Hi Ari, It's best to first understand that Second Life isn't a game, at least according to the majority of the academics working in the field of game studies/ludology. Second Life is a 3D environment which allows for many things, and games are being played within this environment (mostly virtual sex games[1], but also other types of games). There is also Teen Second Life, which includes several games. To understand (Teen) Second Life, please first read the Frequently Asked Questions through the following links
http://secondlife.com/whatis/faq.php (Second Life) http://teen.secondlife.com/whatis (Teen Second Life) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_life (Wikipedia) As you can see after reading these links, most of the content of Second Life is user-generated. This means that people are free to constantly create and add inaccessible stuff to Second Life. Second Life itsself (the application) was not built with accessibility features. Still there are several people with disabilities (mostly physical and auditory disabilities) who have no problem with Second Life. But for people with visual disabilities Second Life is mostly, if not completely, inaccessible. I heard some blind folks were going to give it a go, but I never really heard the result of that experiment. Anyone here perhaps? There has been some discussion concerning the accessibility of Second Life for gamers with disabilities. For an example, see this article and message board: http://www.it-analysis.com/blogs/Abrahams_Accessibility/2006/11/second_life_class_action.html?mode=full&hilite=13287#CM13287 The most noticable contribution came from Joshua Linden of Linden Labs, who created Second Life: *quote* Hey there - I'm Joshua Linden from Linden Lab, one of the folks who help create the Second Life platform. (The world, of course, is created by the residents.) We are deeply committed to making Second Life usable by everyone. A large number of Second Life residents have "First Life" disabilities and enjoy the freedoms that a virtual world offers - from communication to movement. However, we're still a very small company and have limited development resources, so we have not been able to do everything we want to - yet! That includes standard interfaces for accessibility tools. We have recently done a substantial rework of our keyboard focus code to make things more predictable. As a benefit that was clearly in mind at the time, this will make it easier to eventually hook up focus-based screen readers (which typically work by interrogating the active application for changes in the displayed text) and support alternative input technologies. This is a much longer term project than simply saying "we support the W3C WAI" since accessibility hooks are built into many Web browsers already, whereas the Second Life viewer is a stand-alone application. (Long term, one could hope that content-creators in-world can tag their creations in such a way as to be more accessible once the viewer is fully accessible!) Speaking of opening up, today (8 Jan 2007) we announced that the Second Life viewer source code is available under an open source license. See http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/01/08/embracing-the-inevitable/ for the announcement and links. We strongly encourage other developers to take on projects such as interfacing the Second Life viewer to work with alternative input and output mechanisms such as screen readers. Don't just wait for us to do it! *quote end* Well, as far as I know, not a lot has changed concerning the accessibility of Second Life after it got OpenSource. A Google search on "accessibility second life" did bring up the following interesting forum thread: https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/educators/2006-August/001785.html Hope this answers your question, Ari? Greets, Richard http://www.audiogames.net [1] I don't know if the majority of the academics working in the field of game studies/ludology agree with this statement ;) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ari" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 2:26 PM Subject: [Audyssey] Battrick and JFW, and what about Second Life? > Hi all, > I've just upgraded my JFW, but I see something funny's going on when I go > into Battrick. With JFW 6, it seems fine, all the links are there, but > when I try it with JFW 8, there are only the main links, global, > community, etc, why is this and how on earth do I get the other links > using JFW 8? > My other question is, I've been reading about this game Second Life, is it > accessible for us, has anyone ever tried to play this? > Thanks > Ari > _______________________________________________ > Gamers mailing list .. [email protected] > To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can > visit > http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make > any subscription changes via the web. _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. [email protected] To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
