Re: How should mainstream developers make interfaces accessible?
My original idea circa 2002-4: pre-recorded, but only plays when the user presses a certain button.
As of 2006 or so: discovered that (1) some mainstream games just had menus talk by default, and (2) all the sighted players were complaining about it. Disappointing but doubled down on "press square/select/R3 for speech", with possibly making it a toggle instead of a single event.
2016-ish: it'd sure be a pain to record everything, especially when numbers and various settings are involved. How hard would it be to include a TTS?
2019: Basically the same. What everyone says about using screen readers having cross-platform issues, etc, seem like they'd discourage using the built-in screen reader, and the disparities between PS4 and Xbox in this area do not help. In an ideal world, screen reader would probably be the way to go—heck, just give people a style guide for on-screen text, so all they have to do is the equivalent of add an alt tag and the system / user handle the rest—but as-is, that ain't happ'nin'. So someone make a 3rd party cross-platform TTS engine, and let everyone use that. The only annoying bit is that it'd add, like, a hundred megs to every game, but if Facebook needs more space than that for the iOS app, I don't see most people caring.
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