Re: Blind Games - The Next Battleground in Accessibility!
Just a few things to note:
1. If you're playing a handheld pokemon game, use headphones, since you'll get more exclusive feedback that way. Things are easier to hear, though headphones are not at all utterly necessary in older games. In the newer ones, where music has more bass, bumping walls is sometimes hard to hear, but even this is only a once-or-twice-in-the-game thing.
2. Look up a "let's play" of a pokemon game, particularly one that's narrated by someone, and you will have a person telling you what's happening, even if they're interjecting their own comments or being silly in the mix. For instance, you might hear someone say, "Oh, I freaking hate Magicarp. Why do I have to keep fighting stupid Magicarp?" so you know that the pokemon ry you're hearing likely belongs to Magicarp. If you then hear him say, "Okay, Flaffy, ThunderPunch it!" and then you hear some vaguely electric-sounding thing, you now know what Thunderpunch sounds like. And yes, some people do say and do stuff like this, though not all do. Honestly, it took me about ten minutes to get used to pokemon enough to level for my brother and explore a bit. He even got mad because I found a way past a part in Pokémon Blue that had been eluding him. I just went somewhere he hadn't because I hugged a wall.
3. I do agree that sometimes, fighting games can be horribly imprecise about voices and absolute positioning. I will, however, say, that I got quite good at MK Deception for the PS2, without headphones, and without exact stereo panning. I'm no pro, but I can probably hold my own against anyone but a raw expert. I quickly learned whether certain fireballs shot high or low, whether a popup would juggle or just knock back (you can usually tell by the way the victim bounces), all that jazz. I do find it annoying that, say, Li-Mei and Jade have the same voice, but usually it takes maybe a second or two in order to figure out which is which.
4. I'm not saying issues don't exist. I'm not saying games are a hundred percent accessible because they certainly aren't. At worst I'm suggesting that some of the hurdles you suggest perhaps are personal rather than global. And a couple of them, such as exact stereo panning in a fighting game, are probably not necessary. Things happen far too fast and in far too abstract a manner for our brains to both process it and then input buttons for it. If you could fight like your characters do, and were fighting in real-time, maybe if you could hear your opponent coming and he was making plenty of noise you could react, but it is unlikely in the extreme that instead of, say, kicking or punching or blocking, as you'd have to be taught, you instead had to input an arbitrary set of commands with your fingers. You don't do that every day for a specific reason, so the synaptic response simply isn't that fast; thus I argue that panning in a fighting game is of little to no functional use, particularly if it's fast (and it has to be). You need to know whether you are on the left or right, which can usually be done with headphones (that's true of pokemon too, by the way, since if you configure things you should always hear your own creatures on the left).
Anyway, ramble over. I do wish you luck with whatever you want to do.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=144427#p144427
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