[Blindtlk] FW: [nabs-l] accessible video games

[T. Joseph Carter]

In short, it's not an easy task, and I can't even imagine how to do 
it for a great many of the games on the market.  I say this as one 
who has spent some time making video games.  Three cases illustrate 
the problem I think:

Case 1: Final Fantasy X, Playstation 2

This was the first Final Fantasy to feature recorded voices for most 
major characters.  It was one of the top-selling games in the Final 
Fantasy franchise and frankly one of the top selling games on the 
platform.  (At one time it was THE top-selling in both categories, 
but I no longer know if either is true.)

As I said, most major characters' dialogue was recorded, instead of 
being a string of text on the screen.  Minor or incidental characters 
however were text-only.  A screen reader for those didn't exist, and 
would've been distracting.  The cost of voice actors may have been 
prohibitive, and if it had been done it might not have all fit on to 
one DVD.

But it could have been done.  Mostly.  Most of the overdrives 
(special attacks available only when enough of something has happened 
to a character) would have needed significant changes to become 
non-visual.  When Tidus tried to learn his father's famous Jecht Shot 
(a sports move), memories appear in different portions of the screen 
and you have to manipulate the controller in response.  It's not 
hard to do it simply mashing buttons, but it's still completely 
visual.

And then there's exploration, finding treasure, knowing where the 
road forks, etc.  We navigate with a cane and manage just fine, but 
even with terrain clue sounds (which exist but need to be improved 
for our purposes), we just don't have the kind of feedback we get 
from using a cane that would tell us where we are, and where we are 
going.

But it could be solved, and because most of the game (battles and 
whatnot) are turn-based, some means could be found to do it.

Conclusion: This kind of game could be made accessible, and it would 
be very cool and clever, and it would fit right in to the game 
experience if done right.


Case 2: Super Metroid, Super Nintendo Entertainment System

The game involves your character running around a complex side and 
vertically scrolling maze of tunnels, platforms, doorways, elevators, 
and the like.  Crawling, floating, flying, and energy-sucking alien 
creatures are everywhere, and you blast them with various weapons, 
pick up recharges and ammo reloads left floating where they were 
before you disintegrated them, and make complex jumps, climbs, 
swings, and the like while avoiding hazards in any direction.  I have 
no idea how to make this accessible.  Wish I did, because it would be 
awesome!

Conclusion: Probably not able to make it accessible, at least not 
using any scheme I can think up.  If another developer can, that's 
awesome.


Case 3: Bejeweled 3, Mac/PC and coming sooner or later to iPhone

Bejeweled-type games play out as a grid of colored gems.  There are 
three now, and they all follow the same premise I outline here, and 
many, many clones.  You play by taking two adjacent gems and swapping 
them either horizontally or vertically.  You can only swap gems if 
this creates one or more "matches", strings of three or more gems of 
the same color either horizontally or vertically.  These are cleared 
and gravity causes those above to fall along with new gems to fill in 
the holes.  The game ends when you can no longer make a swap.

This basic game could be made accessible in quite a clever way, at 
least on touch-screen devices.  When you enable the touch accessible 
mode, simple swipes on the screen no longer swap gems.  Instead, they 
let you "hear" the gems.  Each color has its own "resonance" sound.  
Power gems would make their color sound and another sound at the same 
time.  A flame gem could crackle, and a star gem could maybe make a 
tinkling sound.  The other special gems are the hypercube and 
supernova gems, and these too could have their own sounds.

Control would be to touch with one finger to select a gem.  Touch and 
hold to get a verbal description of the gem (special gems have a 
tool-tip type thing on the Mac/PC version already).  Swipe with two 
fingers in one of the cardinal directions to swap with the gem in 
that direction.

Sounds great, innovatively accessible, and fun to play right?  Yeah, 
and not even hard to write it!  I dunno how you'd interface it so you 
could do this with VoiceOver enabled, but it would be fun and it 
would bring many of you into one of the greatest time-wasters ever 
invented.  *grin*

Adding voice tags to menu controls and badges and the like would mean 
the Bejeweled Guy (don't know his name) has a lot more to say than 
"Welcome back", "Go", "Level complete", etc.  But it wouldn't be that 
difficult to add to the game at all!

There's just one problem.  The game has other modes, and some of them 
are timed.  You could not keep track of the board with all the gems 
cleared and new ones falling from the top and still meet the time 
challenges which depend on split-second recognition of visual info.  
And changing the timing to make it "reasonable" skews the scoring if 
you mix accessible and standard play, which matters on the iPhone 
where you can share your scores online.  If you find a way to make 
the timing fair and equitable, you will find sighted people playing 
this mode in order to cheat and get higher scores than their friends 
making these modes completely unfair for the blind player to 
"compete" with friends.  (Disable the screen maybe?  It's an option!)

Or would we be content to have a game where only half of the modes 
you could play were accessible?

Conclusion: The most promising, because it requires the fewest mods 
to an existing game and the lowest development cost,  but it wouldn't 
be accessible on the computer.  Then again, it takes the touch 
screen, so long the bane of the blind's existence in the technical 
world, and turns it into the key to accessibility!  Poetic justice in 
that.  Only about half of the game modes could be made easily 
accessible to the blind, and would we really consider half a game 
better than none?

Now I've got absolutely NO idea if anyone at PopCap Games, the makers 
of Bejeweled, even care that we blind folks exist!  My guess is that 
they've never thought about it.  But if they want one of their games 
to be about as ubiquitous amongst blind iPhone owners as a deck of 
brailled UNO cards is, they'd seriously consider a limited version of 
Bejeweled 3 for the iPhone with the above accessibility features and 
offering only the untimed game modes.

In fact, they could use the Bejeweled 2 engine (since we won't miss 
the new prettier graphics) and just add the new gems.  I'd miss 
Diamond Mine mode, but content myself with Butterflies, Zen, Classic, 
and Poker modes.  I don't often play the two timed modes Lightning 
and Ice Storm.  The eighth mode, Quest, is a combination of the other 
modes plus a few others in short challenges that get downright hard 
before you get your ivy leaves!  Oh MAN did I work for that!

*ahem*

Anyway, I might be willing to investigate the matter, see if I could 
contact someone at PopCap, and see if they'd be willing to discuss 
it.  They might ignore me, or they might say they're not interested.  
If you think I should, and if this thread isn't active sometime next 
week, gimme a nudge and I'll see if they're interested in doing 
something that no other mainstream game publisher has ever tried to 
do before.  There's perhaps a legal issue associated with them doing 
it as I suggested, but I'll commit to giving them royalty-free 
license to whatever intellectual property in this message they need 
to implement it.

They can gimme an iTunes code for the result (for demo purposes only 
of course!) and maybe mention either my name or the NFB somewhere in 
the credits for the inspiration and I consider myself compensated.  
Maybe in two or four years, we'll have video game development as one 
of the things a person can sign up for at Youth Slam, who knows?

I'll put this Pipe Dream to rest before I become tempted to go and 
play, well, Pipe Dream.  *grin*

Joseph
Gaming nerd


On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 06:06:26PM -0700, Humberto Avila wrote:
>This question was asked on the student list. Read below.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
>Of Patrick Molloy
>Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2011 6:00 PM
>To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>Subject: [nabs-l] accessible video games
>
>Hi All,
>I'm curious to get your thoughts on this question that's been in the
>back of my mind recently: Why haven't mainstream video game companies
>even attempted to make their products accessible to blind people?
>Wouldn't it grow their profits? And would it be all that difficult to
>make a video game accessible? We have described movies, after all, and
>there's the blind driver car. If they can make an accessible CAR, why
>not video games? What do others think about this issue?
>Patrick
>
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