Jason, Developers don't make their games blind-accessible because:
1. They don't think about it. 2. They work for business people who want to maximize (or even achieve) profit. I've been coding user interfaces, including games, professionally for 30 years. It's rare to get any direction at all from management. Usually they just want to tweak button colors or locations at the end of a project. And I know lots of programmers. Absolutely zero of whom, with the exception of this and a couple of other related forums, are even aware of accessibility issues. Also. Making a program accessible adds roughly 20% to its time and cost. Since most projects are late, and most game companies are not even profitable, ... well, you get my drift. That being said, some good folks over at the IGDA Game Accessibilty SIG are trying to address at least problem 1. Mark Barlet at ablegamers.com is also doing some good industry-bugging. And there are some good folks on this forum: Thomas, Jim, Liam, Che, etc. come to mind, who are building good stuff. BTW. Some current research we're doing suggests that there are probably more blind-accessible games than motion-impaired accessible, or deaf accessible, or cognitively-impaired accessible games. I like Dark's approach. If a game could be made blind-accessible, and the developer company is small enough to give a hoot, ask them for changes. Which is not to say you don't have a legitimate beef. It truly sucks to be locked out of some otherwise good stuff. John Bannick Chief Technology Officer 7-128 Software --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
