Accessibility of all types has come a long way, even since I started blogging about it. Blind accessibility, too, has undeniably gotten better since then, with more games adding menu narration and actual features that help us play. As you can tell from the title, menu narration is the specific focus of this blog post, because I am actually a bit concerned. Let\u2019s talk about why.<\/p>\n
So a lot of games, really quite a lot, have menu narration now. Eagle Island, Crackdown 3, the Division 2, Gears 5, even Minecraft! That\u2019s not nearly all of them either. On one hand, this is great! It\u2019s a huge step forward, no doubt, and absolutely provides us access that we didn\u2019t have before. But, the specific games I\u2019ve just mentioned here have one thing in common, and that\u2019s where we run into my concern. Aside from the narration in these games, they are mostly otherwise inaccessible. Why is that? Well, the answer may be found in words spoken by Microsoft.<\/p>\n
Way back when Microsoft opened up their Narrator API\u2019s for 3rd party developers to use, they made a huge point of talking about how easy Narrator was to implement. \u201cA couple lines of code for each area where there is text,\u201d they said, \u201cand you\u2019re done.\u201d \u201cWow!\u201d thought we. \u201cLike every game is gonna have narration now!\u201d This isn\u2019t true of course, and in fact some games even with narration have largely incomplete narration. This not only makes me wonder about the truth of that statement, but also makes me speculate on the idea that we have perhaps too much narration.<\/p>\n
And now we come to my point. My concern is this. Are game developers adding narration because they believe that narration is all they need to check the blind accessibility box? I understand CVAA is part of it, but given the amount of games that don\u2019t have narration yet, I am relatively sure that menu narration still isn\u2019t a requirement just yet. I\u2019m worried, though, that developers are putting all of their understanding of what blind accessibility requires into narration and going, \u201cAwesome! We did it!\u201d I look at games like Gears 5, which I\u2019ve roasted in great detail before, and I see its narration efforts. It\u2019s super broken and super inconsistent, but it is undeniably there. That, along with the 1 other feature added specifically for the blind, (the audio beacon), along with a feature the blind take advantage of, (aim assist), are the only things helping us in that game, and even then only one mode of that game. But do, or did, the Gears 5 developers think they had succeeded at blind accessibility? I know they know about blind players, as the audio beacon was originally added in Gears 4 because of a blind player. So are they sitting somewhere now and thinking \u201cMan, we nailed it!\u201d I hope not, and I hope those haven\u2019t been the thoughts of any other devs either. Blind accessibility is indeed very complicated. This I shall never deny. Narration alone is not enough.<\/p>\n
By far the best example of narration in a game that isn\u2019t an audio game is probably Sequence Storm. The narration is essentially flawless, and a lot of effort was put into making it that way. Madden 20 comes in second, because even though its narration isn\u2019t complete, it definitely works well in all the places it exists. In these instances, I can be assured that the developer knew just narration wasn\u2019t enough, as both of these games have numerous other features that go along with it. That is a comfort. But still\u2026<\/p>\n
Look, I hope I\u2019m wrong. Despite everything I\u2019ve said, especially about Gears 5, I would happily jump on a plane if given the chance to work directly with them and make some accessibility magic. I want to be wrong about this. However, this has been in my head for a while, and I needed to let it out somewhere. As it happens, I haven\u2019t posted a blog in a bit, so voila! It is done. Thanks for reading, feel free to discuss and throw me some feedback, and as always, stay awesome!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Accessibility of all types has come a long way, even since I started blogging about it. Blind accessibility, too, has undeniably gotten better since then, with more games adding menu narration and actual features that help us play. As you can tell from the title, menu narration is the specific focus of this blog post, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[36,76,374,372,369,373,368,313,375,370,371,91],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-accessibility","tag-blind-gaming","tag-blog","tag-crackdown-3","tag-gears-5","tag-madden-20","tag-menu-narration","tag-minecraft","tag-opinion","tag-sequence-storm","tag-the-division-2","tag-video-games"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":429,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}