Disabled demanding games they can play too
Disabled gamers have had virtually no place to go to that writes up how well the games work for those with disabilities. In fact, some gamers have taken things into their own hands and are starting to sue large game companies that ignore the Americans with Disabilities Act. According to the law all companies are required to make their products useful to the disabled so that everyone can have access to them. Sony is the fist of these lawsuits where the disabled are trying for force game companies to work with the disabled community that deserves good games too. In the meantime, AbleGamers have created a website so that the disabled community can look up which games are easy to play if you are a paraplegic or quadriplegic. They also have search criteria if the game supports closed captioning, speed and difficulty settings as well as color changes to help those that are color blind.
While it is great that a group has taken up the job of trying to help the disabled community to make good decisions on which games play well and which ones that are missing basic help for them, all game companies should think of the ADA during design phase. Typically it is not difficult to add difficulty levels or to add closed captioning since the characters are speaking the words anyways. Changes to keep colorblind players happy is also a relatively simple process because there are well known color combinations that cause grief and those could be easily changed in the graphics engine without any other modifications to how the game plays or how it looks.
One would think that game companies would want to add to the number of customers that can purchase and play their games if the work to do that is easy and cheap. But instead the game companies completely ignore the disabled community because there is no one to club them over the head to let them know that we exist. The lawsuit against Sony will wake that company up, but what about the others? The idea is to get them to make minor changes without pricing the company into bankruptcy because of legal costs or dramatically increased development costs. This could be fixed by adding a few disabled people to the testing teams so that fixes can be worked on right away and the company can get write-ups in disability magazines and websites saying they are working with the community to make their products available. This would open up a brand new market for arcade games to people that would love to play and pay for them but can’t because they are unplayable. But with a few changes we all can have fun on our computers and game consoles.
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