[games_access] Develop wrap up?

[d. michelle hinn]

Thanks for the summary, Barrie! Yeah, the date of the workshop was 
unfortunate but I think that having Ernest in the audience was pretty 
amazing and cool. He wants to start including accessibility into the 
workshops he runs and has been in touch with me as well. He was 
pretty disturbed by the low participation and was wondering why every 
major UK dev firm didn't send someone to the workshop day to find out 
about accessibility. So I think, while we're more used to the low 
attendance, it really hit home for him to see how hard it is to get 
our message across. So I'd say that the low attendance spoke volumes 
for him and might result in our breaking through sooner than we 
thought!

Weird when a negative turns into a positive but it's a good reminder 
that you can either get upset at attendance or see how positive it is 
because you reached someone very influential. For me, it was like 
when Robert and I met with David Perry at GDC after he had seen 
Robert's video when I contacted him to arrange the meeting. It was 
one of those tipping points where a designer sees up close and 
personal what we mean by game accessibility and how gaming is 
realized by a gamer with a disability.

Develop was a nice chance for some of us to get back together in 
person and talk about new directions for the SIG to go into. And that 
beats MSN without a doubt as far as meetings go. :)

Michelle

>Hi Reid, Hi everyone else on the list,
>
>Attendance was low for the show, but explained in part due to 
>confusion over the dates, and most of the delegates clearing off on 
>Friday morning after the show party. So, we didn't have the greatest 
>slot - but we did have a slot.
>
>Amongst the audience was Ernest Adams (www.designersnotebook.com) 
>who showed much interest in our work, and expressed a desire to 
>include accessible game design in his future work. He's been in 
>touch already asking for some pointers.
>
>Others attending inclded a lady working in Virtual Reality linked to 
>anger management and a few others.
>
>The Accessible Arcade was fun. We had Giannis and Dimitris of 
>UA-Games (www.ics.forth.gr/hci/ua-games/ ) demonstrating UA-Chess 
>and Access Invaders. Access Invaders could be played by whistling!
>
>Richard of AudioGames (www.audiogames.net ) and 
>Game-Accessibility.com (www.game-accessibility.com ) was 
>demonstrating a number of audiogames, such as Drive.
>
>I (www.oneswitch.org.uk ) had Xbox "Burnout 3" playable with a one 
>handed controller on a monster screen and sound rig. This game 
>really demonstrated the need to have reconfigurable controls, due to 
>the cramp it would give with the fixed layout. I also ran some head 
>tracker compatible games and one switch games, including Namco's 
>fantastic "Star Trigon" arcade machine from 2002.
>
>
>The talks were from Michelle Hinn, Jonathan Chetwynd, Barrie Ellis, 
>Eelke Folmer, Giannis Georgalis, Dimitris Grammenos, Goran Lange, 
>Richard Van Tol and Thomas Westin. These were all of great interest 
>and turned up some interesting ideas... of which more later....
>
>Barrie
>www.OneSwitch.org.uk
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>----- Original Message ----- From: "Reid Kimball" <rkimball at gmail.com>
>To: "IGDA Games Accessibility SIG Mailing List" <games_access at igda.org>
>Sent: Sunday, July 23, 2006 8:39 PM
>Subject: [games_access] Develop wrap up?
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>Could anyone that went to Develop give us all a wrap up of what
>>happened? Or did I miss that email?
>>
>>-Reid
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>>games_access mailing list
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>>
>
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>
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