Steam is the most inaccessible platform I know of... I can use it because I have limited vision and under magnification, I can read the screen. I cannot navigate it with a screen reader though. I do have steam games, about 90 or so. But for the blind community, it would be a bad choice because of how inaccessible it is. Also I don't know anything about getting a game on steam.

Steam is certainly the most popular PC choice for games, but getting on it is another question entirely. Discoverability and getting on Steam is a common complaint in sighted gaming, and the idea of an entrenched culture that votes for a particular set of games is definitely a concern, although Steam isn't necessarily above hand picking them sometimes either.

You may find this link helpful: (http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/FAQ.php)

It seems a petition's also been started for steam to be more accessible to the non-sighted community:
(https://www.change.org/p/valve-corporat … red-people)

Regardless of how accessible the client is, I won't buy any game that requires running a distribution client along with the game.

In my experience when I did use clients like Steam and Origin, and others. When there was a problem running the game, nine times out of ten, the problem was with the distribution client and not the game.

Although I don't know how well it did or not, if I recall correctly, Grail to the Thief is on Steam, it can also be purchased through the author's web site as well. I believe he uses PayPal for that. It would be interesting to know what percentage of his sales were through Steam. I wouldn't be surprised if he sells more copies outside of Steam.

The last time I looked at gog.com they had no client of any type, however, I'm not sure they'd be appropriate, as their name, Good Old Games, implies, they primarily sell old games. So if your games are new, I doubt they'd even be interested. But it wouldn't hurt anything to ask if you wanted to.

hello dentin,

I make use of the bgt engine, so it is pretty likely it only will be released for windows machines only.

But the game won't be fully done for a large period of time. i am editting the first areas a little before i will add more content.
But is it possible with guidedog, when you want to add me to the system, to post early bèta's and when we want to start selling the thing to add the price?

just curious.

greetz mike

Loll Daigonite, Audiogames own client" is pretty much what Guidedog is, though the eventual plan I believe according to the documentation on it's site is to have all sorts of games sold through it. at the moment it has audiogames, the Alteraeon mud, and will have stelleraeon when it is released, though I think Dentin's eventual plan is to have graphical games on there as well thus encouraging the hole intigration business.

@Pelantas, on the subject of betas, might I suggest you post them here to begin with for feedback if nothing else, sinse people's input could likely help develop your work into something of commercial standard.

hi,

I received your mudmail via alter dentin. i will reply as soon as i have completed this message.

This message is ment to telling the community what will be included in the next beta of your_adventure. if this belongs somewhere else i will move it:

1. redisigned world. it makes use of the menu system, but you can't access all locations from a single menu anymore. you now have to walk to a location, by using the menu's, like the dark grimoire uses his navigation.
2. redisigned sewer system. there isn't an option "fight a creature" anymore. you should enter the sewers and walk around a little before you will encounter something.
3. as you probably have guessed, random encounters (currently only in the sewers).As you notice, this is quite some work to redisign. but i am sure the community will love it.

Thats all i cna come up with for now...

I am not sure when thisrelease will be ready, but i am aiming on pretty soon.

Greetz mike

@sightless combat, bare in mind "accessible" in the sense i mean it means that a blind person can do something with equivalent effort to a sighted person, not whether a thing is possible.
So, if something requires sighted help ocr etc,  then it is not accessible pure and simple. This isn't to say that you or anyone else shouldn't! use it if you like, that's a personal matter, only that in the definition of "accessible games" recommended by this site it isn't.

Consider, there are blind people who quite successfully have learnt to play the original super mario brothers by trial and error, eg, hold right for so long, then press jump and hold for so long, then run right for so long. Theoretically, you could play a large percentage of games this way if you expended enough effort or indeed if you had a constant sighted assistant telling you to do what when.

This doesn't mean mario is an accessible game though. A sighted person will still complete the game faaaaaar! more quickly and with far less memorization and over all effort expended than a blind person using this method.

That is the deal with steam. Until it is equally possible for a blind person to use with the same effort as a sighted person, ie, all elements on pages are directly readable with a screen reader, there are no sections requiring sighted assistance or captchas etc, steam will remain inaccessible in the strict sense. Whether people have the patience to use it (or a ready sighted assistant), is up to them, however accusing someone of  "lacking patience" is probably not helpful, after all would you tell a paraplegic person in a wheel chair "oh that building doesn't need a ramp, just crawl up the stairs on your hands dragging your legs behind you, you just lack patience" if the parapelegic stated that she/he didn't want to go to said building? methinks not.

@Pelantas, sounds good, though bare in mind what I said about judgement previously.  what you had before was fine, but if a player is just hitting a button and waiting for a timer, that might not be such a good move gameplay wise sinse your lyable to lose their interest.
This is why Drakor has combat with the  chosen set of skills, while crafting is entirely walk away from the computer automatic.

@dark
When I made that point about a lack of patience, I was merely referring to the quick dismissals the majority of people here appear to give Steam as a platform.  Additionally, I pulled you up on your wording simply because you had not explained your now clarified meaning on accessibility.

I appreciate the angle you're taking this from now and see why you think steam is inaccessible and I agree with you that Steam should be made accessible to make the playing field more open and equal relatively speaking.  However, regardless of how much hope I have for the idea, Valve being Valve I doubt it'll happen until new more diversity-centric management come into force.

@daigonite
I disagree with your point on Steam being inaccessible just because blind people don't use it for two reasons.  One of these is that blind people, myself included, do use it and the second is my subjective point that it's not the community's fault but Valve as developers and publishers of the platform.  They should be the ones to introduce these changes and hopefully if the appropriate laws etc are passed/worked through in certain areas, that shouldn't be a long time coming.  But we can keep up hope regardless of what happens.

Hope I've made myself clear on all points that I did not intend to offend anyone with the above statements and my previous post in this discussion.

@Daigonite, I agree that audiogames can appeal to sighted people, indeed I confess as someone who mostly played low vision playable console games growing up I was surprised at how immersive audiogames could be, particularly sinse I do confess that reading some descriptions before taking a friend's recommendation I feared they would be too simple.

However the problem with steam's current access as I said above is that old chestnut, namely blind people don't have money and the fat companies like valve don't care about anyone who won't pay them. Generally speaking in terms of access, you can get on with access best when you can speak to the people who do the designing and care about what their making, but if a company has got so huge that the design is all done by committee and the programmers are a bunch of hundreds of code monkies who make up for their lack of ability to do original work by shear weight of drudgery, then there really is nothing to address access wise.
it's true of Nintendo, it's true of Capcom (both of whom i've tried to communicate with directly in the past), and it's also true of Valve.

Sadly we're living in the age when individuals mean less and less, but that's capitalism for you.

There is however an alternative, sinse I do think guide dog will get to the point when functions like those you describe wil be added, albeit that depends upon dentin, after which it will give the functionality of steam,  albeit without the advertising.

@Sightless combat, glad that comment on access isclear. The deffinition used is, (I will say), a formal one from my own doctoral thesis, and actually it's what gets used to determine what games this site supports, ie, what is in the db and what gets news. this is why we won't post news about the release say of the next Mortal Kombat or street fighter, not with the menu learning and sound learning and inability to see the distance between you and an opponent's fireball but need to workout by time lapse after soun. playable? yes, accessible? no.
The same issue occurred with haypy monster on the Iphone. Yes, all the controls were labeled, but in such a completely illogical way that finding anything is a strain, (for example the back button is labeled warehouse x), while there are several moments of poke and hope vo use required. Does this mean people shouldn't play haypy monster or mortal kombat? Hell no! I've spent lots of my time playing low vision playable games as I said, however I'd in no way say I had equal access to those, or that a totally blind person has equal access to mortal kombat or steam for that matter, indeed I think  the lengths that people go to to play graphical games are quite a testiment to some people's fortitude, but the fortitude of some players isn't a reason to let designers off the hook, just the same way that just because some paraplegic person might expend the effort to crawl up those stairs that doesn't mean the building shouldn't have a ramp.

Hope this makes sense.

Shrug, I think another issue people seem to be forgetting in regards to something being playable if one put enough effort into something to play it an a programmer should inser tthis change here real fast is that most players don't know how their game was made.  Sure it may look simple to do in concept, but if the developer designed the game to the point where they have to mess around with a lot of components to make this change work everywhere, and ten bug test for unseen errors, the time it takes to put in one simple change could cost a lot more money than what they get from the blind community since our player base for graphical games is small. 

    Half the time I find the easiest developers to reach out to are those who are extremely responsive during the development of the game and the game is mainly in free demo or beta.   I've seen companies with the makers in the community respond to access changes, and our recent wasteland example reached to an independent developer. 

    Also, unless someone really tried hard to work existing laws in trying to intergrate accessibility into Steam, the issue as Dark stated before is that the company running it is big, and is existing very fine without the blind community.  To put this in prospective, if Steam had an option to work on new features for the cliet, are they going to work on new social features and advertisement/other developer tools or people to put more stuff on their sight, which will attract thousand and thousands of new users, or access changes that will probably attract a few hundred, or even less than a hundred people?

     HOnestly, the only way your going to convince large developers to make access changes to stuff where a blind community is currently non-existant is if you tickle their need to gain more profit from the change, and considering what profit probably means to bigger companies, a change that would attract blind players that would add neary a hundred thousand or  more dollars to their stream of profits.   The issue is that we currently lack a large enough and united enough population of graphical game players who are blind to make a strong case for this, and videogames are not exactly considered a vital product for a person to function or be content. 

     Also though, I think another problem with trying to amass a large enough population of graphical game users is that people's sense of fun is vastly different.  Sure, some people find joy in conquering a hard level in a sighted game while blind, spending hours getting it just righ tto complete a ew battles to a checkpoint.  However, others find that more of a chore and a colossal waste of time and money, and would more likely forma  unied group of people thinking these attempts at playing sighted games are stupid, and be larger than the group playing.   Considering most people reactions with games like swamp, who hated mouse controls when starting, despite the game being accessible, these people would probably not even considerdownloading the demo of a sighted game and immediately shaft the idea before trying.  This is sad however, as this kind of hurts any attempts at amassing a large enough group to make a case for a company to earn profits from access changes. 

   Okay, now for a question of my own.  How is the Steam community.   Is it a fairly decent sight in which one can easily find conversation and plotting on games to play, or is it something with close populations to 4chan users, who if they saw an attempt for access changes, would form a massive troll group to spamm crash ext for screen readers, and harass blind users?  Kind of want to know as usually a group of the second kind could fall under the perception a few sighted friends of mine have with access changes.   The fear that making a game more accessible would dampen or degrade the experience of the sighted user.  Obviously in any cases this is probably not true, and there are probably thousands of ways for a developer to include access changes that do not disturb the original gameplay, or in fact can enhance it ( Like Adventure to Fate).