Folks, Having now read the plethora of posts, its again obvious why Audyssey is a good place for developers to hang out. Lotsa good information and ideas.
Here are some responses: 1. IGDA Thomas Weston, developer of Terraformers and co-founder of the Game Accessibility SIG, is taking a DVD full of accessible games and related stuff to GDC 2009. To my knowledge, he, Eleanor, and I are the only developers of blind accessible games who are members of GA SIG. Why couldnt Tom Ward, Jim, Liam, Che, and other developers join the IGDA, contribute their ideas to the GA SIG, and get their stuff on next years DVD? 2. Sighted Gamers find Purely Audio Games Boring If Michael Feirs own sighted fiancee cant get into audio only games, then there is a big clue there. I suspect that for a sighted gamer, not having eye candy is like having food without taste. 3. Getting Mainstream Companies to Make their Games Accessible Dark and I have had at least a positive response from one small European developer. I wrote a technical analysis of their user interface and Dark and I made suggestions as to how it could be made more accessible. They at least did not blow him off. Dark would have to respond as to whether they made the changes or to what extent he thinks it affected their later games. The point being that some smaller developers might be responsive to specific suggestions. Larger developers might be responsive via their own Modding features. In the Serious Games industry, Dooms been modded to teach firefighters how to work in burning buildings. Could someone ask a big company if they could make their modding capability such that it works with sound and can add the sound elements that would make a game accessible. BTW. That Doom exercise was done by Darks own university, Durham. 4. Market Size and Money The one segment of the blind community thats most likely to spend money on accessible games is parents of blind children. Note that children these days can be in their 20s or even 30s. Parents spend money on their kids. Some parents of blind kids are sighted and have decent incomes. Try the Yahoo Groups and similar venues. Weve seen posts where parents have asked where they can get accessible games for their kids. Obviously, this applies to free games too (Jim gets mentioned there.) 5. Publicity Why cant Audyssey developers write articles for AbleGamers, GameForward, GameCritics, The Accessible Friends Network, the IGDA GA SIG blog, and other media that are eager for accessibility material? 6. Final Words Having just surveyed the deaf and the motion-impaired gaming communities, it is clear that the blind-accessible gaming community is far more developed. There are more media that discuss blind issues. There are more organizations and institutions that publicize blind accessible games. All that being said, thanks for a lot of good information and insight. Now I gotta get back to coding. John Bannick www.7128.com --- 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].
