Game-changers: How the video-game industry must step it up for blind players
Hayley Juhl
Ryan Chou was born into a gaming family. He was also born blind.
He started playing video games with his cousins, then high-school
friends who he still keeps in touch with since their days bonding over
weekend sessions of Street Fighter IV, “or whatever else we felt like
playing that day.”
“Gaming is a pretty big pillar of social interaction,” says Rashad
Naqeeb, who with Chou is part of a group of players who meet on the
messaging app Discord. “One of the easiest ways to meet new people and
socialize from a distance is gaming. It’s a pretty massive creator of
communities.”
The problem is that the bridges between some of those communities are
ill-designed and sometimes non-existent.
There are plenty of audio- and text-based games that are playable for
visually impaired people, but Chou says they lack the complexity and
adrenalin of more mainstream games. The accessibility of the latter is
hit or miss. Games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Tekken can be
played evenly with sighted people, Chou says, because of good audio
design and positioning — there are no requirements to walk a character
to a fixed point. Then there are the ones that are accessible because
the community came together to push for changes or to develop their own
modifications, adding such features as optical character recognition,
where the program translates an image into text. Chou lists Hearthstone,
World of Warcraft and Stardew Valley among those.
“For the truly determined, there are a lot of games like that where you
can finish them … but it’s really, really hard or annoying.”
Leigh agrees with the annoyance part. She and fellow gamer Alyssa were
interviewed on Discord. They declined to provide their last names for
security reasons. Leigh has been blind for about 15 years and laments
“the just-install-it-and-play days of when I was sighted. Now I have to
contend with ‘does it have accessibility options and are they listed
anywhere?’”
And there are still only rickety bridges between communities: blind and
sighted people can’t easily play together because they must have the
same mod installed, which could strip away graphics for the sighted person.
Two and a half years before the limited TV series broke the internet,
Naughty Dog released the infectious video game The Last of Us Part II
with more than 60 accessibility features, including those for players
with vision, fine-motor and hearing impairments. They created new
features for visually impaired and blind players that enable control of
such settings as high-contrast display, text-to-speech (in 25
languages), audio cues for combat and navigation assistance, including
vibration and audio during combat and exploration.
“For me, accessibility isn’t just the options, it’s also how we play the
game itself,” Ubisoft accessibility design lead Aderyn Thomson says.
Since a game is by definition is barriers to be overcome, developers had
to think about what barriers to remove. “That was how we opened the
door. Every single option facilitates accessibility.”
When Ubisoft polled players, they found everyone used options
differently. They want to understand how players interact with design
and pinpoint areas where barriers were inadvertently created. For the
game Far Cry 6, the dev team catered to low-vision players using
high-contrast modes, colour selection and contrast outlines for enemies
and loot.
“Contrast has always been focused on colour-blind players,” Thomson
said, “but colour affects so many people, including those with cognitive
disabilities like ADHD. Just because you’re low vision doesn’t mean you
won’t also have ADHD, for example. You can have two things going on.”
Ubisoft’s Far Cry 6 has many accessibility options, including those for
low-vision players. Ubisoft
Games companies are highly competitive and are known for keeping a lid
on their processes and industry secrets. However, Thomson says they are
more likely to share information in the accessibility community. They
caution the team not to copy other games, or even previous Ubisoft
games, because those options were developed for specific technical
reasons that should be improved on.
“The visually impaired/blind gaming community is a large, large one in
terms of different levels of ability and willingness to experiment,”
Chou says. “Some, like myself, grew up playing whatever we could. This
is the hard-core group. Others have never touched a console or
controller and are perfectly happy to play only audio games, or games
that are 100 per cent accessible. Some others fall neatly right in the
middle. I no longer have the patience to chip away at one thing for
possibly hours upon hours to progress through a game.”
Leigh abandoned World of Warcraft because the mods took up to three
hours to transfer, unzip and put into the correct folders. “I am way
less forgiving about games than others in the blind gaming community. I
was sighted before. I can’t bring myself to enjoy flailing around in an
open-world game with absolutely no direction.”
“The main thing for so many of us is to see more mainstream games
accessible versus solely having audio games with zero graphics,” Alyssa
says. “It makes it difficult to talk to sighted friends about games.
Some of my friends don’t comprehend that while I enjoy gaming, I don’t
play anything remotely similar to most, short of Hearthstone.”
Thomson believes the communities shouldn’t be fractured. “A side
entrance to a building for a wheelchair user isn’t equitable, is it?
They should be getting that front entrance. That’s my goal.”
Mainstream gaming is expensive, and the unemployment rate for the
visually impaired is 14.5 per cent, triple Canada’s general unemployment
rate, according to the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
Because employment numbers are calculated based on who is actively
seeking work, the number could be up to 70 per cent. They might hesitate
before sinking money into a game, then “getting burned and having to
scramble for a refund. We all have very different opinions of what’s
accessible. There are things Ryan finds accessible that I don’t,” Naqeeb
says.
Ubisoft’s Far Cry 6 has many accessibility options, including those for
low-vision players. Photo courtesy of Ubisoft
He adds: “Then there’s the tradition once a year, where an ambitious
sighted dev discovers blindness and makes a Bop It-style game with the
simplest mechanics that gets praised up and down in mainstream circles
because they think this is all blind people are capable of. The biggest
struggle of being blind is that you get put in the ‘that’s kinda weird,
how do they function?’ box. It’s true of all sensory disabilities.
People just can’t conceptualize it the same way they can conceptualize
being in a wheelchair.
“The second-biggest issue in mainstream gaming is the lack of vision a
lot of blind people have. There’s this sense that, ‘We’re getting so
much, why are we complaining?’ and ‘There’s no way most of these things
could be made accessible, and if they were they would suck to play, so
why waste our energy?’ Unless the right person gets in contact with the
right dev with the right attitude, nothing gets changed.”
“We want to be humble about it,” Thomson says. “We know we are not
perfect — no one is — but we’re doing our best to work on it.”
https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/blind-visually-impaired-video-games-ubisoft-last-of-us-part-ii
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