Re: More tools for devs; Unreal engine screenreader support
@6 It's been over a decade or more since I played Kingdom Hearts (probably would have been in 2004/2005), so I can't recall. But it definitely may have had an auto-targeting system. However, navigating a completely 3D world like that to find enemies/where to go seems very difficult to adapt. True, they could input 3D sound targeting beacons like in some of the audio games we've had come out, but I'm not sure they'd have a reason to attempt that when the world is so vast and would require siginificant gameplay considerations/changes.
I mean, who knows what may happen in the future when the tools are available and devs get used to them/experiment. But KH3 is noted in the "upcoming"/announced games, so it's likely already heavily in development and probably can't easily be even updated to take advantage.
Right now devs do not have easy access to accessibility tools for these platforms, so it is only the more devoted devs that know/want to add accessibility or need to that add them by using a hack/workaround (the accsesibility plugin for Unity used by Crafting Kingdom on IOS) or basically self-voice the entire game from scratch. A lot of mainstream devs do not want to use a third party plugin as a dependency for their game, either, so the lack of an "official" solution is a hard "no" for them.
I, for one, am just excited on what creativity might start to come out of the games market when there are actual official ways to add accessibility. With games made in Unity and Unreal, we may no longer get silence or "sorry, it can't be done" from developers that we reach out to to ask about adding accessibility, as they will actually have a way to add it that is easy and official to the platform. Exciting times!
@8, I do hope Unity and Unreal opt to have the accessibility on by default. I mean, technically it shouldn't make any difference to a sighted user unless they turn on TTS on their system of choice if I'm understanding things correctly. It should just let a screen reader know there are, for example, some buttons and a menu or something they can interact with. Having it off by default may just increase the "out of sight, out of mind" thing.
As far as I know, other programming languages/platforms, if you use the platform-specific elements and not custom ones, the accessibility meta data is automatically visible to a screen reader. You only run into issues if someone makes a custom tool/element and doesn't manually add in the accessibility hooks.
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