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AbleGamers Reviews Games From a Disability Standpoint
eldavojohn writes "Early last month a visually impaired gamer sued Sony under the Americans with Disabilities Act (and if you think that people with disabilities don't play games, think again). The AbleGamers Foundation has decided to step forward and provide a rating system for games that blends together a number of factors to determine a score with regard to accessibility. Visual, hearing, motion, closed captioning, speed settings, difficulty settings and even colorblindness options are all taken into account when compiling these scores and reviewing these games."
Isn't sueing Sony because you can't play a game because you're visually impaired the same as, say, sueing Warner Brothers because you can't watch the Harry Potter movies? You can't expect people, and especially corporations, to cater to every type of handicap in a single product.
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They don't seem to have a very accessible website. Quick glance of their code didn't show any css for the blind. And the big sliding image thing in the middle doesn't look very accessible either.
Offtopic. Your issue is relevant for that other topic about the sight-disabled suing Sony (which we already had a lengthy discussion about, and linked in the topic itself), but this is about giving ratings to games based on specific disabilities, which is a much better alternative.
Sometimes it as as simple as subtle changes during the planning phase. As someone whose hands shake too much for FPS and RTS, I was happy enough with TBS and Adventure games. So I was happily playing Myst 4, only to discover the designers had decided that a couple of puzzles weren't hard enough (vibrating crystal puzzle & monkey puzzle), so they had stuck timers on them! Could you disable or adjust the timer? No, sorry shaky hand player, game over.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
Instead of suing and getting angry at the world, this guy should just have the serenity to accept the things that he can't change and move on with his life.
But there can be change - and the law and the lawsuit often makes it happen.
Closed captioning and subtitles have become so much a part of home video that their absence - in a Netflix stream, for example - comes as a surprise.
I suffer from very strong red/green color blindness, which can be very problematic for me in some games. I was happy to see that L4D, and L4D2 include a 'color blindness' option that change some of the colors in the game so that they are easier for me to see.
Having a ratings system, even if it isn't an official one, is a nice idea.
The lawsuit though... Not so much. I don't see any legal basis for it. Someone with no legs shouldn't sue Ford because it is hard to drive.
Love sees no species.
I think a part of the reason developers ignore the challenges disabled gamers face is because there are so many different types of disability, each of which raises very specific challenges that a non-disabled developer might not have the time or inclination to understand and work around.
When you add that to the normal considerations - storyline objectives, gameplay objectives, internal politics, budgetary concerns, etc., it's not surprising that the disabled are completely marginalized and occasionally screwed by silly decisions like the one you've described.
I think if the disabled want games to have a "mode" of gameplay specifically for them, they need to demonstrate that they are a viable market whose demands are easily met. The gaming review site is excellent - it raises awareness, but disabled gamers might be better off soliciting the ADA or some other organization to set up a system for determining a game's viability for different types of disabled gamers, ultimately placing a label on the packaging with this information.