Re: How should mainstream developers make interfaces accessible?
CAE, thank you for reminding me. All right, here go somem ore thoughts on this.
For blindness accessibility, do it like everyone else does. People don't realize that all their iPhones, Macs, Apple TVs, Fire TVs, and Windows computers include a built-in screen reader, magnifier, etc. Why can't we do the same for games? Add an accessibility menu in the settings screen and a key combination that toggles the text-to-speech on or off. This could be documented on the game's information page or manual, and most people wouldn't know it existed.
Regarding a built-in text-to-speech system, why not use eSpeak? It's free, cross platform, open source, very small, and supports many many languages. It doesn't sound fantastic, but it's better than having no speech at all and there would be no need to pay royalties (I'm looking at Nuance and Eloquence *cough*). Please, what ever you do, don't use Eloquence. Just let that synthesizer die. It's not actively maintained anymore and hasn't been worked on in over a decade.
Ianhamilton, I hope you can spread this topic to many developers. As I said, I think it would be extremely helpful if some of these folks came on here and we could have an honest conversation about this. People just don't understand, and I think this could help break down that particular barrier. My hope is that the more people that do this, the more mainstream attention it attracts. Apple was the first to implement built-in accessibility features, and now everyone is doing it which is wonderful. Maybe the same can happen for newly released video games a few years down the road.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
