into FS2020, they don't > mean blind accessibility, at least for now. > > There's accessibility for other disabilities, and pretty much most common > disabilities it's way easier to implement accessibility features. > > > > When you talk about blind accessibility however it's entirely different. > > > > Jorg goes on and on about how they want to make it accessible for everyone. > They want feedback, however blind accessibility would require making drastic > changes that I guess just aren't possible right now. I have also emailed > them. It gets even more complicated when you have two companies. Microsoft > Handles marketing, licensing, etc, while Asobo handles the code and features. > Perhaps it might be a team effort across the two companies in regard to > coding but that's how they're doing things. > > > > On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 11:19 PM Ron Kolesar <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Well, I was disappointed with FS 2020 not being accessible for us. > Even though I have been e-mailing back and forth with a member of the fs 2020 > team. > They've been advertising that there's accessibility written into the product > and trust me when I say there sadly isn't. > Just been having to many problems with the older fsx program. > Even though I purchased it from steam, only because sadly my dvd ran out and > wouldn't allow me to use them any more. > Like yourself, I too appreciate that latest and up to date and as close to > the real world. > So, I'm switching over to p3d 5. > Hope that will answer your question. > I guess from your advice, I'll stay with Active Sky. > Many thanks for the advice and please write to me off list at: > [email protected] > We BVI Pilots need to stick together. > Ron U.S. Ham Radio Station KR3DOG -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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