Richard and Sander, Thank you for your efforts in this matter, surely a small detail next to your busy lives. It gladdens me to know that you're both forward thinking administrators who want the community to be able to evolve as new platforms and types of games arise.

And let me be not remiss. Thank you to the moderators who do their job voluntarily.

Kai

@Figment, please don't take this as an offense. I am not trying to start a flame war or anything remotely similar. Nobody said we agree with what Valve is doing. Nobody said it was OK for Valve to ignore our requests. But this is not about Valve. We are not advertising the platform, but the games within, which have nothing to do with Valve except for the publishing part. Please do take this into consideration and think about the independant developers that actually devote their time to making these games fully playable.

Thanks.

@figment, I'm sure all of us would love to hear a good alternative that also enables people to play the games. Correct me if I'm wrong, but so far most people who dislike tolerance for accessible steam-based games have themselves done nothing to increase the chance that steam will become more accessible. As an example, Some people have said in the past that we as a community should take a more agressive stance with valve, claiming that valve's continuous refusal to make steam more accessible infringes their basic human rights. But so far none of those people have actually done anything which causes improvement. So my opinion is that if they're going to talk the talk, they should also walk the walk. So I urge anyone complaining about this change to AudioGames.net to think for a moment about what they would do instead. At least we are doing something. Whether that is the best option, I don't know. But it's still better than doing nothing.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your replies. If you're interested, have a look at the following article published a couple of days ago on Gamespot:

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/consol … 0-6439754/

The game industry, like many other industries, is most likely going to evolve into a service industry. That means in the (very near) future you will not be purchasing copies of games (which you now own) anymore, but that you will be paying a (monthly) subscription for (a month of) gameplay (and will not own any game anymore. Similar to Netflix or Spotify. Goodbye information age, hello experience age. You could focus on Steam now but maybe it is wise to browse the horizon for these future services and whenever one pops up, challenge their accessibility immediately. Hopefully we can stimulate accessibility into a unique selling point amongst such services.

Concerning Steam: I had another look at the change.org campaign to make Steam accessible for blind gamers and I think we should have another go at that. A campaign I mean. We may also have some people in our personal network in the industry who might want to help contacting Gabe directly.

Who would ever pay a monthly fee to play games?  Oh wait... forget I said anything!  This is a wonderful idea! 

Hello all and I think that adding games from the Steam thing is good if they are accessible. I had heard that some of the gamebooks from Choice were there, but I've never used the Steam thing. What do you do? Just go there, get your game and download it to your computer? Can you play the game once on your computer without running the Steam thing or is this like a game engine so you have to run it like the older Inform TXT games from interactive fiction archive.

@Deng

Steam is a game client that you use to purchase and download games through. It is also a DRM system for the purchased games so it must be running for your games purchased through Steam to run.

The problem is that while there may be some accessible games on the Steam platform, the Steam client is known to have accessibility issues that Valve Software refuses to correct.

Figment: Lets call a spade a spade. No where has Valve declared its unwillingness to modify the Steam client to comply with accessibility guidelines, so I'll take issue with your declaration that the company is refusing to accommodate. It may not be a top priority update, it may not be part of its current plans, and we may not even see it for a while, but there are no statements that I know of where they outright refuse to try and conform to accessibility standards. Lets take Sony and Microsoft as examples. We never expected accessibility features for their console platforms, and yet they appeared. The same could happen with Steam in the future.

Valve's lack of response to the change.org petition does not constitute a statement of refusal -- I'm sure that many, many other change.org petitions go unanswered. You can't honestly think that just because it's on change.org, people will automatically respond to or abide by it. Can you imagine the chaos if such were the case? Government to replace politicians with the currently popular celebrities in response to a change.org petition. Someone help the world.

Do I agree with Valve's dismissal of the petition? Of course not. Do I wish we would've gotten some response? Absolutely. However, we can't know that the response hasn't happened behind doors, and that a change might be in the works. Conversely, we can't know that Valve even gave the petition due process, being that it pertains to a small market footprint.

Things being what they are, Steam is still perfectly useable, if you but take the time to make a few tweaks which require no system changes or jumping through hoops -- all the changes are made to the client, or to the shortcut which launches the client.

Kai

Hello everyone,

Richart: Thank you for the positive decision. I'm fighting for the game accessibility everyday and it's not really a easy task. I did a lot regarding Skullgirls and there's more to come in the future.

Regarding steam, I know one person who knows someone from the team behind this platform. I'll try to get in touch with this person so MAYBE Steam will be more accessible in the future. Also, I think restarting steam accessibility petition will be really a good decision.