Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
@Camlern
You are likely correct about accessibility patents being extremely low on the list of concerns for game publishers, but I believe that daigonite's point about morality points and achieving a bare minimum for compliance while putting misleading accessibility labels on their titles is a good, if somewhat pessimistic observation. I've seen similar many times my self, and while I view it as more of an incentive for them to continue with what they do have, and an example to other publishers of what the PR can do for them rather than a detriment to us, I too believe that it sets the bar very low.
Weather it's a start of something better down the road, or a dead end will remain to be seen. But at least captioning, simple color inversion, and high contrast settings will still allow hundreds of thousands more to enjoy those titles even if we can't.
When it comes to mainstream gaming, I disagree that focusing our efforts there is a waste of time. To be sure it's a slow process, and legally blind users are both small in market share and some of the hardest to make useful adaptations for, I won't argue with that.
However, considering that at least two larger PC titles and several smaller ones have integrated screen reader support directly into their games in the last few years, the built in screen reader for Windows has become far more advanced, realtime OCR has improved greatly in accuracy and speed, accessibility integration is increasingly being considered as a path along side the project's development cycle rather than an unwieldy addition after the fact, and the number of tools used for creating the majority of new games has shrunk to just two or three recently, it seems as though a concerted effort to create, keep current, and propagate easily implemented methods for those tools could be a likely root to success.
We will never be able to experience the full depth of a visual based game without sight, and some genres will always present allot more challenges than others, but I believe that we could get at least half way there if we tried.
I won't discard what this community has made for it's self as inferior garbage like some do, but it seems as though even our best titles are at least a decade behind the rest of the market, and I feel as though the chance to reach even 50% parody with the rest of the world is still worth allot. Plus, even if we were given better tools to work with, we are still a small, largely unskilled, often scattered community, and as has been shown time and time again, very few of us are even capable of sticking with a project long enough, or cooperating effectively enough to see a large game through to completion anyway.
And that overarching issue won't be solved with better tools, even if parts of it may be improved by them.
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