Gaming blind

I came across this video at the top of CNN last night and thought it was a pretty sweet story. A group of gamers carefully cataloged every sound and every move needed to beat a game – which seems to be Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – and gave the info to a blind player they’d met on an online discussion forum so that he could beat the game. Check it out:

Blindness and video games is actually an issue that gets talked about fairly often, whether in the context of a master’s thesis about how to make more accessible video games or blind players discussing the ways that they navigate World of Warcraft.

One interesting element of the Zelda case above is how rich the audio is in Zelda, with very specific cues for specific attacks and in-game events, like opening a treasure chest –

Cues like these are undoubtedly important for people with vision impairments, and I know that I rely on them to keep me on track and entertained in my own gameplay. These sounds, then, seem like an important element of universal design in games, as they may provide helpful information for large numbers of players. Yet, overreliance on audio information can also be a problem, as deaf players may find themselves excluded from Warcraft raids in which players are all using headsets and voice chat instead of text chat.

The mismatches in audio and visual needs only highlight the continued need for improvement in text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology. These technologies are getting a lot of attention this week, with Roger Ebert debuting his text-to-speech voice (compiled from old video clips of Ebert’s actual voice) on Oprah and YouTube announcing the full roll-out of its autocaptioning service, which I blogged about during its initial stages last fall.

But, I think the human, community element of this particular story is also fascinating – I don’t know if perfect code-driven accessibility will ever be possible without some degree of human interpretation of language and meaning, and I like seeing instances in which people can pool their resources to make a more accessible world (at least for this one Ocarina player). Plus, the fact that this occurred in a gamer community around Zelda is a fun connection to my partner, whose dissertation was partially about the activities on Zelda forums, and who sent me the video in the first place!

March 5, 2010 | liz | Comments Closed

World Braille Day

Just a quick hit to say happy birthday to Louis Braille and the written system he pioneered. There are a number of articles out there lately focused on how e-readers are supplanting Braille. E-readers, Kindles and screenreaders for the web are all exciting and useful technologies, and from a universal design standpoint, they do a lot of good crossover work as both assistive devices for people with visual impairments and as enhancing technologies for those with vision.

But, as is pointed out in FWD’s link round-up, these technologies are only useful for visually impaired people with normal hearing abilities. Even more troubling, from some research I did on screenreader technology a few years ago, these audio technologies are difficult to learn, synthesized speech is still imperfect, and the temporal element of having written material read aurally means that progress and comprehension can be very slow. Thus, a number of people still prefer screenreaders that create Braille output – it can be skimmed, revisited, and stored much more easily than audio formats.

So, hooray for Braille and ongoing advances in making the written word available to all! Blogging will continue to be light around here, as I’m travelling more in January, so here’s a thematically appropriate web comic from XKCD to wrap things up!

A stick figure reads a sign in Braille - the Braille does not match the written text, but begins to say "Sighted People Suck"

January 4, 2010 | liz | Comments Closed

Blind photographers (and more) on Flickr

Blind Stenographer using DictaphoneRecently I’ve been thinking about social networks as a space for self-representation and/or artistic expression. This is largely a result of taking an art history and new media course this semester, and trying to figure out how to bring in media studies and my own interests. But, I’ve found Flickr to be a really interesting place to start thinking about PWD using online services and digital media to create art/representation and to share it in a pseudo-gallery space.

Several Flickr groups have been interesting jumping-off points – Blind Photographers, for instance, is a small group, but one that explicitly asks “How does having a different visual experience affect our photography?” !Rock That Disability! is another interesting (and much larger) group. Photos here include both those taken by PWD and those taken of PWD and assistive devices. The group also seems to have an active community forming. And, of course, there are tons of gorgeous, interesting and moving photos to browse through. Wheelchairs, Disability Arts Around the Globe and Disability History all also offer some interesting images and communities. The photo with this post is from the Disability History pool, posted by the Library of Congress, and depicts a turn-of-the-century woman using a dictaphone – in a written caption, she’s identified as a “blind stenographer.” Just another reminder of how assistive devices have always been with us and served both PWD and others who needed dictation machinery.

October 30, 2009 | liz | Comments Closed