Hi Dan.
While that's absolutely fine and a great creddit to your skills of
persistance and memorization, I'm afraid that as far as myself and
audiogames.net are officially concerned, games which require memorization of
a menue or unusual learning of in game sounds, beatemups included, are not
considdered accessible games. This isn't to say they aren't playable or that
people shouldn't try to play them, or that they can't be extremely good fun,
only that as per the guidelines of the site, a game is only "accessible" and
will only be included in the db or news when a totally blind person can play
it with approximately the same amount of effort as a sighted person, screen
readers or turning on of a compatibility mode not withstanding (provided
such a mode can be turned on without sighted assistance).
Afterall, theoretically a totally blind person could play absolutely any
game if they spent enough time memorizing every single in game object, how
long to hold the control in required directions etc, thus every single game
ever produced is "playable" it's just that to play them would require
ridiculous and unreasonable amounts of effort on the part of blind or vi
gamers, though obviously some games, because of their sounds or gameplay
structure are more playable than others.
However, when we say to mainstream companies we want more accessible games
on consoles, we mean "fully" accessible, no need for heavy reading of Faqs
to learn in game text, memorization of menue options or memorization of game
sounds beyond what a normally sighted gamer would do, and all in game
information just as available to a blind player as to a sighted one.
As I said, this certainly isn't to say that people shouldn't try to play
soul calibur, mk, streetfighter, blazblu or whatever, only that the games
can't really be considdered in the strictest sense "accessible"
Apart from obviously logical desire for true accessibility in games, the
other reason is that if the accessible gaming community starts promoting
games that require memorization and a lot of shenanigans to play, mainstream
companies will turn around and say "accessible games? ---- we already make
them, so bog off, no speaking menues for you!"
Something like this actually happened when I addressed Capcom Uk over low
vision access in platform games, their response was "well if you can play 2D
platformers, half of the levels of Mega man x 7 and 8 are accessible, so
we've already done what you want"
Of course, a game where I could play "half of the levels" is a pretty feeble
access solution really, ---- when I asked them what I did for the rest of
the game that I couldn't play their response was "get someone else to play
those bits" which was down right offensive!
So in short, I'm quite happy with people discussing how to play mainstream
games, posting recordings or whatever, but as far as officially promoting
the games as accessible is concerned, it's a no no, unless, like something
like sound voyager a totally blind gamer could play them absolutely from the
start as easily as a sighted gamer.
Hope this makes sense.
All the best,
Dark.
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