Slashdot Mirror
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."
True, true. One of the funniest things about the 'hardcore' FPS players is that they tend to set their video options such that even newly released games look uglier than Quake1. When you use low quality textures, small bit-depths, simple vertex lighting, etc there winds up being less 'noise' to filter out making it much to both spot your enemies and aim at them.
I used to have a blind roommate, and he used something called the "Braille Light", which had a tactile braille interface. It was essentially a laptop without a monitor or standard keyboard. Instead it had a tactile output and a set of keys corresponding to braille dots. It makes me wonder, could we combine the sound effects of aurally-enhanced quake with the tactile interface of the braille light to make a faster-moving quake game for the blind?
This story provides an interesting contrast with the other story about webmasters ignoring standards and designing only for IE. The attitude there seems to be that, as long as you get 95% of all potential customers, who cares about the other 5%? Furthermore, some Slashdotters seem to agree with this attitude. I've always taken the Americans with Disabilities Act very seriously, and would probably do things to comply even if it hadn't been passed. But the question is, although Quake for the blind is a great concept, what is the real value if the vast majority of service-providers simply couldn't care less?
Perhaps the blind could use vibration feedback in the iFeel mouse to be informed of shot accuracy. Immersion has already added distinct vibrations for many events in Unreal Tournament.
I'm mostly blind myself, and I have to agree... improvements in technology are not making access easier at all. For every technology that comes out to make things more accessible, a hundred new inaccessible ones show up. The web is the best example I can think of. Back In The Day (TM), web sites were fairly accessible. High contrast enhancements, Lynx, and OS Accessibility support worked fine. But now, too many web sites use Flash, tweaked out style sheets, complex layouts, and other features that render these access tools useless.
Games are worse... Back In The Day (TM) most games could be played without too much difficulty. Now the color schemes and tiny-text are making gaming rather difficult, too. Most game developers do not cater to this very very tiny minority (I'm not even really saying that they should... I'm just pointing out a fact.) SMAC is the only game I can think of in recent history that had specific features fot the visually impaired... a "Color Blind" palette made the game playable for the 20% of the male population that's color blind.
Am I complaining? Not really. It's frustrating that I can't do some of the things that I want to do, but I get over it and deal. I, and most of the other blind folks that I've met, either find a workaround or find something else to do. If computers reach that point, I'll be disappointed, but I'll get over it. Though unless everyone starts coding in forth, I think I'll be OK for a while.
Incidentally, Linux' support for people with low vision SUCKS. There are plenty of tools out there, but they all focus on the BLIND... voice synthesizer,s braille readers, etc. For people with low vision (20/200 and worse) KDE, Gnome -- pretty much all of X in general -- just suck a big fat one. Even MS windows is better, though I think the changes in XP are actually a step backwards. I haven't used a Mac in a while, but I always thought Mac support for people with low vision was far better.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
This guy is actually a blind programmer !, not exactly Quake but big respect to him for not only creating games for the blind but programming them without being able to see his code!.
Its good to see people are exploring other avenues of our senses why restrict these games to sighted people
i mean why does visual gaming have such a priority over audio/tactile ?,why is it we like games without sound, yet without visual feedback is unthinkable ?
This is a neat intro [needs flash & v4 browser & Sound up] that won awards for creativness, giving you a insight into how blind people "see" the web, good example of provoking thought.
Can't speak for other airports, but the San Diego International Airport (Lindburgh Field) has a pretty nift visual paging system. All around the facility are monitors which print out in big bold letters any pages or important information being said over the loudspeaker.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,