Re: Blind Games - The Next Battleground in Accessibility!
I liked the article, but it has one rather significant factual error that I noticed. It claims that Pokémon has yet to stray even close to accessibility. This is absolutely not the case.
If by "accessible" we mean that a blind or low-vision player can make good on the majority of the game and enjoy success, at least to some extent, then it's actually pretty bloody high on the list. Put it this way: I have beaten at least one game in each generation of the series on handheld systems since its creation (blue and yellow from generation 1, silver and crystal from generation 2, sapphire, emerald and leaf green from generation 3, platinum from generation 4 and now I'm very near finishing Black 2 from generation 5). The earlier generations did require knowing a lot, or looking things up, and occasionally getting help, but what do you think blind people do when they don't have talking menus and things? You can't say a game is utterly inaccessible just because someone might want a little info on exactly how a menu is laid out. Furthermore, the Nintendo 64 Stadium games are both completely accessible. Hell, those games even come with an announcer who will say what's happening in the fight; Stadium 2 is much better, but yeah. I mean, maybe the mini-games aren't accessible, but they are absolutely not required for the main game experience and aren't going to hurt you if you can't do them. Admittedly, the Gamecube pokemon games are, to my knowledge, not accessible except perhaps once battle starts, but those are but a few in a long list of Pokémon games that are, by and large, quite accessible. If you really think you're missing a lot because you can't read every dialogue box, either go read a walkthrough or accept that a game designed for eleven-year-olds probably isn't going to have the most incredible storyline. For that matter, you can't see a lot of the on-screen text in other supposedly accessible mainstream games either, yet they're still listed. It just bugs me when a point is attempted with nonfactual information.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=144098#p144098
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