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Quake For the Blind
Kirby-meister writes: "An interesting article on The Boston Globe talks of a company, ZForm, which has modified Quake for the visually-impaired. The article also goes into an interesting discussion on how visual our world is becoming, possibly leaving the visually-disabled behind the technological advances."
While maybe not to the Quake extent, this has been done before.
At CHI '99 in Pittsburgh two computer scientists from the University of Chile presented work on an acoustical version of Doom which they created for blind children. Parts of their study focused on the cognitive spatial structures that the kids created, but it was basically the same -- they created an aural-based world with different sounds for bullets, monsters, doors, etc.
The talk was pretty interesting - it's a neat read.
Citation for the interested:
Interactive 3D Sound Hyperstories for Blind Children
M. Lumberas and J Sanchez
Proceedings of CHI 1999, Pittsburgh, PA
ACM Press, New York, NY
pp 318-325
If I had to guess I'd say that he's really only used maybe less then 1% of the web. Most sites are unuseable with braile screens and voice synths. And if ever there was a case to make popup ads illegal. More often then not the browser switches to the popup ad and he gets confused where he is.
Try it sometime - sit back and take whatever OS you use right now make it blind friendly - throw out your mouse, close your eyes and use it. Personally I think we still have a long ways to go in making an OS that is userfriendly for blind people in Windows - and especially Linux.
I certainly have sympathy for the blind -- I'm color blind myself, and routinely get myself killed in FPS and other games where "good" things are green and "bad" things are red, but both colors have the same saturation and luminosity as bad things.
:).
If your graphics card software gives you separate gamma-correction control over each colour component, you could tweak it so that one was much darker than the other, and stop accidentally TKing
All current graphics cards can do this easily (the 8-bit palette table is used as the gamma table in higher modes), but whether you can get at it is another matter.
Zform Poker is far from the first accessible game. Other games include Shades of Doom, which is based loosely on the Doom series of games. Shades of Doom is the closest blind people have to a modern FPS game. Also check out Grisley Gultch, Western Extraviganza, a children's game for the blind from Bavisoft.
The field of accessible games has actually been very dry until recently, but starting about two years ago its really started to take off.
I disagree that "in realistic digital environments, those with sensory limitations are going to have an increasingly hard time." You'll have a harder time excelling in games that require split-second decisions after processing audio and visual (and maybe eventually olfactory and tactile) input.
But I think most games won't require you to have 20/20 vision, lightning-fast reflexes, perfect hearing, a keen sense of smell, and six fingers on each hand to have fun. There will probably always be games for hard-core gamers that are incredibly difficult for most of us mortals to play, but as more and more people play online games I predict they'll become less important over time.
But in general, the richer the sensory environment, the EASIER it is for everybody to interact. Especially when you throw a tera-hertz CPU into the loop. Hard of hearing? No problem, run speech recognition in real time to translate everything into text for you. Blind? That's ok, run an AI guide dog to help you find your way...
The current crop of MMORPG's (EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, etc) could be completely accessible to blind folks reasonably easily. Personally, I think it would be pretty fun to play a blind, but powerful, wizard, who used his magic and other senses to detect and defeat his foes.
Gavin Andresen, Dev Head, http://www.zform.org/ "Video games that bring the blind and sighted together."