As long as its something we turn on and isn't on by default, then yes, but keep in mind that every studio will not have the budget to implement the same kinds of features as other larger ones. There will be a lot of push back from sighted gamers, though probably short-lived,and there will be an equally positive movement from players who think its cool that accessibility is a thing, maybe they have a family member or friend with a disability, and they think its cool that the publishers / studios are designing inclusively. Just remember that when you stick your head out, expect violent reactions, at least at first, though most of it would be targeted at the studio.

@4, those developers who you spoke to and who told you that are very much correct. It is incredibly hard to add accessibility to something that is already released to the public and/or that is already fully developed than it is to start from the beginning. Its equivalent to you attempting to, for example, completely rewire your house, or reinstall the plumbing of that house (or something equally as foundationally dangerous) to that house rather than just building your house from scratch. In that sense the same can be taken to development of a game: you have to completely rewrite the parts you want accessibility in to have accessibility, and when it comes to things like graphics, that can be incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible. And while it would be awesome to talk to the studios themselves, we must also keep in mind to talk to the publishers too, because they call the shots. (Of course, that doesn't apply if the studio is a publisher itself, like EA is.)

Simple answer; yes.

Something like text to speech for menus SHOULD be very quick and easy, as it SHOULD be taken care of at engine level. Unfortunately it isn't currently taken care of at engine level, but I'd hope that once developers start getting their head around text to speech properly that they'll start putting pressure on the engines to did it once and for all instead of every studio having to do their own implementation.

As far as gameplay goes the easiest sell is accessibility features that benefit all players. The work done on Killer Instinct is a wonderful example of that, with blind accessibility considerations such as ensuring that every sound is unique and adding in an extra volume slider to be able to adjust the volume of HUD sounds just make the game better for everyone.

There will of course be studios who want to go the extra mile and dedicate resources to features that are solely for blind gamers. But it's worth remembering that blindness doesn't exist in a vacuum, it can be difficult enough to try to get resources for barriers relating to much more common conditions such as colorblindness or hearing loss, so any opportunity that can be done to do things easily add cheaply and to benefit all players is really valuable.

There are lots of quick wins and low hanging fruit available, go for them first.

In a word, absolutely! But it should always be an option that can be disabled, sighted players won't need or want them, so why force it on them. Also, it shouldn't be just one control that turns  on or off everything, different people have different levels of blindness, or a single person might be experiencing progressive vision loss. The totally blind will need or want most of the accessibility options, but someone who is only partially blind might want only a few.

@6, I know. I'd advocate for the keeping of controls as they are; most games these days allow you to either modify the button mapping or alter it to another preset one that suits you more comfortably. Keeping cheat bots out is practically a top priority, far more so than accessibility is simply because cheat bots are far more destructive to the game than accessibility could ever be. Granted, overdoing accessibility can certainly destroy a gameplay experience but cheat bots have this bad habit of utterly annihilating a player base for a game and thereby making it completely hopeless for continuation.
@7-8, for the engine-level accessibility, do keep in mind that most mainstream games choose to use in-house game engines, so adding that kind of accessibility would definitely be possible, though I hope its togglable -- I'd hate to have it always on, always off, etc. There also, like 9 said, needs to be a loooooooooot of accessibility controls so we can configure it to our liking. I have been in discussion with several developers of the Godot game engine though to see if we can make the editor accessible, and while I never started the thread I definitely jumped on-board and gave my input. Last I heard someone was going to see about either making accessibility with the editor through the scripting language they have, GDScript, or by using a headless editor so you can do pretty much everything from the command-line. (I suggested making the editor GUI directly through the C++ code itself, but none of us really wanted to go through all that code considering how complex the editor is.) I'll probably go and get the ball rolling for UE4 and accessibility; hopefully I can establish something like what Godot is doing where they either use an integrated scripting language or interface instead of having to completely rewrite half the editor.

How about an option on the last screen of the installer that asks if you want the accessibility options turned on, as well as a hot key in the game to toggle them on and off.

The big challenge will be to come up with a hot key everyone can agree upon, otherwise each developer will end up choosing something different.

Just look at Windows and MacOS, I'll bet that just like Windows, MacOS has a hot key to turn on its screen reader, and I'll bet the hot key Apple chose is nowhere even close to similar to what Microsoft chose.

@Cyco:

thanks for informing me about that, since I do not have a xbox, I was not aware of such information.

@Orko:

I really like your idea. let's say, a checkbox for installing or enabling the accessibility features.

Hello everyone, karate25 here. In answer to the question yes. An imphatic yes for consoles as well as pc games. I think it's long overdo and I think that even though we're a minority as some have stated and a fact that I completely agree with and fully accept, I believe also that the pushback will become less and less as the sighted community grows more and more accustomed to seeing totally blind gamers inside of their virtual worlds playing alongside them. They'll start to think nothing more of us being there than one of their friends or relatives. This is so exciting but again I know that it'll take time. But it sounds as though the laws comeing into effect will make it easier.

I am glad to see all the responses that this thread is getting.
It is always wonderful to get different points of view on things like this.

I've been seeing a lot of stuff over twitter over the past few days, and here's a question I have. How much is too much. What I mean by that is how much can you really alter the game and its still the same underlying game with the same relative level of difficulty. You can change button configs, OK that's been in games for years and years now, but accessibility features that do more than switch to a grayscale mode, or a high contrast one, change UI scaling to make text easier to read, etc. So where is the point where accessibility features start to come into play that make games easier. In my opinion, they already are too easy. You get these games that have tutorials that hold your hand at first, then you already know what to do. Also, this concept of if you fail a mission so many times, you can say OK, make it easier, or just pass me on which I kind of have mixed opinions on. On one hand, I don't like it because it just means you can beat the game with a minimum of effort, on the other, think if you paid $60 for a top tier game and you literally can't get past a certain spot, kind of sucks if you literally can't play any further, and that may or may not have to do with accessibility. For instance, some people just might not possess the coordination, even though they don't have a disability.

Already, we're seeing things that bypass quicktime events, rather than trying to find a way to work inside the system and be able to still experience that part of the game. Also, let's say a particular game is sort of a button masher, and someone comes along and says, I can't press the buttons that fast, I have X that is preventing me from doing it. OK, so they turn on this mode that the developers included that means you can either hold a button down, or use a mod layer, like you press one button or press and hold one button while you press another to do this type of action. Now, someone with no disabilities can find this in the settings, and be like oh hey nice, and well, if they do it on their own time, who cares, they bought the game, and they should be able to play it how they like. It's not something I would necessarily agree with, but its their game, their time, their business, and they can play it how they like. But, a lot of games have online modes, if not exclusively online, or primarily so, with maybe a single player story that's sort of secondary. Now we have issues. Let's say Jenny has cerebral palsy, and needs controller accommodations to  play whatever online game. It makes things on a level that she can cope with due to limited dexterity or mobility or motor control. Sam, Jenny's 11 year old cousin sees her playing and knows this game, and realizes she's playing it differently. He knows when he plays this game there's a lot more going on a lot quicker. He wonders why Jenny's doing so well but doesn't really seem to be playing as furiously as he has to in order to play at the same level. He finds out (either by asking his older cousin, or just by exploring the menus of the game) about these accessibility options, turns them on, now Sam, an 11 year old able-bodied boy is playing the game online even though he doesn't need the accommodations.  What's more, because he doesn't need the accommodations, he actually is doing better than most other people on the game because he has normal dexterity, mobility, and motor control, so he can be ready. Sure, its weird to get used to at first, because you're not hitting buttons rapidly, but he eventually figures out a system.

Now, how is this to be dealt with, and I know it seems a little further down the road, but I tend to look for problems that are a little further down the road since that gives adequate time to come up with a solution. To me, Sam is cheating, even though he's not using mods or hacks, or external programs that allow you to inject code or data into memory, etc. But how would they ever detect this type of thing? DO you see where I"m headed with this, if the publishers ban someone, and say they were cheating, how will they know for sure. If they mistakenly do this, and it gets out that they banned someone who had a disability for using the accessibility features of the game, there will be a huge backlash against that developer / publisher. The media will have a field day about it. But, the people in charge need to make sure that people are playing fairly, so how do they do that?

Post 21, I fully agree with, and post 22 also has a really good example, and its one reason Danny and I are pretty much against game accessibility in mainstream titles (people will find a way to seriously abuse it). Now I'm just resigned to it, I've tried making my points and no one listens. We could do medical checks of everyone who plays but that would take way, way too long. We can't really send option sets over the network for the publisher to see so that they can do the medical checks either, again that would take way too long. I personally can't think of any solution to this. Which is why, in a sense, while I think it would be cool, I just see no way of ensuring that only disabled people use it, which is why I'm against it.