Evidence-Based Design

“Game Accessibility — Why Bother?” is today’s cheap Gamasutra link here at We Can Fix That with Data. Author Dimitris Grammenos argues that you should care about accessibility because it can happen to YOU.

So, what would you do, if you woke up one morning only to find out that you can’t play your favorite game anymore, just because some designer did not consider something as simple as allowing redefining the game controls, or altering the game speed? Would you like to spit in his coffee? Would you wish to punch him in the face? Well, take a good look in the mirror because that designer might as well be you.

Shit! Please tell me which WoW designer decreed that I can’t rebind right click’s “interact with target” to a key so that I might get to the violence. If it weren’t for that, I could play almost 100% with the keyboard. (Then again, if I didn’t have to use the mouse, my left-handed mousing skills probably wouldn’t have gotten as good as they have over the last few weeks. I credit this step forward to my bank mule, who uses mail and the auction house a lot. With the fucking mouse.) (Not that I have any bright ideas on controls for those systems, I just don’t get the interaction thing.)

In other words, I’m still one-handed. PC games are largely accessible. I’m more annoyed that I can’t open my own bottle of beer.

1up.com, continuing a surprising tradition of original game journalism, just published a great article on gamers with disabilities.

Accessibility is important to me — back when I was a web designer, I worked for the state government and had a mandate to create sites usable with text-to-speech readers and such. Nobody else seemed to take it seriously, but I double-checked all my work in Lynx and used colorblindness Photoshop plugins to see how my stuff would look.

The colorblindness issue, in particular, annoys the shit out of me. Lots of people are colorblind — lots more than the rest of us think, because they never complain. Check out the grateful comments for this WoW mod, though. Is it really that much more work to have your UI artists keep problem color combinations in mind? How many lines of code is –/++ notation for conning systems?

The 1up article mentions also games that don’t have visual indicators to accompany audio cues. WTF?

Remember Nick Dupree and the Star Wars Galaxies New Game Experience?

Developers don’t even think about it. And true to form, I never even thought about checking this blog template. Heh.