hello. my name is arjan and I'm 11 at the time of writing. I've been blind since birth. i come from the Netherlands. i first got in some kind of games when i heard my sister play some games with the mouse. i found them pretty good, and i was wondering why i couldn't play them. because i can't see the pictures. then, i believe it was four years ago, on the news on tv, it said there was now a racing game for the blind. it was in dutch (although there is now an english version). i really got into this game and played it for many weeks. I'd probably wanted something different, if i knew about the games in other countries for the blind, but i was i believe seven, and i was excited that i, like my sister, could also play games now.
later, i found out about audiogames.net, the website where the forum is where I'm currently writing this. my dad found a translator on the internet, for me to translate some of the stuff. it wouldn't be natural, and wouldn't translate everything, but it would work. this way, i began to write the english language. in the beginning it was rather rubbish, but i could understand some of the english games without too much trouble. this is how i basically got into more and more english games too. i also am impressed with the work done to let the sighted game developers out there know that there are, since a few years, blind people who can play games. and no, i don't mean those card games that just talk. i mean arcade games, shooter games, and so on. we now have games that we can play online over the internet with our friends. one cool thing is that because the audio gamers compared to the sighted gamers, there are such a small amount of audio gamers when comparing it to normal gamers, you'd have people from all around the world for multiplayer games. in a way, this is pretty cool, but on the other hand, there are very few people i know here in the Netherlands who play audiogames, so there are only a few dutch people to play with. but i don't very much care about the country where they come from and i just take tournaments from people on the other side of the world as me. i would really like to play some of the games that us blind people can't play though. my friend had a very cool shooter and i so wanted to play that. so, I do have one suggestion. try to make the games somewhat more accessible, so us blind people can enjoy them almost as much as the sighted people can. possible solutions to this are more speech or sounds or more keyboard commands instead of the mouse. at last, I'd also like to say that there are actually some games with the mouse. an audiogame is currently be developed where you can use the keyboard as well as the mouse. some audiogames also do have joystick support. so, it is not nesicarily with the keyboard.
sorry if this post is a bit long or if there are spelling errors in it by the way, my english is not perfect. but yeah, these are my game experiences.
kind regards,
arjan

Hi,
I'm Tristan, and I am 11 years old. I have been visually impaired (technically, I am legally blind) and totally blind in one eye since birth, and an audio gamer for 3 years. I started researching for audio games when I heard my friends play video games, computer games, etc etc etc. So, I went to gamesfortheblind.com, those were OK, they were bla...
I met a totally blind 11 year old toards the end of 2005 and we soon made a good friendship. He showed me the pcsgames homepage, and the links to accessible games webpage that PCS Games had made over the years. I downloaded demos of games and loved them! Finally, I purchased my first game, Lone Wolf (3.5). It was impressive, in every way you can think of! Soon I got more into audio games, and the VI Community. And now I am a developer useing vb6/dx9 I am not good at all but I will learn.

Sorry for writing so much.

Hi readers! If you read the document that was made in 2006, you will probably know me. If you have not, here is another little intro.

My name is tam

Hi,
  My name is Bryan Peterson. I'm a soon-to-be twenty-seven-year-old college student in Twin Falls, Idaho. In short, the good ol' USA. I've been totally blind practically since birth and a gamer since I can remember. The first games I ever played were on the Atari 2600 and they included such cclassics as Space Invaders, Pacman, Centipede and countless others. Then, in the late 1980's I got a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas. This opened the wayfor Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, Metroid and, of course, my personal favorite, Final Fantasy. While it's perfectly possible for a blind gamer to play and complete many of these games successfully with the assistance of a sighted friend, the individual is left in a bit of a catch 22 situation when he or she is home alone and wants to play their favorite game. While it's sometimes possible for a blind person to play certain mainstream games and complete them successfully with only minimal assistance learning what the controller functions are, I would say these instances are fairly rare. An example of a game that a blind person could possibly complete totally unassisted is Super Smash Bros. Melee for Nintendo's Game Cube. Once they learned the basic controller functions and became familiar with the moves of each character,  blind players could actually complete the game's Classic mode with little to no help. I myself have done this a number of times. In fact I've lost count over the years since I got the game for Christmas.
  But these instances are, as I said, fairly few and far between. Some games are fairly accessible by accident due to one aspect or another of their make-up, be it the audio or the gameplay itself, but even so they aren't completely so. It makes no sense that the blind community should have all manner of other rights, equal jobs, equal education, wages, writing, reading and all manner of others, but we're left almost completely out of the loop when it comes to gaming. While it's true that some blind individuals are starting to take a stand and develop their own games which feature audio environments and interfaces instead of graphics, these games are so simple for the most part that a person could conceivably play through them as few as three times and, at the end of the third run-through, have discovered all the secrets the game has to offer. As any gamer will tell you, this is hardly a satisfying phenomenon. And the fact that the number of games out there for the blind is probably still within the double digits as of now is a fact which will, if the situation continues, turn blind players away from the market. Since few if any of our specialized developers have the skills necessary to design a really rich, complex game that keeps the player's attention for more than, let's say three weeks or even a month, some myths need to be busted in order to encourage mainstream designers to take an interest in a market that, contrary to popular belief, does in fact exist.
  I'm going to take a moment to clarify my point and hopefully those of others who've left words here. I don't mean create a sidemarket for only audio games here. In fact what most blind players want is a game that a sighted and a blind gamer could play and enjoy together without one side automatically ahving an advantage over the other. A sighted player can look at the graphics in a game and know just what's going on, but the blin player is almost always unaware of the situation until either he is struck by inspiration, alerted by the sighted player to the danger or killed by said player, a monster or thwarted by another aspect of the game. Since audio games create the exact same situation in reverse, where the blind player is totally in sink with the situation, the sighted player tends to find himself or herself on the outside and usually walks away from the experience with a feeling of extreme dissatisfaction.
  I think the major problem that's kept mainstream developers from actually building accessibility into their games (I mean deliberately, mind you), is that A. they don't realize just how many blind gamers are out there and would jump at the chance to play a new mainstream game if it were made more accessible and B. They don't realize how little extra work would actually have to be put into the game. Rather than modifying the console itself, build a few relatively minor changes into the game. Since many of today's games are in stereo, part of the problem has already been at least partially solved. I'm an avid fan of The Simpsons: Road Rage, many of whose effects are in fact in stereo. When a passenger calls out to be picked up, it's very possible for a blind person to zero in on their location and pick them up, often without any helpat all. Granted they can't always get the passenger to their destination but I believe a solution could be worked out by adding an audible cue that would alert the player when they were heading in the right direction. Since the pasenger alerts you when you're going the wrong way, nothing would necessarily have to be done with that.
  As I maentioned i'm a huge fan of RPG's, particularly Final Fantasy. Since no games of that genre exist for the blind, many fans of said genre have been chomping at the bit for a long time. I believe it would be relatively simple to design an RPG that could be played and enjoyed by both sighted and blind players alike, even simultaneously. The menus and stat reading could be handled with synthetic speach, while more voice work would have to be added for the characters, to insure that the blind player knew just what was being said. And if the sighted playr chose to play the game solo, there could be an option in the game's options menu to disable the accessibility feature for that particular save fie. In short the blind person would play the game with the extra speach and sound, while the sighted player could lay it as they would any other game and not have to deal with the extra speach.
  Actually, designing an accessible turn-based RPG that a blind player could use successfully might in many ways be easier than designing a first person shooter, and might be a good stepping stone to attempting other genres. Since those games already proceed at a slower speed than an arcade style game, it might be relatively easy to make use of all the game's functions even without sight. As long as cues were provided that alerted the player t what menu choice they landed on or the condition of their characters, it could actually work out quite well. As I said, all that would really need to be done would be to add extra speach for when the player character talked with an NPC, and of course speach for the menus and for reading statistics and other information. There would also have to be changes made to allow auditory navigation through the game world. Many games for the blind have a special Look function that acts in many ways like the Map features in todays sighted games, except that the information is spoken instead of displayed. In an RPG for instance,a player might look to the north while in a town and be told that an item shop was in that direction and how far away it was. This look function could also help in determining where clear paths could be found, so a player could easily navigate to the next dungeon or even through it.
  I believe quite firmly that, if a mainstream developer really set their mind to it and asked, perhaps via a survey on their web site, what features would serve a blind player best, they could come up with something that would cut down on the extra work they would have to do, and yet maximize the enjoyment that a blind and even a sighted player could get from a title. I urge any of you who really aim to make games for everyone to consider my words and those of the others who come before and after me. I believe there is a workable solution here, and it's down to us, sighted and blind alike, to find it.

There is just one problem with making the patch available as a download. We aren't merely talking about computer games. For a game on another console, the download approach would be pointless since there would be no way to install the file onto the game CD. My suggestion, as I said in my last pot, would be to create a toggle for the accessibility that would be saved with each individual save file. That way the blind guy could load his file and have all the game's functions right there at his fingertips with no problem. Then the sighted guy could load his own file later and play the game as he would any other, without the extra speach and things the blind guy would rely on.
  I forgot to mention in my last post tha I woul love to see a Metroid style game made accessible to the blind. While I understand that it might be difficult to translate such a style of game into a sound medium, I believe it could be done. As I mentioned in my last post I loved the original NES Metroid and remain a fan of the series to this day, and I've been brainstorming, trying to come up with ideas as to  how one might capture the atmosphere of Metroid using audio alone. If Metroid Prime is any indication I believe it could possibly be done.
  I agree with Craig in his last post. If Microsoft can work to make its operating systems accessible, and if Apple can go so far as to include a screen reading program directly in its OS and not be labeled an "accessibility company," there's no reason whatsoever that the game industry couldn't do something similar. Again, I don't mean create a sidemarket for the blind, because honestly the market would be too small to focus on only itself, but build the accessibility into the regular games. I strongly doubt that it would make any real difference to a sighted gamer unless they saw a blind person playing the game. Most react with fascination and wonder why nothing's been done to make things easier.
  As I mentioned above, there's currently no middle ground. Blind people can't often play sighted games and complete them without sighted assistance due to the fact that so much of the important information is visual. Yet introducing a sighted player to an audio only game creates the exact same situation in reverse. Now the sighted player needs the blind player's help because they've taken to relying so much on their eyes, yet suddenly their eyes are utterly useless to them. There need to be some games that feature both the graphics for a sighted player's benefit, and the extra audio for the benefit of a blind player. This way neither player automatically has an advantage over the other.

Hi. I am an independent game developer and virtual reality hobbyist although I never even knew there were audiogames before. I was recently brainstorming some concepts for alternate human interfaces specifically for games. One of the ideas included a game that was played only through sounds and force feedback controls. Through some searching on google and I ended up here. I have read the document to be presented at the GDC, and I think it is a very noble effort. It has honestly inspired me to pursue this idea I had for an audio-based game. Hopefully some of the big game companies will get a copy and realize that there is a market for audiogames. As a developer I am very excited about the possibility of making games more accessible to a wide variety of gamers. I believe if a game is done right, it could appeal to both sighted and visually-impaired gamers. It is such a young genre that there are many more possibilities to explore original concepts that haven't been done before. To me, that possibility is very exciting.

I feel that the game industry is quickly becoming very saturated with the same old content, similar to the movie industry. There is also the tendency to focus on visual effects and neglect all other areas, including gameplay. This is why I feel an audio-game has the potential to focus on engaging gameplay through sound and haptic force-feedback alone without relying on graphics. This type of design constraint also lends itself to original concepts. I'm playing with a few ideas right now, I will post some of them up at a later time. Raising awareness of this community is vital. I think if more developers knew there was such a market, there would be more games released with audio accessibility. Anyway, I wish you guys the best of luck in your efforts and I hope to help in any way I can.

// cybereality