True enough, but I'm certain that if these mainstream game designers were to
find out where blind gamers congrigate and conduct some accessibility
surveys in those communities they would probably attract many more potential
customers. People who weren't gamers up until then but had the interest
might be encouraged to come forward with their ideas. I just happen to feel
that their lack of understanding is as much their own fault for not
bothering to find out as it is ours for not being able to enlighten them.
And again, we've been trying to enlighten them for years without much
success. So while I understand their concerns I don't have much sympathy for
them.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Ward" <thomasward1...@gmail.com>
To: "Gamers Discussion list" <gamers@audyssey.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 5:14 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Copywrite and abandonware
Hi Bryan,
Snip
The question was why accessibility to the blind was
such an abhorrent concept to mainstream game designers. I refuse to say
alien since
we've been trying to explain it to them for years and most refuse to
listen.
End snip
Well, as I have said so many times already most of it comes down to
numbers of potential end users and money. If a feature like accessibility
isn't going to sell millions of extra copies, and it costs them x to
produce that accessibility it isn't going to happen. It is simple supply
and demand unfortunately.
Another issue to consider is simply that accessibility is not taught in
college courses either. Anyone can pick up some programming credits at a
local community college, tech school, etc but that will generally consist
of programming theory and basic training in language x. None of that
training is hands on instruction on ways to make your applications
accessible to a blind user. In fact, this lack of understanding among
programmers about accessibility needs is why the Gnome foundation has
build accessibility directly into the core Gnome 2.x desktop. Apple has
also set about building accessibility features into the core Cocoa API for
Mac OS. The concept on Linux and Mac now is rather than putting
accessibility into the hands of the third-party developers that operating
system core APIs do what is necessary by default leving the third-party
developers to concern themselves with writing the application and let the
various access features built into the API handle the access needs for the
application by default.
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