Sorry but… how would blind people play this exactly? I’m genuinely curious.
Uh, the same way we all do. w to wield, W to wear, etc. etc.
o_o
That’s a joke.
An unfunny joke.
To be fair, a casual search of either footage or design choices for the blind was hard to get. I got a lot of blind lps and fluffy blogs instead.
And this video on how to make games the wallets of blind people more accessible.
There’s been a bigger push in the last three or five years to make games more accessible. I mean, if you think about it, just 10 or 12 years ago most games didn’t even have subtitles or colorblind modes. Now they’re making games specifically to be played with one hand, text adventures are being fully voiced, VR games being visual experienes that don’t require hand-based inputs, etc. It’s not the most rapidly progressing area, and has obvious difficulties, but it’s something.
Your remark that it’s about money is cynical. I admittedly didn’t watch the entire video, but in the few minutes I did I didn’t see anything but people genuinely trying to make games accessible to those with physical limitations. Even if it was driven by greed (it is an increase in potential audience, after all), it’s an effort to bring gaming to those that can’t experience it as things are now.
My brother only has one functional hand and I know that he’s always loved video games but struggled to be proficient at anything that requires both hands (95% of games). I don’t know what it’s like to live with such a limitation, but I know that if my life didn’t have video games in it, I’d lose my damn mind.
EDIT: I feel we’ve gotten off topic.
A screen reader reads off the contents of the screen a character at a time. It can either rapidly read each character in a pattern (usually left->right, top->bottom), or read it when prompted via a cursor command, i.e. the player moves a cursor around, and it reads the character each time it moves.
Why would anyone expect a game developed for free by a group of fans, a game in a relatively obscure genre of (classic, turn-based, ascii) roguelikes to be made accessible to people with disabilities when most of commercial games don’t do that ?
I mean, it would nice, and great but isn’t it a tiny, little bit kinda of… a completely unrealistic expectation ?
From what I’ve seen, Free and open source games tend to have a better track record in this regard than commercial titles, since anyone can alter them and there’s no time or money constraints. The situation could still be better though.
A little clarification, i was describing how a screen reader works, not anything we need to implement.
The reader software exists and is integrated with curses already.
All we have done to be accessible for people with vision impairments are a few tweaks to how we present a few pieces of data, i.e. screen readers have trouble with bar graph outputs.
Why would anyone expect a game developed for free by a group of fans, a game in a relatively obscure genre of (classic, turn-based, ascii) roguelikes to be made accessible to people with disabilities when most of commercial games don’t do that ?
You might as well ask why we make it at all. In my experience, open source contributors are far more ready to do things right instead of good enough.
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