Accessibility part 1

Now this is something I find quite strange, which coincidentally may have had a great impact on what I want to do with my career. I find it incredibly sad that we're at a point in time where games will soon look and sound like real life, where countless dollars are spent on game development, yet accessibility features are almost non-existant.

Lets start with the most basic thing of all -- subtitles. Now, ideally games would have closed captions even for important sound cues, but even proper subtitles for speech would be a good first step. Realistically, if you sink millions of dollars into the development of a game, how much extra would it cost to subtitle the speech? Well, lets consider that there's a script for the game dialogue in virtually every case, most likely with copy in digital form. Associating each speech file with a section of text is fairly trivial. There are indie game developers who can do this properly, really, so what is the excuse for large companies not do it?

I suspect it's just a matter of not caring, and partly not being aware of the problem.
Halo 3 subtitles cut scenes, and that's it. Any dialogue spoken by other characters while actually playing, a deaf player will be completely unaware of. Many games have this same behavior, and I would not attribute it to malice but rather lack of interest. Some games of course are worse, like the atrocious subtitles of 2K Games' Bioshock which at times come up 20 seconds or so out of sync. That combined with lack of any indication of WHO says what makes it almost pointless at times. Playtesting? What's that?

The biggest exception to the rule seems to be Valve, who seem to have an option for closed captions in all their games now. I just use the subtitles, though, so I'm not sure how thorough they are. Still, considering that and also how Half Life 2 Episode 3 will have both a character and a robot using sign language, even if it's used as a story device, I think it's safe to say they are aware of accessibility issues for the hearing impaired. Very nice. I hope they decide to include large font and hight contrast modes as standard for future games, to help out the visually impaired gamers as well.

In any case, there seem to be more eyes open nowadays when it comes to accessibility problems, but it's clearly far from ideal. There are many improvements that can be made to visual cues in games, and straight-up accessibility features that are there ONLY for people who have hearing problems. Developing a reusable framework for this seems like a good idea.

Now something that really fascinates me is audio gaming for blind people, I think there's an abundance of untapped potential there, and that's something I'm very excited about, and something I would love to work with professionally. Right now I really hate that I have to study Swedish lit. instead of trying to work on this, but in two months I can spend more time on it.
A lot more on this in the future.