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Denver, 12:06 AM
Wed Dec 16
64 posts in the last 24 hours
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12/15/09
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I dated, and then lived with, a girl who was completely deaf in one ear and about 90% deaf in the other ear without some form of hearing aide. Childhood meningitis had knocked out most of her hearing, so she grew up more or less without the ability to hear. She used to tell me about how she loved to play games on the computer as a kid. Adventure games and the like were usually told entirely in text, so the lack of hearing didn't matter. As CD ROMs became common and the games started switching over to voice, she eventually gave up on games entirely because subtitle support was so spotty.
We bumped into this when I fired up Half-Life one day because she wanted to check it out; we were a bit stunned when we realized that, hey, Half Life 1 has no subtitles!
I actually fired off a letter to Gabe Newell about it sort of on a random whim (I figured hey, worst he'll do is ignore it); surprisingly, I got an answer back within 24 hours. Gabe had forwarded it to Marc Laidlaw at Valve, who sent me a script of Half-Life 1 to print out for her to read while she played, which was astoundingly nice of them insofar as I wasn't expecting any kind of answer at all, let alone such a personalized one.
He also mentioned that the company had received complaints from deaf gamers over the first game, and had made it a company policy to have full captioning for all their games from that point out to avoid alienating that community ever again. They have, too: Check out any of Valve's releases from Half-Life 2 on and they have astoundingly good sound-to-text support.
It'd be nice to see this kind of thing offered for the colorblind as well, again as a standard thing you just come to expect. If anything, it'd be easier to implement than captioning, at least for minor stuff like changing the color of player names to something more easily distinguishable to colorblind folks. That, subtitling, basically anything that can be done reasonably easily to increase the accessibility of a game to an audience would be a great habit for companies to get into.
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"I realize that when fewer than one in 10 men deal with this kind of vision ..."
12/15/09
"almost 10 percent of people"
"fewer than one in 10 men"
You're not numerically incorrect, but the fact remains that you are using the number ten in order to draw attention.
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My best freind wanted to be a pilot and is color blind so that part made me crack up too
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Dad's Protanopic, too.
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Is there any special medicine and equipment that your family members have to use?
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So what exactly would they change? team markers n such, or the actual uniforms? I'd guess that markers wouldn't be hard, but uniforms could be tricky.
Is there no filters? Like how schools give out yellow paper to some kids, and I think some get like a screen thing(it was a while ago okay :P)
And surely 10% isn't a small number. I'm amazed its that high tbh. Especially as that seems a big enough number that checking your game works okay for colourblind would be some part of your QA.
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Lots of people you've met may be colorblind but you never know until they make a mistake.
On a side note: The colorblindness /really/ sucks for color-based puzzle games like puzzle fighter or bejeweled. Some of the more thoughtful developers of puzzle games differentiate by shape as well as color.
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But then again, for all I know about programming this could require 15 hot dudes in tight pants with a trained monkey and a bottle of Jack to get completed.