Why Not Blind Accessibility?

Accessibility is essential to allow everyone to enjoy experiences that they may have, in the past, missed out on due to a lack of vision, a lack of hearing, or so many other factors. As many of you will know, both Jae and James are visually impaired, and so making one of our favourite pastimes more accessible for those with a wide range of sight conditions is a truly exciting topic for us.  So, Jae reached out to Brandon Cole, an incredibly talented and respected accessibility consultant with credits within the Forza series, not to mention his incredible work on The Last of Us games, so we could sit down and have a chat about all of the work he does as well as a discussion on why accessibility for the blind and visually impaired poses many challenges we may not have considered before. Do you have any experience with accessibility features in games, or maybe the lack of them? We’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server. If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page. Affiliate Promotion If you want great pricing with fantastic customer support for all your Linux based cloud computing needs, you can get $100 of free credit with Linode, cloud computing by Akamai, when you sign up here. Episode Links BrandonCole.net – Brandon’s website @SuperBlindMan – Brandon on Mastodon Last of Us Part II: Is this the most accessible game ever? – BBC News Virtually Superior: A Playstation VR 2 review – Brandon’s PS VR2 review Retro Collective – The Cave and Arcade Archive Chapter Times 00:00:04: Introductions 00:03:36: Why is Gaming Accessibility Important? 00:08:37: Blind vs Visual Impairement 00:13:25: Game Studio Attitudes 00:21:13: Channels of Information 00:31:04: Unfair Advantage? 00:36:06: Controls 00:43:14: What Has Driven Accesibility Forward? 00:50:26: A Good Day’s Pay 00:53:19: Accesible Retro Gaming? 00:58:42: What’s Missing? 01:06:30: Wrapping Up Credits Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW