Hi Shaun and all: In an ideal world games and other products would be accessible to everyone, but the fact of the matter is universal accessibility is almost impossible to achieve. At least not without developing a product with the most common denominator in mind, and then the product may suffer as a result of attempting to offer accessibility to too many different types of people with vastly different needs.
Let's just say for instance I wanted to write a card game that was accessible to everyone blind, sighted, deaf, whatever. Well, to begin with I'd probably want to use straight text rather than pictures of cards since the blind can read the text labels with their screen readers and a sighted person can read it too. Problem is that resolves accessibility but robs the sighted player of seeing the cards which makes it less interesting to them. We can't rely on Sapi output alone as Jim Kitchen does for his games because that assumes the player can hear the speech output, and there needs to be some method of displaying the cards in braille on braille displays since we assume deaf-blind players will play as well. The most simple solution is, as I have said before, a simple text based game which is accessible but lacks anything else to recommend it over other such games. For a sighted player Microsoft's card games, which are free and come with Windows, would be of more interest just because they can see all the cards rather than a white screen with black text. A blind user might like playing the Microsoft games that come with Windows 7 because they are accessible with Jaws and Window-Eyes, and can be played over the Internet with other people as well. Jim Kitchen's card games are specialized for the blind but are in many ways the best option for a blind player because the gamer can choose from a list of Sapi voices, be able to hear various sounds, and they are by far more entertaining than just a straight up text based game. So while a text based card game might be ideal for access it doesn't necessarily address the wants or needs of any particular group so to achieve universal accessibility we have to develop something far more complex to address those wants/needs. In an ideal world what we need is a graphical card game that can output alternatively through Sapi or via braille, and have sounds, music, and so on. That's not impossible, but costs more in time and energy to develop, and we are just talking a simple card game. What about something more complicated like Doom III which is a highly complex game, with thousands of lines of code, and would need drastic changes to be made into a universally accessible product? My point being it is all well and good to sit here and say we want universal accessibility but the time and expense of doing so will insure it never happens in this life time. Some times it can't be done without making the product inferior to the original design and everybody loses out in the end. Besides I don't think we are counterproductive by developing specialized products for ourselves. the reason is that in games the sighted already have unlimited choices, and we do not. We could help develop games for other specialized markets, but there are niche markets out there for one-handed games, one-switch games, and the deaf already have access to a lot of mainstream games so we aren't necessarily cutting them out by developing specialty games for the blind since those groups already have sources for games not available to us. Cheers! On 12/6/13, shaun everiss <[email protected]> wrote: > Well I think access should be all and not just for sertain dissabilities. > Blind products should be called blind products. > Yeah I know thats really bad mouthing the blind > but accessable implies total access to everyone. > One issue with some of this is to make stuff > accessable for say the blind because say graphics > are not something we use we get rid of them and > then its inaccessable to the sighted. > I once decided to get some equipment that was > large print or at least invest in some and was > told by a friend that because it was for the blind, it was not nice. > I was quite mad at the guy but then I started wandering. > Is it because we don't see we disreguard what > others think of how our stuff looks? > If we are going to be fully accessable to all > that means being concidderate of all. > By making stuff accessable to us are we in > fact doing what the sighted do to us by making > their stuff unusable because of graphics and other things. > I know tech is getting closer but I do wander how > long it will be before we will seriously need to > think of dumping all blindness technology in favor of universal access. > I am not saying its all bad ofcause, heck I'd > like to use blind tech all the time but by doing > it I do wander if I am excluding myself from > normal life, and after all we are supposed to be trying to have that. > So I wander if we are being counterproductive. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. 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