[games_access] games access

[Eleanor Robinson]

Hi - I agree with most of you that not all games can be accessible to 
all people.  BUT, they can be more accessible than they currently are.  
A combination of accommodations that are not excessively costly to 
include would improve accessibility for many.  Variable speeds, 
re-mappable controls, color blind accommodation, and pre-sets like 
auto-aiming and so forth could make a game much more playable.  Closed 
captioning for speech and meaningful sounds for the deaf, and audio 
descriptions for the  blind would be more expensive, but doable.

One of the things I feel strongly would help developers to think about 
accessibility would be to label games as to their accessibility.  If 
developers had to say a game was not accessible to (whatever), they 
would be more inclined to build in something that would improve the 
accessibility to that group.  It also would encourage thinking about 
what accommodations might improve the accessibility.

I do agree that our efforts should be focused on making games  
accessible to more people, not looking for the silver bullet of 
universal accessibility.  I think we should also focus on the fact that 
making games more flexible in their play, increases the appeal of the 
games and increases the revenue for those games.  And we, as gamers, 
need to take care of ourselves and others as we age and make sure we can 
still play the games we want to because they have that flexibility we 
need in order to see, hear and manipulate the controls.

Eleanor Robinson
7-128 Software