Category: Accessible Games
I've had this thought for a long time, since I discovered the first audio games many years
ago.
Like me, I think other gamers back then and still now have a lot to say about mainstream
games being accessible for us. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think very few are.
My question is, while it would be great if accessibility was included in many more games if
not all so that we could play them with our sighted friends without a disadvantage, why is
it that our audio games barely have any graphics? I think that while we are being
excluded from the games everyone plays, we are doing the same thing and excluding our
sighted friends from playing our games with us. I think it would be really cool if that could
be done.
Yes, there's the fact that *usually* these sighted people can hear, and so they could play
our games if they for a moment decided to give up the need to look at the screen and
listen to the sounds, but lets be honest here, very few people are willing to do that, while
we don't have a choice to look at the screen.
My point is, if both accessible and audio game developers could make an effort to make
their games accessible for all, no one would be left out, both sighted and blind.
I do feel left out when people talk about, or play a game I can't play, just as I feel left out
when I'm the only one who is able to play this audio game and those people obviously
have never heard of it.
So, we are excluding ourselves just like they are excluding us.
This is my thought, what is yours?
Idealistically speaking, you're right. The difference is that the only reason I've
ever found that sighted people would want to play our games is because our
games don't have graphics. That interests them. The game play sucks. Hell,
sighted people get games we celebrate for free on their computers. I mean, we
have to search for accessible chess games, or solitaire games, but those come
free on almost any device. Face it, audio games, at least when compared to
mainstream games, simply suck.
There's more to it than you're acknowledging, I think.
First of all, mainstream games don't feel they owe us blind would-be players anything. The vast, vast majority of their target demographic is sighted, and does not need accessibility features. They're not going to spend extra time and money making something accessible because a few players might enjoy it. A few indy games (like Skullgirls, for instance, which I have personally never played but have heard mentioned many times) have been taken up and made accessible in some way. A few other games, such as many old fighting games, are mostly accessible because sounds have been made different enough that we have a pretty good idea of what's happening. It's an unintentional consequence, rather than a deliberate way to make those games accessible to us. In any case, it'd be nice if more games were accessible, but it's a pipe dream. You'd have to convince larger game developers that making their games accessible is worth their time and money and effort.
Now, as regards graphics in audio games, there are two notable issues:
1. Many people who make audio games are blind themselves. A blind person putting graphics into an audio game faces one hell of a lot of challenges, and again, since most of the demographic neither wants nor needs detailed graphics, it's a lot of hard work for very little return. And frankly, the audio games community is bitchy enough already that I don't really blame developers for not bending over backward on this.
2. Sighted people can play games without graphics. They just don't want to. We, on the other hand, cannot play games without some sort of sound or other accessible feature. That's a functionally large difference. I feel like you've oversimplified your point in order to make it seem like sighted and blind gamers are two separate sides of the same coin, fairly equal in their accessibility challenges for different reasons. They aren't. A sighted player who really wants to try can pick up an audio side-scroller and figure it out. A blind player without sighted help is never, ever going to be able to play World of Warcraft.
They're not working from the same base, in other words, and that matters, at least a little.
Cody and Greg have said it all I think. As a mainstream gamer, I am constantly underwhelmed by the audio games I've played. Not that I've played a ton of them, but every so often I try. Games like Papa Sangre and A Blind Legend seem to be trying a bit, and from an audio perspective their sound quality is actually pretty good. But they're still bare bones at most. There are a lot of mainstream games which could, theoretically be made accessible, or at least more accessible. Games with Quicktime Events which are usually more interactive stories, could have their button prompts telegraphed via audio quite easily for instance. But as Greg said, the market just isn't out there enough to make it prophetable. Sony is at least headed in the right direction, making much of their concole accessible via invert colors, zoom and text-to speech. The latter is not fully implimented, but with every major update they're ading more functionality to the point that now even their built-in web browser is getting more accessible. Granted one still needs some rudimentary sight to use it, but it will read stuff under the mouse pointer similaar to any TTS sofware on a PC or mac. if they can create their own text to speech cursor, and impliment that cursor in games to read blocks of text, similar to how voiceover and narator do, we'll see a big leep forward.