Video Games– Access for All

Gabriela Quirós Post on May 01, 2007 by
Topics: Engineering, Health, Television

Can someone who's quadriplegic or hearing impaired play a video game? QUEST TV takes you to the international Game Developers Conference celebrated recently in San Francisco, where a group of gamers used colorful tactics to convince mainstream developers to make video games that are accessible for everyone.

You may watch the Video Games– Access for All TV story online.

Video Games for All and Underwater Flight (episode #109), airs tonight on QUEST at 7:30pm on KQED 9, and KQED HD, Comcast 709. (full schedule)

Gabriela Quirós is a Segment Producer for KQED-TV, and is the producer for this story.

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  • Gabriela Quiros

    Hi everyone,

    I wanted to post a correction to a bit of narration in our segment:

    XBOX 360 is by Microsoft and Playstation 3 by Sony, not the other way around, as we unintentionally stated.

    Enjoy!

    Gabriela

    Gabriela Quiros
    Segment Producer

  • Steve

    Hi,

    I find it ironic that a video segment about making video games accessible to the disabled community, especially closed captioned games for the hearing impaired, is not closed captioned. Yet the broadcast version viewed on the TV is. Why is this?

    Thanks

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  • http://kqed.org/quest Craig Rosa

    Steve:

    Your question about closed-captioning web video is absolutely fair. We hope to be doing more to make our content widely accessible.

    Our TV broadcast of the story is closed-captioned and our web version is not currently captioned. The reason (though not an excuse) is that there has been a standard & process for TV closed-captioning for many years, but no one standard for closed-captioning web video across various formats (Quicktime, RealMedia, Adobe Flash, etc.) has emerged.

    Your comment motivated me to do some more research yesterday and there has been progress in this area just in the last few months, even after we launched the show. I did find a promising example at:

    http://www.popview.com/demos/popcast/captions/

    which demos some new captioning capabilities in the newly-released version of our Flash software. I look forward to experimenting with these new features, as soon as I can.

    I also learned that there are 3rd party services that will assist in the captioning, though pricing may be an issue for us as a non-profit. I'll have to see.

    http://www.automaticsync.com/caption/webcaption.htm

    I would welcome any help or advice on solutions that yourself or others are using in the interim until such standards can be adopted.

    Respectfully,

    Craig Rosa, QUEST Interactive Producer

  • http://www.oneswitch.org.uk Barrie Ellis

    A very fine video, touching on most of the main points of game accessibility. Can't say that I agree with Noah Falstein's thoughts that main-stream developers will likely never embrace accessibility. Many of the features essential to disabled gamers add very little development time if thought out in advance, and can offer much to the main-stream. For example – speed control, reconfigurable controls and closed captions can benefit all gamers.

    Anyway, great work – and honest too – highlighting how far there is to go. Thank you!

    Barrie Ellis, CEO http://www.OneSwitch.org.uk

  • http://gamescc.rbkdesign.com Reid Kimball

    Hi,

    I'm Reid, the person lucky enough to be shown in the video talking about closed captioning and my Doom3[CC] mod. I've been thinking about web video subtitling for a while now and Craig is right, there is no standard. There's a website I think has a lot of potential, but seems to be dead in the water right now. http://www.opencaptions.com/ I really like this idea of letting users caption the videos themselves, only because I fear it will take years of legislation to get commercial developers of video content to caption their videos for the web. We've already fought this battle in the 70's and 80's with TV captioning standards. Funny how history repeats itself.

  • http://www.last.fm/user/RajaRamu Markus-Alfonso

    I cannot believe this will work!