[games_access] questions about "blind hero"

[d. michelle hinn]

>Hi Sandra,
>
>On 11/11/2008, Sandra Uhling <sandra_uhling at web.de> wrote:
>
>>  Yes. What did they say about these projects ?
>>   (Konami also has a guitar game: guitar freak)
>
>I got feedback from both companies. They were both very supportive.
>Red Octane send me some guitars.

Yeah, in no sense did I mean to say that (other than activision -- 
and that may be because I was responding to activision, which I 
*think* is the parent company of Red Octane?) there hasn't been 
support in the spirit of accessibility and now that I know that Red 
Octane sent Eelke some guitars I feel better about that!! But so far 
it's been in spirit versus action -- but there's always hope that 
things will make it into the "next" version of the hardware and/or 
they will host DIY info or point gamers with disabilities in the 
direction of the people working on various projects like different 
members of the SIG are.

Widespread change, I think, is going to come from companies who make 
the full commitment to back one of these projects in the sense of 
including it and/or manufacturing solutions on a wider scale. As of 
now, most of these projects are very expensive because they are "home 
grown" so to speak. A Quad Controller, for instance, can set you back 
quite a bit because it's handmade.

According to years and years of advocating for this, the take away 
message is that industry needs to see the numbers before investment 
and that's a hard thing to track down -- if it were possible and 
affordable, how many people with disabilities WOULD be gamers if they 
COULD be gamers? We can make guesses but they aren't clean guesses 
(ie we don't know if there were disabled gamers in the surveys done 
on the number of gamers in general and we only know the population of 
those who are disabled). We have been pushing for getting funding 
and/or help in getting the question put into surveys that are about 
media but not necessarily FROM the game industry (ie, some of the 
"American Life" studies done by PEW).

Michelle