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.
But wait, what's that? A transport! Saved am I! Hark, over here! Hey nonny non, please help!