Hi Tom.
Your statement about small developers is certainly true as I've said before,
indi devs tend to be on average very nice to deal with, ---- though whether
the fat cat coorporations such as Sony, Nintendo, Capcom, square, namco etc
will take any notice whatsoever is quite another question.
The problem with small restaurants however is that access costs money they
don't have and if they are told "well you can get a braille menu printed for
500 pounds" they're just not going to do it since they don't have that sort
of investment.
This is actually where information technology and some of the principles
employed in game access would have a very good application in other areas,
since for all the time and resources one fact is that it's far easier to
provide an accessible alternative of something online than it is off it.
For example, you know I am a major fan of the sight Chronicles of Arborell
with their gamebooks, novellas, mythology etc. Back in 2007 when i first
discovered arborell the only inaccessible part of the site was the timeline,
since the gm had created this entirely as a graphical flow diagram which was
utterly unreadable, (even the text of dates etc was part of the over all
image).
It however wasn't so difficult for him to create a list version instead,
after all he already had the information on his computer, it was just a
matter of copying it into another format and writing it as a list rather
than the fancy image thingy he'd done which no doubt looks much nicer for
sighted visitors but is of no use to the lusiently disadvantaged.
This cost him nothing but a little time, where as had the Arborell
collection been physical books and had there been a need to provide a
similar timeline in braille, goodness knows what the cost might be, ----
heck, I remember the trouble of having such things produced back when I was
doing maths and history at school.
I actually do wonder if there would be mileage in setting up a charity or
small business for precisely this purpose, say charging something like 5 usd
per A4 page to produce an accessible html version of something like a menue,
an events schedule, a time table etc.
Heck, even for 100 pages this would still work out a fraction of the cost of
something in braille, and would also have the advantage of being far more
easily alterable over time just as a print menu would be, after all even
when I've been in places like the restaurant chain Tgi Fridays which does!
have a braille menue, it doesn't show any of their offers or specials or
even their most recently added dishes.
Myself, I actually see this inequity in production cost being another major
factor in Braille falling out of use in the future, since while it is true
that currently the Rnib and similar organizations don't know computer exist,
that is likely to change in 10, 20, 30 years when generations who have grown
up with computer use get to be 50 plus and start losing their vision, ----
heck the lady I did my guide dog training with was a programmer in her early
40's who'd lost most of her vision recently (of course I told her about
audiogames.net and accessible computer games, and that Jaws wasn't the only
choice when it came to screen readers).
Beware the Grue!
Dark.
---
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