FCC / CVAA discussion

I didn't ask. I don't care.

Then why do you keep jumping in when I have presented no misconception?
"Final decision of whether you get shafted or not is up to FCC." Is not a misconception.

 

If you don't know or care whether I'm pro or anti CVAA kindly stop accusing me of being here to defend it.

What you actually said was "It's entirely dependent on how a govt agency feels that day." - this is indeed a misconception. It is factually incorrect. FCC meditation and enforcement is not based on daily whims, fine proposals require a bureau vote, and fines are not actioned until the conclusion of an investigation, which follows similar standards of evidence to litigation.

If you have civil questions about how it works I'm very happy to answer them, but I'm not here to be argued with, be accused of things or be a handy outlet for people to vent frustrations against.

 

Yes; I know exactly what they have in common. I chose those examples because

1. They are popular games that everyone here is familiar with.
2. They have complex mechanics that many people would assume would not be accessible to people who can't see, more complex mechanics than most indie games.

They are also in nearly all cases not accessible because of anything to do with team size or budget, because in nearly all of those examples precisely zero work was done on accessibility for blind gamers. That was the point. That blind gamers already play mainstream games to varying degrees without any accessibility accomodations; it's a common misconception that a blind person would have no way of playing a mainstream game.

I assume examples of mainstream indie games that blind people play would be more relevant to you. Here are a few, including some with intentional accessibility as intentional blind accessibility is drastically more common in indie games than AAA -

Karateka
Way of the passive fist
King of dragon pass
Diceworld
Solara
Crafting Kingdom
Skullgirls
Shank
Harvey Birdman

I took you off ignore. If you are going to be accusing me of not understanding anything about the industry then we won't be talking, but if you have civil questions about how CVAA or accessibility in general works I'm more than happy.

 

But you're doing such a fine job of it...

 

For the people thinking the result of CVAA was going to be no more games having chat - https://twitter.com/jetuser/status/1092520820373483521

 

Weird how Respawn has this on lock while the Anthem team went "accessibility is hard" and gave up.

 

Do they have all their paperwork in order for all the people they interviewed about their issues with chat?

At some point there will be easy systems to drop in for typical uses.
But everyone still needs to duplicate the interviews.

 

Yeah they haven't done much for some of the requirements but they've done a really great job for gamers who are deaf or have difficulty speaking.

The game was over 90% through development at Jan 1st, so I assume they'd have a solid achievability case for not being able to do some of the other things.

 

Yeah... er for indies tho. That game has billions behind it. I welcome it and frankly, it's great. Just at least try to understand the gulf between them and most devs.

I think something like this solves ONE aspect, but not the other: https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ (and it's not free, and with piracy, etc pushing up hosting costs plus costs of something like that)... lots to consider and think about for developers that do not have a team available for accessibility.

If CVAA wanted to be helpful they need to eliminate all indies below a certain income threshold, or figure out better resources. Have to understand I'm not a hater, but someone who truly understands there's a lot of costs involved that aren't solved.

 

To be fair the cost of that game will be more like tens of millions max, not billions. EA didn't pile the entire corporation's resources into it, Respawn are not one of the bigger AAAs, the game was done in less than 2 years, and they're also working on their Star Wars game too.

Honestly I do get it. My background was in indie games, most of the devs I know and speak with are indies. Like this one man studio, he doesn't have any player to player communication but still decided to implement text to speech for UI, it took him an afternoon:

https://mobile.twitter.com/pixelnicks/status/1091449482175229952

What Respawn have done for deaf gamers is really wonderful. It also isn't required by CVAA, is an example of a company going way above and beyond the basic requirements to focus on giving people as good an experience as possible rather than the minimum required to comply.

Yeah exactly. There are a bunch like that, like Amazon and Google. Pricing is normally based on an initial free use threshold, so if a dev is feeling aggrieved by the idea of implementation on the basis that they think no people will use the functionality, they don't have to pay anything unless their prediction was drastically wrong and if paying would not be financially viable they do not have to pay, on grounds of feasibility.

There's also the STT service provided in the Xbox SDK, for both Xbox and PC. It works in exactly the same way as Amazon/Google/IBM etc, a cloud service. But Microsoft's is free.

There aren't actually any developers at all that have accessibility teams. People will be assigned to work on accessibility features, but that isn't their job. It is still early days, the number of people in full time permanent accessibility roles within studios across the entire industry is 7, and of those 7 the number who do hands on work developing features is 0.

I also would also have preferred a blanket small companies exemption, as with ADA and EAA. But they limited it to only a one year temporary exemption, from 2012 to 2013.

But there's still the "reasonable" thing by means of small company accommodation.. that isn't the nebulous CVAA-specific concept that some think it is, it's a standard accommodation made in other accessibility legislation in other industries and in other countries.