Re: Message to the audio games community
Hi,
I thought I should share some information that might be useful to this conversation.
In the United States, we have a law called the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA). My understanding is that it actually covers things like video games, gaming consoles, and distribution. You will sometimes see this law referred to as CVAA.
Yesterday marked Global Accessibility Awareness Day and one of the events that went on was something called ID24 (Inclusive Design 24.) Basically, it consisted of 24 1-hour presentations on accessibility topics. Three of the presentations focused on accessibility of gaming. One talked about accessibility features being added to XBox-1. Another presentation covered some accessibility work done on Uncharted 4. The last was a presentation about the general topic of the accessibility of gaming. One of the comments is that accessibility of video games is still in its early sta ges, but it is improving.
There are also evidently some groups like Able Gamers that have done some work with various companies in the video gaming market and they have evidently made some progress.
What we might really need to do is try to develop some connections with Valve--either working through a group like Able Gamers which probably already has some connections in the gaming market or find others with connections to Valve that might be able to talk with them about the issue.
If you think about the success we have seen with Skull Girls, that is because someone from our ommunity managed to make a good connection with a developer for the game. This provided us with an opportunity to engage in a dialog that has made this work out. We probably need to try to duplicate the same thing with Valve if we want to improve the accessibility of Steam.
I suspect with CVAA either Valve is or will be improving the accessibility of Steam. But one of the most difficult pa rts of making any application accessible is trying to figure out what you need to do that might help the users. If we make those connections, we can provide them with feedback on such things as what parts of Steam might need to be fixed first and what things give us the most trouble.
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