Re: considering selling our audiogames via steam
@dark
@daigonite
I disagree with your point on Steam being inaccessible just because blind people don't use it for two reasons. One of these is that blind people, myself included, do use it and the second is my subjective point that it's not the community's fault but Valve as developers and publishers of the platform. They should be the ones to introduce these changes and hopefully if the appropriate laws etc are passed/worked through in certain areas, that shouldn't be a long time coming. But we can keep up hope regardless of what happens.
I didn't mean to imply that blind people have no interest in using Steam/don't use Steam (although from my experience I couldn't get ANYTHING to work in Steam through its interface and could only use the right click context menu for launching games, so unless I'm just missing somethi ng it's horrible in accessibility). It would be stupid to suggest otherwise, Steam is the largest video game client out there and is a huge marketplace and full of opportunities for both gamers and developers.
But, to Valve, the amount of people using Steam blind is going to be so low that they don't even care. It is completely Valve's fault but that doesn't really change the fact that they're not going to develop for a currently non-existent audience, which is too bad - if they spent the time in making their client even just tabbable it could be a great audio game platform.
The problem with mandating accessibility is that some software would take way too long to make accessible on a timely manner. Of course, not a game client like Steam, but many games themselves don't have the time to focus on that and must stress their efforts elsewhere to remain competitive in today's market. Other software has no purpose in being made blind accessi ble such as photoshop. What may be better is educating developers on how to properly work with accessibility integrated into their code - this was something that seemed to be more popularized 10-15 years ago but has really been shifted to the wayside lately, as well as tightening on the standards for "generic software".
In addition, there really needs to be definitions set in place with what kind of software is classified as what. This way people can make the distinction between software being a "nice-to-have" if accessible, such as a video game, and something that has no reason to not be accessible, such as Steam.
Sorry for the confusion.
However the problem with steam's current access as I said above is that old chestnut, namely blind people don't have money and the fat companies like valve don't care about anyone who won't pay them. Generally speaking in terms of ac cess, you can get on with access best when you can speak to the people who do the designing and care about what their making, but if a company has got so huge that the design is all done by committee and the programmers are a bunch of hundreds of code monkies who make up for their lack of ability to do original work by shear weight of drudgery, then there really is nothing to address access wise.
it's true of Nintendo, it's true of Capcom (both of whom i've tried to communicate with directly in the past), and it's also true of Valve.
Valve is a pretty small company (only about 300 employees) and quite frankly a very lazy company considering they haven't really released a game in quite a long time, but if they see no real financial gain from it they probably won't do anything. Hell, that's part of the reason why they rarely develop new games anymore - it's simply less profitable than adding new content to their bi g cash-cow franchises like TF2 or selling games on their marketplace. Why, profit-wise, should they sit down, go through the code of their Steam client, and make it not actually suck for keyboard users? Unfortunate but that's the way companies like that run.
I have pretty big ambitions for trying to reverse this trend but quite honestly at 22 there's not really much I can do other than try to squeeze myself into the accessibility industry, as niche as it is.
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