Re: Developing a new game. Asking the community some questions!
1. Audio is very important for us. If you consider for a moment that most of the users of this forum are blind - as in no vision with light perception or none at all, you'll quickly se that sound design is integral for a good and immersive experience.
2. This depends on whether or not you want to make the game accessible to blind people, or if you feel the visuals are the driving force, and want to accommodate partially sighted people and not make it playable for the blind. If you do want to make it blind playable, you could have someone record voice lines for the menus, or use one of several libraries for screen readers or write your own class to interface with the screen readers' APIs.
3. Yes. Make good use of occlusion if you can't directly go from point A to B. Let's imagine your goal is to work your way through a maze and collect musical notes as you go. You start out hearing one in front and to the left, so you walk left, then try to go forward, but you smack into a wall. OK, there's a wall there, great, but where's the opening. You could just bump along it until you found a way through, or things on the other side of it could be muffled slightly, then, when you do find the opening, you can clearly hear the sound when you pass through.
4. For low vision people, absolutely it's important. I was partially sighted until my vision deteriorated. Point of fact, I can still see, but I don't really use my vision anymore because it's so unreliable and I have problems with maintaining focus that it's just easier to essentially ignore it. For every person with a wide variety of visual conditions, there's an infinite amount of combinations of things that will work and those that won't work for them. Put simply, offer as much customizability over colors as you can. Colors, brightness, contrast, different foregrounds and backgrounds, etc. This is mainly for text readability, I don't think anyone expects you to render your entire game in some weird sepia tone.
5. I guess I rolled all of that into one.
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