[games_access] New Member and thoughts about legislation

[d. michelle hinn]

Hey Gang -- we have a new member and for some reason the bounce 
filter got him so I'm resending (Michael -- did you send from another 
address than you subscribed to the list with?). And welcome!

Michelle

PS -- we've been slaving away at getting us known in the dev 
community -- we're getting there and we now have the attention of a 
growing number of people. So we soldier on! :)

>Greetings everyone!
>    Just joined yesterday. I'm a software engineer, basically trolling
>for ideas for projects to kill some spare cycles and looking for
>people who might be interested in helping me design and test the same.
>  My primary goal joining this group and the ACM's SIGACCESS group is
>to try to figure out what types of accessibility software are
>currently lacking and see if I might be able to fill a niche there.
>I've got a lot of experience with industrial imaging and
>automation/control software, and have spent the last several years in
>consumer audio and multimedia development so hopefully we can find
>something I can offer.
>
>I can't rewrite Doom 3 from scratch to make it accessible to everyone
>- hell, I couldn't see anything but the 4 pixels in the center of the
>screen in that game myself - but I have done some experimentation with
>inserting my code into video games and modifying their rendering
>behavior. Any ideas from basic utilities to accessibility gaming mods
>would be much appreciated.
>
>On the current topic regarding legislation - I don't think that will
>be the most productive direction to take.  One of the great things
>about the software industry is that any bloke with a grasp on logic
>and some time can crank out a piece of software. If it doesn't suck
>people might even use it.  In the game industry specifically, we've
>seen small groups of individuals with no money but a lot of time and
>talent completely turn the establishment on its head and create
>entirely new genres of games.  This is one of the things that helps
>keep the industry innovative and fun.
>
>Legislation will create a barrier for independents and hobbyists, and
>prevent new innovations that don't mesh with the laws.  If it's done
>in a lowest-common-denominator manner in the way the ADA is, it could
>even create hurdles to those wishing to create games for a specific
>subset of the market you wish to help.  For example, some really neat
>audio games would be kinda boring for a deaf person.
>
>What I'd recommend instead is to try to make your market more visible
>to the developer community and to approach smaller groups and
>independents for whom making a game with a smaller target audience
>might still be profitable or fun.  There's a fair number of developers
>out there like me that just enjoy writing software and do it as a
>hobby as well as a profession - you'll find a lot of those in the Open
>Source community.  If you want to get their attention, write articles
>for Slashdot and similar places to increase awareness and to educate
>the community, then get projects started on SourceForge to get new
>genres going, etc.
>
>One of the big challenges any developer will face here though is that
>unless they themselves have an identical disability, they won't know
>where to start to make something fun and easy for you to interact
>with. That's where we need your help.
>
>Cheers,
>Mike Ellison