Hi Tom.
I agree completely, indeed this is part of the job I do for audiogames.net,
though one severe problem on both windows and mac is a technical one, since
there are many games, such as some stratogy games which would be as easily
accessible as smugglers, but which use graphical, rather than textual text
to represent their information, thus meaning it's not just a case of
labeling the immages and fixing navigation, but of entirely rewriting the
game. It's actually a real shame since if it weren't for this, something
like starcraft could potentially be very accessible simply through it's
text.
It's a shame that there isnt' some sort of easy ocr tool which overlays
screen reader readable text onto graphical text and lets the user move
around it and click on it with normal screen reader functions, since that
would make lots of games accessible.
I also agree about big companies being a waste of time as far as access
goes, but failing some sort of major economic change whereby companies were
required! to include access in their games (which wouldn't be possible
without a major altering in the structure of the world), I don't see
anything happening there. A company may produce something like sound voyager
occasionally as an experiment, but I don't see them as being more
commonplace than that.
On the plus side however, Indi games are very much the way to go, and I've
also noticed indi developers tend to be a much nicer bunch to work with
anyway, as well as there being more indi developers all the time. indeed, my
brother was saying yesterday that most serious gamers these days are rather
losing faith in sony, capcom etc since there games are becoming less
creative and more and more derivative as time goes onn, he even stated that
in tomb raider, resident evil, soul calibur and in fact street fighter
recent entries had been panned by fans for offering very little that was new
or interesting to play while upping the synamatic appeal and generic plots,
(apparently the recent time delay sequences in tomb raider have pissed off
lots of people). apparently these days, older games and indi games are
getting far more seriously played as compared to what the major companies
are offering.
So, maybe all those scumbags will go out of business :D.
#Seriously, this again however is a good thing, since if more gamers turn to
the independent devs, and more indi devs include access, access gets
promoted.
Beware the Grue!
dark.
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