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FCC / CVAA discussion

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by N1warhead, Jan 4, 2019.

  1. ianhamilton_

    ianhamilton_

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    Ebooks are regulated to be compatible with text to speech software. Television programmes are regulated to have subtitles. Movie theatres are regulated to have wheelchair access.

    The precedent is a law from 1990 call the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). ADA enshrined a legal obligation for communications services to be accessible with people with disabilities, it's why telephone networks have relay services for people who can't speak or hear.

    This 2010 law is an update to that requirement, to make sure that communication services that have become commonplace since 1990 are still covered. Specifically text messaging, voice over IP, video conferencing, and interaction between VoIP and telephones.

    That is what is regulated, communications. Games in general are not. If you choose to integrate a communication service you're obliged to do so in as accessible a way as is possible within reasonable expense and effort.

    I'm not here to attack or defend CVAA, discussing whether it is a good idea or not is really not productive, it is what it is and there is no getting around that.
     
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  2. ianhamilton_

    ianhamilton_

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  3. ianhamilton_

    ianhamilton_

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    You cannot do this. If players choose themselves to use a service that's up to them. If you tell them in general they need to use third party services, again, that's on them to make a choice of which one. But if you tell players that your communication is through a specific third party service, e.g. directing them to a discord channel, any inaccessibility of that platform is your liability (and discord is not fully compliant).
     
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  4. Antypodish

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    Are we still drilling FCC topic? I thought we said already long time ago, what to concern and what not.
     
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  5. Ryiah

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  6. ianhamilton_

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    On a personal level I've been trying. I've spoken about it pretty continually, on social media, in conference talks, in articles, etc. But there's only so much I can do, I don't have a direct line in to every dev's ear as nice as that might be.

    Unfortunately many of the other people who have experience have their hands tied by legal teams who won't let them talk about it.

    But here are two conference talks on it from last year, at GAconf and GDC:





    There have been some other kinds of efforts to get people thinking about it, for example ESA sponsored a GGJ diversifier in 2017 that was about encouraging devs to think about alternative means of communication.
     
    Last edited: Jan 6, 2019
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  7. CloudyVR

    CloudyVR

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    We are not discussing what has be proposed, we are discussing what has been imposed. Please stay on topic!!!
     
    Last edited: Jan 6, 2019
  8. AndersMalmgren

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    What about a game like ours that don't even have a UI, I mean how should we implement text chat?
     
  9. Ostwind

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    Nothing prevents you to have a virtual keyboard behind a button or a gesture and entered text outputted to others with Windows TTS. I remember seeing few VRChat streamers doing similar with ovrdrop + apps.
     
  10. AndersMalmgren

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    Yeah but we have no UI to present it on, would be a very lonely chat

    Edit: missed the text to speech part, but still you don't have time in a shooter to type
     
  11. CloudyVR

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    Stephen Hawkins probably would have..
     
  12. AndersMalmgren

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    Maybe if you slowed down the game for everybody else, and that's not an option. It's like playing a FPS with gamepad, no sane person would do that
     
  13. Socrates

    Socrates

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    They may have everything to gain, but access to stores, restaurants, and many public spaces were surprisingly non-disabled friendly until the laws got passed forcing places to put in access. Workplaces also often did not have any accommodations. New buildings were being built without the proper access. It was forcing people by law to put in that access that made the access available, not just relying on good will.

    Ultimately, human beings have proven that if they have a choice to spend less and leave out possible complications as part of ignoring accommodations, the majority will choose to do so. This seems to be even more common where decisions are made by groups or corporations, probably because the idea of "individual responsibility" vanishes in a group due to human psychology.

    Software is the same way. Look at how many software programs don't even let you do something as simple as increasing the font size for those of us with vision issues. Heck, even UNITY has never put this feature in and they're supposed to be all about getting everyone possible developing games.

    This is not to say that I think I should be able to play video game X or use software Y when I finally go blind. I expect to use dedicated software that reads the text off the screen for me for some things, and just accept that I cannot do things like play a platformer. However this law is NOT about gameplay. This law is about making sure that people who are not "fully able" (or whatever is PC) have as close to possible equal access to communication systems. I've seen people get wrapped up in the idea that their gameplay is going to be controlled somehow, but that is just not how the law reads.


    As a side note, if you have good "juice" in your game, you'll already be helping people who have lowered access to one or more senses. Think about when a character jumps. You get the visual animation of the jump, then a bit of dust or other animation when they land. There's probably a jumping sound. When you shoot, there's the muzzle flash, the bang, and possibly some screen shake or character vibration. It all adds up to extra feedback to fill the senses. This makes the game more enjoyable for anyone, whether our senses are limited or not. (Though please let us turn screen shake off. Makes me motion sick! :eek: )
     
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  14. Antypodish

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    Bad argument. SH wouldn't be able to play most of FPS, on any competitive level. Hence wouldn't be bringing any joy as game initially are designed for. So that wouldn't be typical choice to play, which such several disabilities.
     
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  15. Ostwind

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    It does not matter as you would only have to fulfill the chat requirements. Anyways they might just type between rounds or write in a safe stop.

    All games with voip could at least have quick comms templates for common things regardless of disability acts and such. For me it's not too rare to have a Russian, German, French etc. player in the game due ping priorities and they are not communicating at all, doing it in their lang or just sometimes struggling with English so others cant make the sense of it. Heck I've had this happen even with Swedes :p
     
  16. AndersMalmgren

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    We could do that, but no disabled person would play our game anyway, becasue it's very core mechanics are not accessible. It would be a waste of resources, resources a two man team could have used elsewhere
     
  17. Ryiah

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    I'm fairly certain I saw computers in your simulation. How hard would it be to type on a virtual keyboard? :p
     
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  18. ianhamilton_

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    Ask some deaf gamers what they want, they're easy to find ;)

    There's no time for typing, but there's time for choosing from a chat wheel for example, which could be freely configurable outside of play sessions.
     
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  19. Ostwind

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    But now you are again assuming and forgetting that there are people with different kind of disabilities at different levels and some might be able to play the game well enough but they might not be able to communicate normally. You should not really think about the gameplay at all in regards of the topic.
     
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  20. AndersMalmgren

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    Sure but you would only see it when your dead, or when you bring up the in game score board.
     
  21. AndersMalmgren

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    a deaf player wouldn't hear what the other players say anyway. And speech to text would be cheating since enemies within VOIP distance would show on some funky text chat window even if they whisper to avoid detection
     
  22. AndersMalmgren

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    We only have time to deliver what the market want, and the VR market isn't exactly swarmed with disabled people
     
  23. ianhamilton_

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    .... correct, this is the case with all voice chat. However deaf people have a legal entitlement to be able to use your communications functionality. Hence the requirements to make voice chat accessible.

    Why would it? You're the developer, you have full control over what is displayed. You do not have to give anyone an unfair advantage, you just have to give them equivalent access to other players.

    To be fair you're making an assumption, you don't have any idea how many people using VR are disabled. However as has already been said so many times in this thread, you are not required to implement anything that sits outside of reasonable effort and expense.
     
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  24. AndersMalmgren

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    So basicly no Indies then, that's good atleast, sounded like it was enforced on everybody
     
  25. AndersMalmgren

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    A text on screen is a much harder que than a whisper with a attenuation falloff curve
     
  26. Ryiah

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    How about you have it remove letters based on how far away or quiet the sound is?
     
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  27. AndersMalmgren

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    Still you will know there is a player within range. A whisper can get hidden away in the sound of battle or wind etc, etc

    edit: It will change the gameplay that we can agree on?
     
  28. Ryiah

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    To be fair my Soundblaster Z's control panel has an option that can make a whisper stand out as if it were spoken normally even with other louder noises. I like using it in game locations where there is supposed to be hushed conversation in the background (eg tavern noises) you're not supposed to hear.

    I'll agree that the methods we can come up with will affect gameplay. I want to believe there is a solution out there that can allow for text-based chat that won't compromise gameplay.
     
  29. ianhamilton_

    ianhamilton_

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    Depends on the consideration. For example it would be hard for a small indie to argue that ensuring their text chat was suitable for colourblind gamers entailed unreasonable effort and expense.
     
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  30. ianhamilton_

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    Also one of the four components of what makes up reasonable is what the impact would be on your product and company. That doesn't just mean financial, if you have a mega budget but the consideration would break your mechanic then that's taken into account by this too.
     
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  31. No. You're setting the threshold what you think can be heard so you will provide it as text on the screen. Also you allow ALL people to turn on or off this feature and you can display for the others (at start maybe) if someone uses this option so they can turn it on as well. There are always solutions if you want to do it and there aren't any solutions when you don't want to do it, just because.
     
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  32. AndersMalmgren

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    No you could have special disabled enabled servers, which no one would play on
     
  33. AndersMalmgren

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    Which is even harder in a MP game
     
  34. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    I got solution.

    Position text on screen, where sounds come from. (risking hiding significant game play details).
    And make text transparency, adequate to the sound volume. Means near zero transparency, is like whisper and 100% shouting is opaque :D

    Of course need add resizable text, as some people will need higher resolution. So then suddenly font 24, will start overlapping halve of the screen, popping here and there :) I can imagine such fun gameplay.
     
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  35. Still better than nothing.
     
  36. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    You're making assumptions again. How do you know nobody would play on those servers?

    Even putting aside how many disabled players there may be or what their disabilities may be, I'm aware of competitive players who deliberately do stuff such as turn graphics settings to minimum and enable accessibility features like "colour blind mode" because they care about functionality more than presentation.

    It's possible that even if disabled players are a very small minority that others may choose to play on those servers just to include more people - especially for niche games where communities may be small.

    Putting that particular solution aside, as others have pointed out, it's up to you to decide the best way to approach the problem in general because you're the designer of the product. This is probably why it's deliberately left vague - if they said "thou shalt have subtitles" then I'd be irritated too, but all they've said is "make it accessible, somehow, if you reasonably can".
     
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  37. AndersMalmgren

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    Yeah, and I hate that. Turn down settings so foliage isnt rendered more than 10 meters, etc, etc. Its cheating.
     
  38. angrypenguin

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    If you truly hate it then I heartily recommend console gaming. Standard specs for everyone and usually no performance/quality related configuration options. It's the closest to an egalitarian platform that you'll get.

    For what it's worth, I don't by the "cheating" argument for a second. Taking a choice that the developer of a game knowingly and deliberately gave all players of that game isn't "cheating". If you think your eye candy is putting you at a disadvantage then just turn it off.
     
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  39. @AndersMalmgren @angrypenguin
    This reminds me to one of my friends who were played Quake 1-2 MP competitively. He ran the games in window with very low resolution (small window in the middle of the screen) so the game was rendering very quickly and more responsively. :D It was hilarious watching him playing.
     
  40. Billy4184

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    Television programmes and movie theaters are at least to some extent embedded inside what might be considered to be collectively owned spaces. As far as I know, nobody can just up and start broadcasting a television signal across the country. And movie theaters are part of finite-size public spaces - even though they are privately owned, it could easily be argued that having a non-accessible movie theater interferes with the ability to have one that is accessible.

    And eBooks have a very standardized interface with TTS - they are pretty much just text. I imagine that TTS software can pretty much convert a .PDF or something like that by default, without the onus being on the writer to do anything at all to be compliant.

    But games on the other hand come in all kinds of weird shapes and sizes. Just listening to the video, I was confused by all these references to fine motor control and response time - I don't quite see how that fits into the category of simple multiplayer chat functionality. And the suggestion that disabled people should be involved in early design shows just how complicated it is expected to be and how much integrating accessibility might have an impact the project.

    In any case, I would not have a problem if the law simply stated for example that multiplayer chat must integrate TTS and text must be discernable in grayscale, but something about the vagueness of this whole thing and these allusions to a wide range of disabilities that don't seem to have much to do with communications tells me that this is not going to be a straightforward thing for developers to become compliant with.

    I don't see how a game can be considered a communications service, as such. Multiplayer chat is not an alternative for a telephone call.

    Again, these are communications services, not games.

    With these references to fine motor control and response time, frankly I think the regulation has gotten into the gameplay itself, although I didn't really understand that part of the video too well.
     
  41. ianhamilton_

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    If you can tell me specifically which items you have a hard time seeing how they would apply to communication I can give you some specific answers. I can assure that every single one of them is only relevant to communication and not gameplay.

    The clue is in the name - CVAA - the C stands for communication.

    The requirement to consider early is not because it's horrendously complex and takes ages. It's because considering early means less unpicking and refactoring, is easier and cheaper and allows the solution to be more effective. Coming to it late in the day beenfits neither developer or gamers.ⁿ

    A game is not considered to be a communication service. Text chat is, voice chat is, vision chat is, regardless of industry.

    I use voice chat in games like a phone call, I travel a lot and keep in touch with my friends while overseas via the medium of PUBG. There are people for whom real life socialising is physically not an option, who rely on in game communication for quality of life, to have a friendship group and to be able to take part in society and culture.
     
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  42. Billy4184

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    Here is a link to the video at the time the speaker talks about 'performance objectives', I did not understand these and how they relate to simple multiplayer chat functionality.



    I can understand that, and like I said, if the idea is to have a way to chat via text or speech in a multiplayer game, that seems reasonable to me although I don't think it's appropriate to have a law about it. I don't see how this requires early design considerations or anything like that.

    What I hope that this law does not regulate is the way that multiplayer chat might affect the gameplay, which is what these 'performance objectives' seemed to allude to, and the idea that accessibility had some impact on early design. Although making the game as fair as possible is worth considering, it's something that could easily become fantastically complicated.

    If it's just a voice/text chat, and maybe TTS, that's something that can be easily standardized and added at any point in the project. The vagueness of the law does not help here.
     
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  43. angrypenguin

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    Perhaps it's early in the design of the communications part, rather than early in the design of the whole thing?

    In software design terms, this just adds some requirements to some features of the software. They're known from the start so they should be taken into account at the design phase of those features anyway - regardless of this legislation, if you're ignoring known requirements when you design your stuff then you're not doing your job properly! So, to me, language about "early design considerations" for this stuff is just speaking common sense.

    That said, I do admit that having yet another source of requirements is inconvenient at best.
     
  44. Billy4184

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    Well, I don't think it's a great approach to simply tell developers to involve disabled people in early design and then leave the nuts and bolts of the law vague. What would be good is a clear set of instructions on exactly what needs to be added (not in terms of the software as such, but in terms of exactly what the accessibility needs to achieve).

    Frankly, making menus discernable in grayscale, and implementing a versatile chat system does not seem to me to be anything requiring early design consideration (except perhaps in terms of budget and time). If what @ianhamilton_ is saying is accurate then it's something that is essentially entirely separated from the game itself.
     
  45. Ne0mega

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    Before they disabled comments on the youtube video, you could find ian hamilton in the comments diligently defending CVAA, responding to every single comment, just like he is here, but with more vigor. You can also find he has written multiple articles and has been quoted many times about the issue.

    He also has a twitter account which has been pushing this (and more regulation) for years.

    For him to claim he is not here to "attack or defend CVAA" is an outright lie. He has not written a single post on these forums except on this issue. He is specifically here to defend CVAA. His twitter is here: https://twitter.com/ianhamilton_/status/1055390022667550722 All this dude does is work for these people. He is here on this forum specifically to defend CVAA.

    He has not made a single comment on this forum about Unity yet. All he has talked about is the CVAA, and every post has been in defense of it.

    And these are the type of people were are supposed to trust to "take into consideration cost and expenses with implementing CVAA"
     
    Last edited: Jan 7, 2019
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  46. Ne0mega

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    And by the way, before they remove the up/downvotes, (they have already removed the comments) currently the video ianHamilton_ posted has 292 thumbs down and 31 thumbs up.
     
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  47. Murgilod

    Murgilod

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    Oh my god nobody cares about your baby slapfight
     
  48. CloudyVR

    CloudyVR

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    If you're calling yourself "nobody". But seems to me there are a lot of people concerned about this businessperson's struggle.
     
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  49. Ne0mega

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    Ian and his freind Tara took down the comments. Because lots of the comments were from disabled people, and they had 80+ upvotes. A lot of these people don't want to be given "an equal playing field". It's a game. we all have disadvantages, and nobody who games is the big winner, most gamers are average, some suck, but still play. None of the reps of this had more than 3 upvotes.

    That is why they silenced the disabled people of this video. Because they think they should be the owners of the voice of the disabled. Even more arrogant, they think they should be the voice of game devs. When most of them never even made a game. They want to take my voice, as an artist, and tell me I have to do as they say. I MUST CREATE, FOR THEM AND THEIR POWER.

    I WILL NOT COMPLY.

    So we got people who come to tell us what to do, but no real interest in listening to who this is for, disabled, game dev, whoever.
     
    Last edited: Jan 8, 2019
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  50. AndersMalmgren

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    This is classic socialism for you, I see it all the time in my home country. The politicians and the activists are so self righteous and blind so they hurt the very thing they think are making it better for, see it all the time here.
     
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