Re: Big news & feedback needed - CVAA legislation
Eh, if you mean accessibility features in games... those do take more time, effort, and money to pay for said time and effort, and the trend in mainstream gaming these days is toward Call of Duty clones, since they make the most money the easiest, or toward upkeep of cash-cow franchises.
Removing the extension would probably result in a huge mess for the next few years, as companies scramble and grumble and politicking happens.
I'm imagining the easiest way to deal with this would be to have a company or API dedicated to out-of-the-box accessibility solutions that can be licensed for cheap, but that company would need to have their solutions thoroughly tested and with lots of approval from the people who will actually be using them (so us, among others).
Oh, and I feel like I should mention that I've heard sighted gamers complain about talking menus in games. More talking menus would be nice, but best would be making talking menus optional. And cheapest
would be including a TTS on the console, and requiring games to access it for on-screen text. It still puts the responsibility in the nands of the game developers, but less of it. A simple if system.is_speech_on() : system.speak(menu.selected.toString()) would suffice.
(Adding accessibility features to Unity would make life easier for everyone! Is there any reason I haven't heard about anyone talking to the developers of Unity about this?)
It kinda feels like we haven't really solved all the accessibility issues out there in a way that can be applied to mainstream games. Swamp comes closest, in that its accessibility features are more like perfected versions of modern technology (It's like you have a cane, a compass, and a GPS, and the cane doesn't cost either of your hands), but mainstream games use the third dimention and silent objects. The Canedar can be adapted to detecting the heights of things, but the obvious solution to silent objects is to go the Injustice route, which ... works, I guess. But I like how Swamp tried to avoid doing any extra object sounds, until missions came along and we got the crate ping.
While Bokurano Daibouken 3 has more or less solved 2D sidescrollers, this requires more features than just the cane-esque sonar (the game is playable enough without it that you don't even get it until a few stages in). The Object Viewer and the tile-by-tile cursor help loads, but they aren't so passive as Swamp's radar/GPS. If we're talking consoles, buttons tend to go at a premium, and we just added two that only blind people will use. Extend this to any other type of game where this type of feature is needed, and things get messy.
So, what I'm saying is, someone start a company that builds Swamp-esque features for mainstream console games, so that when the next extension cycle comes around and all the consoles have a built-in TTS, there really is no more excuse for not taking the extra *does some math* $50k they'd get from making a game accessible and putting less than half of it toward a Canedar license. And if they want to save the money, add an extra three days of pay to one in-house programmer who can build it themselves for cheaper.
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