Re: Stop punishing developers trying to make their games accessible
Hi everyone, I'm Michelle, the author of the blog post.
I wanted to post here to throw in my two cents. Ian Hamilton just linked me the AppleVis thread as well, so I'll be posting this over there, too.
Because my post felt kind of negative, I didn't post it on Twitter or draw attention to it. It was a personal vent - I didn't think many people would care for it.
There's no need to give the game a 5 star rating to counter the 1 star ones. The thought is much much appreciated, and thank you for that - but I'd feel much better if people just reviewed the game after they played it (once everyone can play it). Someone said it pretty perfectly further up in this threat. Manipulating ratings to counter manipulated ratings is not the solution.
Also, I'm a little overwhelmed at the moment by the sheer amount of comments, emails and Twitter messages I have received. All of them positive, some offering insights or just trying to see things from all sides and so on. It's pretty awesome, and I made a point of showing around the 20+ positive comments on my blog post today. That definitely changed things, I can tell you that much.
Regardless, even if not a single person had read my post - it wasn't my intention to make anyone worry that I'd be stopping my work on the game's accessibility. If there's any doubt in that regard, allow me to spell it out:
This game will become accessible!
I just don't know when.
Aside from the big core gameplay mechanics, I'm fighting a million little things. Here is just one example: The text in some labels has words highlighted in a different color. The screen reader reads the color information out aloud, so currently you're hearing "Great job recruit, now hop onto your left bracket color equals hashtag f f c c 4 5 right bracket colony ship left bracket dash right bracket and fly to the next planet".
Not terribly difficult to fix, but I have a hundred of little things like that to iron out.
I'll get through it all, in time.
Last time, with Crafting Kingdom, it was the feedback of dozens of beta testers from this forum and others that made all the difference. The first version of the game was accessible, yes, but far from great. I'm really hoping one something similar again with this game, once I got things far enough to throw it into an accessibility mode beta test. I had always planned to come here and start a thread looking for beta testers once I'm in that stage.
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