Jeremy Hartley wrote an excellent post on the way that sighted people
view blind gamers and what blind gamers need to do to interact with game
developers.
I know that I, as a sighted person, have learned a great deal from the
people on this forum. I joined this forum and others to improve the
games we produce and to find out what information is needed to improve
access to games. That is the reason we, working with Dark, put together
the information about how to work with the game development community
found on www.blindcomputergames.com. I have tried to be an advocate in
the accessibility community for changes in software that improve blind
access.
Unfair as it may seem, most sighted people will see spelling,
punctuation and grammatical errors as a sign of ignorance. I do
understand that without visual reinforcement it is more difficult to
remember the spelling of words. That prompted me to develop our Sounds
Like game that uses a sound-alike word in a sentence to help reinforce
the difference between words like (pair-two) and (pear-fruit). Jeremy
says accurately that "in order to be taken seriously by the sighted
world, we need to show that we know what we are talking about, enough to
capture their interest". Unfortunately that includes being careful in
communication with sighted people to spell check and be sure the
sentences say specifically what you mean.
We here at 7-128 Software try to make our games accessible, but most
game developers know nothing about accessibility and, unless they have
family, friends or an interest in the blind community, don't even
realize that people who are blind play computer games. I did a session
about what is needed to make a website or game application accessible to
blind gamers at an unconference in Boston early this fall. The majority
of the attendees knew nothing about accessibility and were surprised
that it was possible to make games accessible. So, expect that you are
dealing with people who know nothing about your capabilities and what
improvements in their games would make it accessible for you.
That being said, I do see progress happening. And we will be looking at
what has happened over the last year as we update our top 25 websites
for gamers who are blind. I would value any suggestions as to websites
that are not in our top 25 that deserve consideration.
Have a great holiday season.
Eleanor Robinson
7-128 Software
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