Hi Josh,
Yes, several people have been in touch with mainstream game companies
regarding improved accessibility. There is an organization called IGDA
which has spent considerable time and money working towards improved
accessible games, and they have been continually stonewalled by the
companies that be. concessions have been very few and far between.
For example, IGDA has managed to convince some game companies to include
closed captioning in many of their game scenes and dialogs for people
with hearing impairments. That, of course, doesn't help us any, but it
is a small compromise they managed to get out of some of these major
game companies.
The major problem comes down to time and money. We are a very small
minority, and are hardly worth a companies time and money. They are not
going to shell out big money on research and development for game
accessibility unless they are going to get a huge financial return on
that investment. Unfortunately, there isn't enough of us around to
really make a major impact on their sales, and we hold no real influence
with these companies. So total accessibility is pretty darned unlikely
in the near future.
That's to say nothing about the general attitude of these companies.
From what I've heard responses range from polite sympathy to outright
rudeness. I get the feeling some of these companies think of us as an
annoying gnat that can be swatted out of the way, and in a sense they
would b correct.
Josh wrote:
Hi,
Has anyone ever thought of calling companies like Sony and writing letters to them and petitioning for the major video game companies to modify their current games so they are accessible? put a visually impaired/blind players mode in the games and a button to access it? And with today's console arcitecture why not add text to speech built right into the console? same with pc games, add an accessibility option or a downloadable accessibility pack for the games. and since we got firefox and webvisum brushthose captchas aside, subscribe to the sighted gamers forums and lets make our voices heard and keep making them heard until we get what we want, the quality of games played by our sighted friends.
Josh
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