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Video game makers aren’t catering for gamers with disabilities, study finds
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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I can't exactly fault developers for focusing on 99.99% of customers that doesn't have disabilities.
I'm sorry, but 99.99% is a laughable hyperbole. A huuuuge number of people have disabilities and disabilities are extremely diverse. A simple example is colour blindness. Google says 8% of men and 0.5% of women are colour blind. Video games frequently do use colour in a way that makes colour blindness a problem and colour blind modes are an accessibility option.
Google also says 15% of the world has some degree of hearing impairment. That's admittedly biased towards seniors, but I can find numbers that say 9% of 20-39 year old Canadians have detectable hearing losses. Captions are an accessibility option.
And those are just two examples. There's tons of disabilities out there. Even when an individual disability might only be 0.1% of the population, add them all together and there's a substantial number of people who are left out by lack of one accessibility option or another. Aside from obvious disabilities, there's also just general worsening of reaction times as people age.
Just because someone has a disability, doesn't mean it's game-breaking. Yes, 8% of men are red/green colour-blind. But that doesn't mean 100% of those can't tell the colours apart. You can be more or less colour-blind. Or so my friend says, because he is colour-blind, but have never experienced that to be an issue in games. Red for him doesn't look like red does to me. But he still knows what red is. And believe it or not. Most developers don't exactly use a colour-blind test palette for their gameplay or menus.
Subtitles have been around since at least the playstation2 era. I feel like you would almost struggle to find a modern game that doesn't have subtitles these days.
You may think my hyperbole is laughable but your response does nothing but follow suit. If you suffer from bad hearing, I'm sorry to say that you might not be able to fully experience a game with speakers. Might want to get a pair of headphones, so that you can 1. Amplify the volume if needed. and 2. raise or lower frequencies you can't hear, into a range that you can hear. It's going to sound a little distorted perhaps but at least you will be able to hear it. I'm sure developers do their best to create captions that are important. But I don't think you understand just what a monumental task it would be to create an automated system for full CC captions of the ambience in a game.
And I'm sorry, did you just list lack of reflexes and reaction time as a disability to gaming? If you don't have any arms, basketball might just not be for you. If you suffer from bad reaction time. Maybe pick a game that doesn't rely on reaction time. That's not on the devs. That's on you.
While I argue your response is an equity Vs equality issue and your basketball argument kind of conflicts your previous statement, there is the the huge difference of individual cost per game to cater to a/all disability. As you mention automation of these systems aren't really feasible and although guidelines can be put in place. They are still a significant investment of time and money. You can implement them into an engine but you still need the game to integrate it and although some things might be easy across multiple games (colour blind overlays) some won't (mechanic driven considerations).
I work on a product that strives for Section 508 compliance, despite the fact that any improvement we make will only be used by fewer than 1% of our userbase.
Yes, we can and do exactly fault developers for ignoring users with disabilities.
Catering, and ignoring. are two completely different words with two completely different meanings. Did you read the article?
Everything they touch on is so incredibly vague that there is no way to make out what the problem actually is.
"fast-paced gameplay (34 per cent)"
34% complained about the gameplay being too fast-paced. What where they playing? No one knows. Could be sitting playing Call of Duty and raging about being 360 no scoped for all we know.
The article is vague on everything. And that's always on purpose. They're vague on purpose to maximize outrage. Oh this sounds horrible, look at this, the devs are not catering to disabled players. Should we mention that the kid with 1 hand is upset he can't play CS:GO competitively? Nah, just call it "lack of customisable control options"
oh I'm sorry. My comment was in response to you, and not the article.