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."

Comments

Just started to look at their site

[Gadget_Guy]

I have just started to look at their site and the first thing that I notice as the page was loading was that the pictures that you click on near the top to go to choose the platform all have the same alt text of "xbox reviews". That will be confusing for someone using a screen reader.

I thought the whole layout seemed a bit complicated and confusing, with javascript menus and a very busy interface. Gray text on a gray background seems an odd choice for the color blind people out there.

Still, at least they are raising public awareness. Even if you don't think that game makers should HAVE to provide support for all disabilities, this kind of site fills in the role that most game reviewers would not consider.

Re:Accessibility Ratings? Good. Lawsuit? No.

[TheRaven64]

That really surprises me. Testing for red-green colour blindness issues is one of the standard things that you do when designing a graphical user interface. It's easy; on most platforms you can map the red and green channels together so you get a rough idea of how our UI will look to colour blind people before you even send it off for testing (and there are a number of automated tests you can run for other common forms of colour perception problems). These affect so many people that if you sell more than ten copies of your program you're likely to have at least one user who will complain if you don't. I'm astonished that it isn't a part of the testing process for games.