Re: what should we do if the forum, Whent down with out any warning?
A few thoughts:
1. Definitely agree that we still need a long-form, slower platform like a forum. Chat would be nice for some things as well. Managing them under the same umbrella may or may not be a good thing--I'm not sure yet.
2. I wonder if it's time to drop the "audio games" branding and go with something like "blind gamers?" Don't get me wrong, I like audio games and think they still have their place. But even as someone who makes them, I think they're kind of niche and maybe dead-end. If I can figure out how to make graphical games with tiles/2-D sprites, like roguelikes, then I will. But at that point I don't really fit under an "audio games" umbrella.
3. Loathed as I am to suggest this, I think we need to use our own things rather than relying on something like Reddit, Facebook, etc. Before the chorus of "waaaah, that's hard, here are all the challenges you'll face" starts up, I know. But we as blind people can't build on cloud services that may go inaccessible tomorrow and wipe us out. I'm fairly confident GitHub won't go inaccessible without a backlash of some sort, so I'm cool using it for what I need. But Discord randomly breaks accessibility in significant ways, and then you're stuck with their upgraded client and hoping they'll fix it. I get that some of you have found the Konami code to correctly use Reddit, but I think that's an unrealistic expectation for everyone. I, personally, don't even bother with Reddit because I have too much to remember already, and again, they could change their interface tomorrow and make that knowledge useless. Yeah I could press iuoerjmnolif;eaf and correctly read posts, but I'd rather remember VSCode hotkeys and how to use my game engine correctly.
One chat system I haven't seen mentioned here is Matrix. Yeah yeah, it's another network, none of your friends use it, yadayadaboo. But it's accessible and improving. You can run your own server or join an existing community. The primary Android and iOS clients are also fairly accessible, audio/video one-to-one and group calls are supported, and the network is robust enough to host FOSDEM's virtual events next week. Might be worth checking out as a possible chat alternative. Fair warning, apparently Google Play just removed Element, the primary Matrix client, because someone reported it for sexually explicit content. Never mind that Chrome won't ever be pulled for the exact same reason. Anyhow, I'm not going down that rabbit hole in this thread--I mention it because if you go looking for Element on Play now, you probably won't find it.
Not sure about forums yet, but I'm brainstorming. Discourse's web UI isn't the most accessible, but it does at least have features like mailing list mode for folks who might prefer that. And maybe a few of us could ralley together and fix Discourse, or some other forum software. I wish more folks did what I do and use their skills to fix accessibility where they can, because that pays off massively.
And whatever happens, there needs to be some open governance/funding model so this isn't in one person's pocket, and we're in the exact same situation we are today. Should probably be managed on something like opencollective.com. Maybe those of us selling games could sponsor months of costs in exchange for a banner or something? There are Matrix and forum-hosting services, so you'd basically hook them to the bank account of the entity running the thing.
Yeah, entity. If this is a community worth having and keeping, and I think some sort of significant blind gamers community is, it's going to require some collective putting on of grown-up pants. Otherwise, some random 14-year-old's forum won't cut it, and even if it takes off and gains traction, it's just kicking the can down the road. I might be tentatively interested in some sort of effort like this if anyone else is with me, but fair warning, it won't look much like this place. It'd be a welcoming community where people behaved themselves, piracy and other bullshit isn't tolerated, and where actual codes of conduct exist and are enforced--in other words, how other non-internet sesspools currently function and thrive. If you don't like that, go play somewhere else. Let me know if anyone else is seriously interested in this effort, because it can't just be me doing it.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
