Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
I am still working on it, I know I promised a release back in February but we had to refactor the whole project. It is for the best though.
Basically, to explain what max-lib does in comparison to before:
Before, max-lib was basically a set of tools to make an accessible game engine, kind of like an open source but walled-garden type game engine, but with the ability to be broken up into parts and imported into other game engines. The design has been heavily abstracted from this.
Now, Max-Lib is more like an environment that can have UI modules added into it. It
A good way to think of this is, when I was first developing Braillemon, I was really contemplating hard how to approach the topology of how you interact with the game. For example, should it just be menus or should you be able to walk around? I went with the latter but it would be kinda cool to have a menu-only pokemon game. What Max-Lib does is use a two-fold UI system to allow a topology both for how you interpret the game environment as well as how you interact with it.
Obviously this changes a lot of things because it means that any game developed with max-lib either as an extension or as a standalone will have the ability to have its UIs changed out like this. We want to start with basically a "standard" visual UI and a console-based UI and work from there. Right now my partner is working on some complex cross compatibility stuff, and is currently sidetracked with a side project we're both working on for a few days.
So basically this will allow you to, in an open source environment, swap out UIs for games. Which means that we should be able to make games developed in max-lib blind accessible relatively easily without requiring corporate involvement.
Also, max-lib references resources in sort of hierarchy so that resources can be extended. For example, color blind assets can be added even if color blind definitions didn't exist in the original distribution.
The goal is to make the game engine do all the work, but still allow developers to create private code for games and have them interact with this system efficiently.
I need to stress that while its nice that gaming companies finally seem to give a single shit about blind gamers, we should be more wary, because its pretty clear to me that they are trying to take control of the accessibility gaming communities. They have made it transparently obvious that they care about blind people becoming consumers, not necessarily the quality of that consumption - a problem that blind people have dealt with for decades regarding accessibility, being treated as constantly second class. We should remember that they are employees working for a company with private assets and privately held accessibility (including accessibility owned by corporations but distributed by open source means) has been a way to control accessibility and likewise how blind people interact with computers - having massive social implications that most members of this forum have felt.
I cannot stress how serious this is, it has very serious social implications and game development is an experimental field for accessibility that allows accessibility to spread to other technologies. By allowing this sort of infiltration consistently into our communities we take away the production away from the blind - max-lib aims to reverse this by allowing communities like ours to produce modules instead of relying on what a corporation decides is accessible enough for you.
But I digress. When we get a working build, we are really interested in having devs work with it and possibly even help build out the blind accessibility UI modules.
The source code is here: https://gitlab.com/labadore64/maxlib-hub
We also now have a website, but its incomplete and i haven't tested accessibility: https://max-lib.com
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