Re: Would you like an OCR feature in Narrator on the Xbox? Please vote
Liam is right, OCR for Narrator wouldn't affect games as Narrator can't run when games are running. It's not an issue of games lagging, it's an issue of there not physically being enough system resources to run it. Games like Crackdown work by a simple text to speech API that takes up minimal system resources, not Narrator.
That may change with the next console generation, but I'd still not want to encourage this, OCR is a dodgy hack. I'd rather see them put pressure on engine developers to work on actual text to speech support. If UI in Unreal and Unity worked with text to speech by default there wouldn't be any need for OCR in most cases.
There is also a degree of risk involved with implementing less than ideal solutions in that it can make ideal solutions less likely.
Just look at remapping. The ideal solution is a platform certification requirement making remapping mandatory in all games, as was done with the Sega Saturn. Instead, remapping is offered at system level as a safety net. System remap is a poor solution compared to in game remap, but it's at least a safety net so that there's always at least some way to reconfigure games that haven't considered accessibility well enough. But there's a side-effect; some developers thinking that they no longer have to worry about remapping because the system does it for them. So those games are made less accessible by the presence of system remap.
I'd worry about the same thing for blind accessibility. If OCR was present at system level as an official Microsoft sanctioned approach (rather than an external hacky workaround) it would send a message to some developers saying that they shouldn't worry about supporting blind gamers because it's already handled by the system, therefore making their games less accessible.
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