Re: Screenreaders, engines and advocacy
Interesting article and one that sums up things pretty well. My only beef is that you asume that it's easy to get in touch with game developers or engine developers. While this approach work for indie developers such as those of skullgirls, one will have a much harder time talking to big corporations like Namko and Capcom who so often use their own engines as development bases. The PC market is different... because screen readers exist on those interfaces, but to side with the companies who make games primarily for consoles, this would be a far stretch... since there'd be no practical way to develop and implement accessibility for an engine designed around console games since there is no screen reader for consoles and likely never will be. lol PC indie developers are the place t start, and hopefully this will lead to something. But talking to the developers of major gaming engine platforms, often large co mpanies, is difficult. NRS and Injustice was a great start, but I'll be curious to see which big gaming company next responds to a similar request. Advocacy is difficult without attending gaming conventions and events, and your average blind gamer doesn't have the funds, or necessarily even the interest, in mainstream video games to attend such things.
it's easier to speak to people than you think, you just have to be sure to speak to individual people and not try to talk to corporations. There are lots who are happy to chat on Twitter. Yes, absolutely agree, a face to face chat is better, but often if you go to an event like PAX or E3 the people from the big studios who are actually on the show floor are just junior marketing folk, the people with any kind of decision making power are locked up in a back room doing scheduled press meetings.
The popular engines do go a long way - e.g. Injustice, Bioshock Infinite and Devil May Cry are Un real. And although consoles don't have screenreaders, if for example Unreal supported PC screenreaders the PC version of Injustice could have had an accessible interface as well as accessible gameplay.
But that's a technicality really... Unreal isn't really a good one to aim for. Something worth bearing in mind is where the most games are that could be made accessible with very little extra developer workload if the tech was in place, which more often translates to games made in Unity, Cocos etc.
Unity are a bit difficult, you can't really get anything done through the official channels as they are worked very hard and have a huge to do list of critical things as it is. So I think if it was to happen it would be a lone sympathetic person at Unity taking it on outside of the usual processes.
That's what happened with colour blindness in Unreal. There's no way that a colour blindness simulator would have made it up the backlog, but one o f their developers decided it was important and knocked a simulator out in one afternoon in his 10% time. It's now included as part of the main UE4 interface.
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