Re: First person spatial audio - Constraints vs freedom
It's definitely possible to make games that both blind people and sighted people can play on equal footing. I'm just not sure that FPS is a genre where that works. It would certainly be hard at best, because while we can handle stuff vision still wins just due to the reaction time. I am too young to have been around for audioquake but I have friends who were there, and apparently how that ended is that blind people ended up making maps with no light sources so that sighted trolls couldn't drop in and say hi.
If you want to see blind-sighted game equality ending well, you might look into Sequence Storm (rhythm, accessibility is built-in) or Slay the Spire (via the mod say the spire). I think there's some others that do it to a greater or lesser degree. There's Last of Us II, but opinions on that are very mixed and "a good first effort" is probably apt. I think a game called Skullgirls (mortal combat clone) implemented screen reader support. It does happen, but it's the kind of does happen where I definitely won't run out of fingers counting them.
I don't want to hammer the point more than I have, as long as you know. For what it's worth usually what happens is it's a grad student or something without a clue, who does the thing and never actually gets this no matter how much we point it out. that doesn't just apply to audiogames either. You're possibly literally the first person in my experience to say "I get it but I want to learn, and I'm using this simplified version to do so". You get a lot of points from a lot of us for getting that far.
In so much as we care that you're using Unity, it's that we can't. I'm actually the author of this library for 3D audio, which mostly exists because things like Wwyse etc. are inaccessible as hell and everything wants more money than most blind devs have (seriously: the only other good open source HRTF is OpenALSoft). No one is going to judge you for it, but you won't be able to collaborate with blind people in any meaningful fashion if those are your tools. Unfortunately for us, fact of the matter is that those tools are very impressive tools that let you do in days what takes us weeks. Perhaps I shall eventually succeed at building the audiogame stack I want to build, but practically speaking I'm in the market for a time machine so who knows. At least I've solved the audio problem.
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