2016-09-21 01:37:41

OK, I have seen this all over the place and I just have to say something about it because it doesn't make any sense to me. Blind people get their hopes up over and over and over again and get thinking that all new products will be accessible. This is folly on their part, because they get into this state where everything is a disappointment when it turns out not to be accessible. What I'd do is start out thinking that its not going to be accessible and what to do in that case. I also don't right nasty letters to them, o emails whatever you want to call it these days. I write out a well constructed email with points, being polite the whole time, discussing why it would be adventageous if they would put in some effort to getting a product accessible. I set out basically to say that I know its not an overnight fix, and I know that in some cases, it is not practical, like with games that have been written from the ground up to be graphical.

The fact is, people, that we, the blind community are a minority, and that the rest of the world is going happily about their lives, doing their own thing, they have a vision on how to do things. There are those, of course, that have been monumental in providing accessible products, and support and training for said products.

Laws are changing, and now companies are slowly but surely needing to consider accessible interfaces, GUI, screen reader / braille support. The fact is, that they may not even consider us. It's not as though they don't care at all, they are just so much the majority that it doesn't cross their mind.

So just remember that the next time you get your hopes up over something, I'm not criticizing anyone individually or singling anyone out, just suggesting a better route for all. And, remember that when you email a developer they don't really know most of the time what's going on, so the more polite, and impressionable you are, the better received you will be, and the more results you can hope to see, if you see positive communications from them.

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2016-09-21 02:01:00

I agree. It sucks when something isn't accessible, but there might be developers who have never even met a blind person.

A while ago, I contacted a company called Natural Machines that's trying to produce a 3D printer for food, such as pasta and that sort of thing. I told them that it would be neat if that kind of thing was accessible. They told me that they would have to talk to the engineers about that. I don't know if they were just blowing me off or what, but it was an acceptable response.

Another experience I had was with a company called Imzy, which is a new social media platform that's in beta. Imzy doesn't currently play very nice with screen readers at all, so I contacted them about it and offered to help if they needed help. They told me that they were already considering how to make their site more accessible.

So yes, there are reasonable people out there who may consider making products accessible. All it takes is a well-written request to consider accessibility. As for those people who simply don't care, I'd say stay polite and get more people on it, even sighted people. If companies see that making things accessible is something customers want, it may cause them to seriously consider it. However, sending nasty e-mails and making demands doesn't give a very good impression. Consider this. You're representing the rest of the blind community when you send such messages, and if you send nasty messages and make demands, you're giving all of us a bad rep.

2016-09-21 10:28:21

The general problem seems to be that while those who make or design items and programs, the engineers and programmers etc tend to be very nice creative people who want to make whatever they create accessible to as many people as possible, the actual company staff themselves, the executives and share holders won't do anything unless it increases their amount of prophet and since as a baseline there isn't much prophet in accessibility have little interest in such.
this means unless you can actually talk to the people who do the making and just get fobbed off with the publicity adviser or their manager, you will be on a none starter no matter how reasonable you happen to be. Really, the size of the company is extremely proportional to how much of an arse they are and how much they actually will do in terms of accessibility, or such has always bene my experience.

This is one reason i don't really myself hold out much hope for the likes of Sony or Capcom to start producing accessible games, but do see a lot of milage with independent developers.

the problem is there are several opposing forces at work here.
first is the problem that Ironcross is correct, most things are just not designed! to be accessible simply by virtue of the fact that most of the world isn't visually impared, this can be put down to an oversite.
then however is the much nastier and more devisive problem of  generation of prophet, indeed it has happened in the past that developers have told me they'd love to add access features but can't justify them in terms of making actual prophet from their games.

Finally however there is something at the back of this, which is that to be brutally and obviously honest yes things should! be designed with blind people in mind, or at least when requested to make design alterations people shouldn't be complaining.
You wouldn't say to a paraplegic "Oh I'm sorry the world is designed for people with legs, so just crawl up that flight of steps on your hands since it's too difficult to put in a ramp for your wheel chair and doesn't make me enough prophet"

In a perfect world there would be a cast iron law that you could put into play and have any access proposal reviewed by an expert, and after said review the company would be forced! to implement said proposal, the way it is now illegal not to have wheel chair access to a public building.

Of course, we're not living in that perfect world, and blind people don't have much power, so we need to practice the arts of persuasion and compromise, albeit remembering that what we're striving for in the end is! that full level of access which everyone else gets by virtue of having eyeballs, not some sort of half arsed effort.

so, yes, if there is a game that could be playable if the images were labeled certainly contact the company and ask politely if the fix could be made and explain how. However, equally if the company then respond with "well you can push the buttons at random or get someone sighted to help, don't tell them "oh okay then" tell them politely that they are not being reasonable.

I do agree that not all lack of access is malicious, however there is still a lot of greed and just plane prejudice out there, though equally if you can talk to the actual designers as opposed to the bean counters it's amazing how much you can! get done.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2016-09-21 10:37:23

I agree.
Not everything can be designed with accessibility in mind, but talking to people who are helping with accessibility side of thigns could help. There are, as has already been said, a lot of cases where people from companies haven't met any blind people, so that gets a bit more tricky then. The best thing to do is to not get angry.

2016-09-21 15:08:13

Tell me about it. Despite the fact that I've had vision problems my whole life, I've never had any exposure to, or even thought about,blindness until I lost my own vision to glaucoma.

And then there are companies like Valve who have been approached about the possibility of making Steam accessible, and so far they have not been receptive to the idea.

So some people have come up with a way to make it some what accessible, unfortunately this just gives Valve more incentive to just ignore our requests for accessibility.

2016-09-21 19:42:17

We haven't approached valve for a while, there's still some... figuring out to do before we try again. Do we send them all the links of games that are fully accessible with screen readers in steam and see if that justifies it, well, I don't know if that will work. I seriously think it will take some mighty convincing, backing even, to get them to listen and I do not know if we are ready for such a task yet.

2016-09-22 11:02:23

Personally I'm not entirely convinced valve will ever do anything about access. they are too huge a company for the people that actually matter to even here the access requests, let alone have the power to do anything about it.

Certainly feel free to try again with another petition and so on since it's always worth a try and Valve might prove the one exception, but until the law is changed to give disabled access a bit more power in terms of priority once companies decide something isn't going to be good enough for the almighty prophet margin that is usually that.

Indeed when I have spoken to companies like Capcom and Nintendo it's not even possible to speak! to the people making the design dicisons since they're all in a bunker under a mountain in Japan somewhere and you just get fobbed off with the publicity advisers, who actually have no power to put in any design change requests anyway.

So while I would definitely support giving it a try, I'm not going to hold my breath, particularly given the amount of effort that has already! been made, and Valve's response, ---- or lack of.

What would help considerably more is if someone designed an accessible interface or skin to interact with the steam client, to aide in setting up the account and installation, so people could run accessible games afterwards.

I don't mean an alternative client since I suspect Valve doesn't allow interaction, but something you can run along side the steam client which for example uses Sapi to handle input and output of text during account setup and game installation, without having to mess with ocr, clicking with no knolidge or the like.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2016-09-22 12:07:19

Hi.
One other problem also is that it is harder for blind people to reach out to bigger companys for their accessibility needs. Where smaller companys might be happy about everyone who joines their user base, larger companys already have theirs and can just ignore those requests and concentrate on things to make their product even better.
Sure, sometimes it is quite the blowback when something isn't accessible and the developer isn't willing to improve on that or implement accessibility features. But hey, we aren't the world and just a minority and we need to find other ways then, this is a fact that some blind people just don't want do understand these days, at leased I sometimes have that feeling.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2016-09-22 12:42:59

the problem simber is that however reasonable we can be with people who do! make accommodations, saying "we aren't the world and just a minority" just won't do.

In the 1960's, black people weren't allowed on busses in America. Would you suggest they said "well we aren't the world and just a minority so never mind?" Would you suggest a paraplegic said that if they were unable to get into a public building due to a flight of steps?

While some people definitely take it too far, it is trivially, or at least theoretically true that denial of access requests is effectively discrimination. In a perfect world there would be a recourse regarding that discrimination such as the law I mentioned surrounding public buildings and ramps for wheel chairs.
Since we don't live in that perfect world we need to negotiate and be reasonable, and a major part of negotiation also includes recognizing the difficulty of access provisions to those providing them and appreciating the trouble it might take to provide them, however don't confuse "negotiate" with "capitulate"

It's again a balancing act, but ultimately if we follow the "well we're just a minority never mind" attitude to it's ultimate conclusion we won't end up doing anything, ---- hell if I followed that attitude I'd either have to live with my parents or starve given that when I go into a shop i need to ask someone for assistance getting things for me.

Indeed that is a perfect example.
In a perfect world all products would be brailled or otherwise accessible (say with a hand held barcode scanner that spoke). We don't live in that world however so must ask a shop assistant to assist in getting shopping. This is again, absolutely reasonable, after all we are legitimate customers and as I said just saying "Well we can't read the products so never mind" won't do.

Such a thing is however, still outside what the shop assistant usually does and thus our request, even though we are making an access request, needs to be done with consideration for said assistant and the work they'll do collecting and reading items in the shop.

making it a demand or an expectation, or treating the assistant just as a means to an end is not only severely unpleasant and bad for disability relations generally, but also just plane rude!

Indeed not treating others! as just means to an end is a major part of living compitantly with a disability.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2016-09-22 12:56:13

Hi.
Well if you ask me, the equalisation between blind and black people is a bit far fetched, isn't it? Black people were actively discriminated and used as slaves, while blind people are, well, accepted in modern culture.
Also, black people aren't a minority at all.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2016-09-22 15:04:16

If you think blind people are accepted in modern culture, ask yourself how often you see a blind character in a tv series who is actually a reasonable character not either a pathetic blind person or a super human.

Your correct The paralell isn't quite the same, since in America it took a change of law rather than physical alterations to fix the equality of black people with respect to busses, but it's surprising how similar many of the attitudes such as avoidence sterriotypes etc can be.

This isn't to say to go too far the other way and become arsy about it, but really it's amazing how much collective attitudes doaffect people's lives.

Take my mum for example, back in the sixties when she was a teenager she'd spent her entire life in a school for the blind with positively dickensian rules, and when she qualified she was told streight off "there are only three jobs blind people can do, typing, telephony, or physio therapy" (she chose the physio).


As I said this isn't to go too far the other way either, since being reasonable is important, but so is recognizing that yes, society's attitude does matter, and no, society's attitude towards disabled people in general and indeed particularly towards those with very visible and none trendy disabilities such as blindness aren't good.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2016-09-22 22:19:30

Hi.
Well, I have to admit that I don't know the situation for blind or disabled people in other cuntrys like the US, I just know the situation over here in Germany, and from my own personal experiences, it is quite well.
There is a city in Germany called Marburg which is often said to be the city of blind people. This might sound strange, but well, it is true.
There is the only good school for blind people there which not only teaches you things like in a normal school for the sighted or blind, you as a student also have the ability for orientation training, assistance training in tasks of the dayly lives like cooking and stuff.
Also, when you are finnished with school, they are also assisting you in finding a place at university, help you finding a flat or a living space.
The people there are ver'y friendly, sometimes to friendly when it comes to help a blind person, but that's a thing for another topic.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2016-09-22 23:06:14

Well Simba Germany is I think somewhat better on a social angle, but still has it's issues. My lady lived in Germany for 17 years, and several things she relates like blindengeld (hope I've spelled that right), and other things in germany sound very progressive and not similar to things in the Uk.

then again she still relates issues of for sexample being ignored by others in new situations and the occasionally less good attitude she encountered even in Germany.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2016-09-23 00:12:05

All good points, a little rise in the maturity level of those who choose to reach out to companies, politeness goes a long way.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united