@24 -

My criticism isn't that NG abused them. My criticism is that NG sees this guy as "lesser" than the rest of the design team. Mind you this isn't just a problem with disabilities, it also happens with homophobia, misogyny ect, tokenism basically. But they get relegated to positions that don't get as much power over the full project, unlike the audio games community.

I've worked in the industry and my blind friend who works as my business end has been abused horribly by the industry, this is simply just... not true. Like there's a lot of abuse. And in my case I've experienced abuse because of my visual issues. It's not directly in game dev but I had to quit my job at IBM because I had to prove to them that the migraines were real. Yeah, if you know anything about migraines you know why thats not easy.

Regarding IOS usage - demonstrably false, this AFB publication from 2017 says apple dominates with 79%, little reason to assume it's improved much in the last 3 years. Do consider that most of the users on this forum are likely going to be more technologically adept because of the demographics on this forum vs blindness at large, but this still presents a serious power-control problem.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200304062 … 149519.pdf

I mean, you also don't represent all blind people and I've definitely talked to blind people who felt weird about it. Like it was pretty clear to some people that the social problems were the reason why they actually had a problem with being blind. The problem with your cure proposition is you're talking over people like that.

Its harder to see with blindness, but this issue is much more amplified in the deaf and autism community. With deaf people, totally deaf people have built their own cultures and languages. You HAVE to read about this because its absolutely fascinating: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/w … n-language

So, deaf people produce their own cultures. Meanwhile, autistic people, well, that's their whole life experience and autism's social difficulties are so abstract that its hard to even imagine what it would be like not being autistic. And so then you erase who that person fundamentally is.

Obviously this doesn't necessarily translate to blind people but you can see its really not this simple.

I think understanding other disability communities is really important to help contextualize disability in general. That's what I experienced and I really recommend people on this forum reaching out.

Brad, I never said a blind person never worked on it or that their contributions weren't meaningful. However, its accessibility consulting. He was paid to be a tester and make suggestions. That means that he had to submit to the choices of the developers. This actually proves my entire point. Also, it promotes archetype design, which means that all blind people are submitting to this guy's decisions, which is not something that will work with all blind people - an issue that has persisted across the industry for decades.

I'm surprised how you can't see how this is putting power in a large corporation's hands by

I also have a lot of criticisms with accessibility consulting in general because while I dont know this guy specifically a lot of them are assholes who guilt trip developers as a marketing tactic. They're petit bourgeois.

That's fine but its a little weird when you start talking for other disabled people then. I mean, not just you but almost everyone in this thread. That's kinda what I mean. Sure, have opinions, but don't be surprised when other disabled people call that crap out. Although tbh brad you're just giving your two cents so thats chill.

Look, Steve is allowed to feel any way he does about his work, that's not an excuse to ignore the larger sociological effects going on here. Its like how disability activists are still valid in their opinions but they're still part of a larger sociological system.

You want me to believe that your hunch that people on a gaming forum use android more than ios means that blind people in general use it more, in comparison to a study published by the AFB 3 years ago. I get that not everyone likes these orgs, but bruh.  I mean, the reason why blind people here are more familiar with android should be pretty obvious. But a lot of blind people are older and are less familiar with technology. That's where that number comes from and why its a problem. Obviously not everyone is a gamer, but games represent a sort of experimental ground for accessibility solutions that could help problems like this.

@23
If there is an inherent danger in curing blindness from birth, tell me what it is, and why society should go "We have a cure for blindness, let's not use it and run all these social services instead".  You need a very high standard of evidence if you're going to tell anyone who has a clue that we should let parents get away with not curing blind children.  You will find, even here on the thread we just had, that a majority of the people who are hesitant about a cure think it's because the vision won't be usable.  If that's the case, it *has* to be done when someone's a child, or you forever deny that child the choice.  And when it's not the case, a vast majority of the remaining people don't understand what vision is and clearly don't know enough to make the choice, or are hiding behind the "it's identity" line because otherwise we'd have to face objective reality.  You can't turn this into blind people have culture and it's society's fault without being an insensitive asshole because that's simply, objectively not the case, so for the sake of literally everyone stop it. 

To put this another way, are you advocating for PTsd culture?  Should we let parents beat their children so that we can continue the PTSD identity?  Do you even realize how these two things are the same?  I doubt it.  But I also bet you that if we put effort in, we could find people with PTSD who wouldn't take a cure as well, and you know, as long as they're adults, fine.  But not curing a child's blindness literally does as much with respect to poor life outcomes as beating them every day, and before you continue participating in such discussions you should think really hard on why saying that in exactly those words isn't an unreasonable position to take, and realize that that's the position you're arguing against.

What I see here is that you haven't dealt with your disability, and when someone else gives you an inch w.r.t. disabilities maybe not being so bad for them, you grab onto that side of the argument and take a mile because you need a justification to be pissed at the world to avoid coming to terms with it.

Alright Cam.

You lose all the knowledge that you gained from your perspective from being blind. Like the fact that you're even questioning this. There's also the vast amount of knowledge that we would lose about how the brain processes visual information, spacial information ect. Blindness in ferrets has been extremely important in understanding neurology.

As I explained in @27, other disabilities have even more to lose. Deaf people built their own languages (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/w … n-language). Autistic people will lose their entire identity, who they are.

Also, I'm NOT SAYING SOCIAL SERVICES. The problem is the HIERARCHY between abled people and disabled people, sighted people telling blind people how they work, non-PTSDs telling how PTSDs work. And even more generalized, we are telling people how their own body works when we dont even live them. That's the problem. And you are doing the same when you say "oh blindness is the sucking end all be all" because you represent one experience, not all experiences.

I get that deaf and autistic people don't matter to you when they're not validating your world view, but here's the thing, and what I don't get about your hostility - nobody's saying YOU SHOULDN'T BE TREATED. They're saying YOU SHOULD HAVE THE CHOICE. Yes, there are COMPLICATIONS but you can't just ignore all the other complications because you emphasize one end. And you can't just assume that people who DISAGREE with you are just stupid assholes who "don't get it". That's YOU who's the stupid asshole.

We all get your fucking point.

I never read your response to the first time i presented this but what is your opinion about people born with glaucoma then? I know people who bailed from the surgeries when they turned 18 because they were so traumatic. How is that not a problem?

And stop talking in blindness cures, blindness cures don't exist. Bodies are machines not ideals.

And at the same token you are forcing that child to go through the realities of that surgeries. Treatments aren't cures, they have consequences, they have struggles associated with them that you're forcing people through otherwise. And maybe some people, if the situation was more adapted towards blind living, would rather live blind than being traumatized. Like, jesus christ some of my friends have it BAD and I get I'm the token sightie but can I not say, hey my friend literally told me about when his eye blew up and all the pain his eyes caused him and how he just wished things were usable that maybe, we can think about what that means?

Am I not allowed to think about the context of my friend? Wow, its weird cuz we can talk about this just fine even if we come at different angles. Its cuz we know we're not telling each other "this is the way it has to be" its because we just are talking about it.

Oh here you are with this "disability identity" shit. Nobody even said identity. Again. And yet you still manage to pull it out of nowhere. Explain this magic trick to me.

Wow dude, maybe you should ask what PTSD people have to say about that instead of just assuming for us. Woah isn't that what you complained about with me? Weird how everyone else is starting to get the problem but not you.

Anyways, they already have "cures", its called "zapping you with a strong electro magnetic ray that fries your brain". Man I wonder why people are hesitant.

have you possibly considered that the "daily beating" is because everything sucks for blind people and how we treat them. Like i keep saying this isn't me saying oh technology can fix everything (honestly you're implying this very heavily). It's me saying that things could be different and we should try to focus on that.

This isn't even going into how blindness would be extremely difficult to cure in the way you propose because of how blindness is caused by a social interaction that is interfered by a wide variety of physical conditions. There will always be types of blindness missed by "cures", but accessibility can benefit all blind people.

Look can you just admit you tell people you don't like that they're just cope-posting? You really want people to respect you but you take a huge shit on everyone who disagrees with you and call them stupid and act like they're just crazy idiots. Damn I wonder why that might be a problem for someone with PTSD.

@OP Is everyone really assuming they know everything about PTSD, or do you have a why me complex and a maladaption to your condition. I'd bet the latter. Also, are people from your circle really agreeing with you because they care as much as you do, or is it because you do the equivalent of driving a truck and trailer loaded with TNT into the middle of it and light the fuse. You're trying to make this all revolve around you, but it just doesn't work that way. You can't take one disability and use the way in which you deal with it as a template for how you should deal with all disabilities.

@36, What you're saying doesn't make sense.

Apple didn't hold a gun to my head and say, hey you, buy our product, I brought it because other blind people brought it, who then wrote about it and how awesome it is.

Before that I had talks on nokia.

Android is now usable, so any blind person can go to a shop be it android or apple and use a phone.

The thing is Rachel, you're not blind, so don't know how we feel, blind people don't feel that apple is the big bad, or something like that and that's what you're saying to me, apple is using you blind people to gain profet, so? isn't that what every company does? What would you have them do, make a screen reader for every smartphone? Oh wait, they did Android and apple phones are both accessible.

As for curing/fixing blindness, I'd be all for it, if they're babies and wouldn't remember the opperation, I don't get the issue.

You say we'd lose out but we wouldn't, this cure would be happening now, not in the past, so we'd have all the blind stuff we do and if people who were older decided not to take the cure, they'd not have to.

If your issue with this is that we'd lose our identity, we wouldn't, we'd grow up as different people with sight; that's all.

Sure I'd not be the same brad as I am now, but, I wouldn't care because this Brad wouldn't exist.

That article is going to be above most people's level of understanding, including mine because Pubmed is for doctors, not laypersons. SO really what you're doing is saying that you want things a certain way and here's why... except the why would take several years of medical school at the very least, and probably a specialty in neuroscience to fully comprehend it. Also, you're focusing only on your condition when there are other people the trigger warnings are likely to help.

You basically came in here and started a dumpster fire, and don't like that we don't like it. I don't know what else to say. This whole thing has changed my opinion on you. i used to just think you were an advocate on the edgier side of things. OK, I get that, but now I'm just thinking wow, how cringy would it be if I ever saw her speaking on behalf of disabled people.

Alright now stop fighting over this performative bullshit. Nobody told you how to be blind in this thread, I was just talking about how official organizations are misleading developers and I was pissed off about it.

https://forum.audiogames.net/topic/3613 … ty-guides/

Read my actual OP here, and please talk about the contents in that OP. I actually have direct criticisms of accessibility that I wanted to talk about here and I'm interested in actual input. Genuinely frustrated as fuck that I've been able to talk about this problem to pretty much all my other disabled contacts. I'm trying to build a larger picture here and I really need the input of blind people instead of them just taking a shit.

Basically my criticism comes down to the power structures we have here. Like I guess another way to put it is that I'm trying to encourage the idea that blind-developed games in general shouldn't be viewed as inferior.

The problem is NG doesn't really fix this and in fact they actually reinforce that hierarchy because nobody blind worked directly on the development of the game, rather they used a consultant to develop it. And yes, this is better than nothing, but you can see how this is a hierarchy. Over here, we have games that were literally created from the ground up that are very popular among blind players, and basically this kind of movement basically reinforces that shit across the industry.

Its hard to talk about because its not a binary problem, like, oh NG is totally bad. (real talk they did way worse in other ways if you really want to read about the dev history of Last of Us 2). Rather, they're using the whole fact that all they did was hire an accessibility consultant to get this good press about how awesome their game is. And look, a lot of the time, people don't even realize that it was a specific consultant. I wasn't aware it was an outsourced resource but I still knew that they basically just got a consultant, which is effectively a tester.

That's the thing. Last of Us 2 is sighted people giving to the blind. I want it to be more open.

And the way I think we approach that is by challenging how we approach accessibility in general. This is what I was really trying to bring up in my OP, specifically. See not everyone has access to an expensive consultant and so they have to rely on these kinds of guides, and when they're spreading misinformation thats a serious problem.

So as you can see, there are only two options - follow this guide or hire an accessibility consultant. and for most people, thats one option.

The problem is these suggestions have questionable practices. For example, encouraging "fast travel" means that it encourages developers to think that accessible development = simpler games. Thus, this means that accessibility is kind of dumbed down for disabled people outside of their own development communities. These design patterns will also replicate elsewhere with other software we use too, so we can't just say, oh its just a gaming problem.

This is the most useful thing tbh. Although I would appreciate it if blind people didn't tell me how PTSD works, I'm mad about that because they're saying things that aren't true about me or any person I know with PTSD, and its a serious common misconception that has to be stopped. And its upsetting to see it propagated by such an important name that sighted devs are pointed to.

The problem is that the thread got hijacked and I had to keep defending myself. If you read the OP again I think you'll clearly see that it really wasn't about anything to do with talking over blind people but criticizing larger industry practices.

By the way, I really want to stress, that I'm talking about systemic pressures here. Not like, individual feelings. I dont want people to think I'm telling them how to feel about a situation. In a way I'm just probing the political context, and perhaps stirring interest in more actively engaged blind people.

Yeah yeah it sucks, options are very limited.

Actually, I made this thread because I'm trying to propose a new model for game design which again I've been experimenting with the Max thing (I'm seriously very sorry that we dont have anything to show yet our lives have been on fire because of coronavirus). I've been talking to other disabled people, cuz like, whats interesting is that motor disabilities really change up the accessibility model and really complicate things further. Blindness is one use case, but then you have all these other use cases and they all get kinda swept away with the current way we approach it.

I mean, not necessarily you, but many people are developers here.

But I think a good way to think of my proposition, "fuck around and find out" (and yes, I did pick that cuz its edgy and will piss off these guys). Like I said, the idea is instead of programming a game as this sighted (or blind for that matter) interactive environment and make additional use cases, you instead make a system that creates objects that can be interacted with.

So basically, for example, instead of using fast travel, you can use alternative input methods to quickly move to certain points of the map, but you still have to solve the puzzles. But, instead of being forced a specific input for a solution, the puzzle can be generalized, and then you can interact with the puzzle through different models.

How this would work is these objects would "talk" to the interactive component. They send signals to this component and translate it. This is actually how your senses work! They take that information and unfold it in their own unique way. So I think this model has a lot of power, but it won't be developed by a major corporation because it requires a very flexible open sourced design; so instead I'm trying to develop it with my partner, or rather build up to it. There's a lot of technical reasons why it isn't developed this way in the industry, mostly relating to privatization and labor costs. And I'm working with other disabled people ranging from just every day people to theorists to try to really feel this problem out.

Oh, and I called them soyboys because uh. hahaha. most of you haven't had to actually... deal with a lot of the more bureaucratic guys. I mean, the indie devs are fine and I actually see really great shit and encourage them whenever I see them come along. but like. Im just saying I've had some very angry twitter DM conversations with some of these people actually running the show.

I would have had him as a developer on the project. Like, an actual, active developer.

It's kind of hard to say it in this case because the guy's job is literally being a contractor so it wouldn't be a fluid transformation directly, but like. He's not a developer working on the game. None of these games have actual blind input except for making sure its ok for blind people to play. And sure that's neat but they're basically getting credit for what the contractor did. And its cool that he enjoyed his work and he did a great job; but at the same time that doesn't take away from the larger systemic issue at hand here.

The game I'm currently working on a tech demo of I don't have a blind programmer on it because its game maker (taking my old colors engine to save time) but a blind person wrote the initial TTS script of Braillemon, and in this game a friend of mine who is totally blind from glaucoma has a major role on the business end as well as helping me with writing, character design ect.

You see what I mean?