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."
what, no screen shots?
All circuits busy.
Whats next, MP3's for the deaf?
.....
The modifications described in the article would prove useful for NON-vision impaired players. More audio clues means more overall clues as to where things are at and what is happening in the game.
I see competitive players using Quake mods that provide this functionality in addition to normal visual and audio assistance.
having Excel (or StarCalc) on your screen and only headfones on you you can Quake without distracting your boss! :)
Well, what about the industrial revolution? My guess is that the rise of heavy machinery and high speed transportation probably made it more difficult for the blind.
My theory (though it's hardly original) is that the digital world is on course to mimic the real world in as many ways as possible. One day, having a poor sense of smell could be a serious liability in FPS games.
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.
I commend those doing what they can to make the digital world more inclusive, but the fact of the matter is that, in realistic digital environments, those with sensory limitations are going to have an increasingly hard time.
Cheers
-b
And then bitched about the instability of the game on irc.
Don't read this!
The blind have always had to deal with a world that was made for the sighted. For a very long time, the blind, if they didn't have family that wanted to take care of them, were forced to beg on the streets to continue living. Before Braille, they couldn't read. Before seeing-eye dogs, they couldn't move safely many places.
If anything, new technologies allow the blind more freedom and ability than ever before. There's always hope that one day technology will advance enough that no one will have to be blind.
And, I know some of this from experience. I'm still blind in one eye, but being able to have a lens implant in the other has allowed me to do things such as drive, and read without super thick glasses.
Quake for the blind is almost just like normal quake: The only difference is there are two new buttons, labelled "Marco" and "Polo", but I can't figure out what they're for.
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
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.
You pointed out something that needs to be pointed out - that able-bodiedness is largely temporary, that most likely all of us will suffer some sort of loss of ability at some point in our lives, and that making it easier to cope is ultimately in everyone's best interest.
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.
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.
Oh man, I gotta find me one of these servers. No more getting spanked by 11 year-olds in CounterStrike. This is my kind of competition.