Through Kestrell, I discovered some news about Audio Game Maker, which is a “game building environment for the blind” slated for release in February 2007. Specifically, this is an accessible tool that enables blind users to create audio-based games.
What’s interesting to me is that the tool itself is accessible, which implies that if anyone out there is going to make great games for the blind, it’s going to be blind game developers. This is probably true: most game developers don’t consider accessibility at all! While you might say that it makes sense to ignore it from a business perspective, consider the fact that somewhere between 5% and 10% of males are color blind. How many games out there rely on color-matching puzzles in some form? How many of them let the user remap colors to ones that they can actually differentiate?
Anyway, I look forward to seeing (and trying out) the tool when it’s released.
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