Re: [orca-list] Great news for blind gamers

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

According to Christopher Chaltain:
# I don't disagree with anything here. For my part, I do prioritize thinks
# I need for my job over games. I also prioritize ongoing accessibility
# issues over one time accessibility issues, such as installs.
<snip...>

On the surface, this would seem fair, except for one small problem. If 
one-time accessibility was a low priority for many of us, an unknown 
someone could just register on forums for us and setup our Google 
accounts. But people get understandably angry when they have to solve 
those captcha things, even when it's Google's captcha, which does have 
an audio alternative, although it's very hard to understand especially 
the new ones, and it is only required at setup, unless you royally screw 
up your account the way I did when I tried to run my entire phone 
through tor. And again, many of us don't have, or even feel we should 
need a someone. I was taught all my life that I could and should be 
independent, which seems it should not include having a resident 
application installer and captcha solver in house ready to do my bidding 
at the ring of a bell or the push of a buzzer.

Yes, I do understand the limited amount of resources available for 
making things accessible, and I appreciate all the hard work that goes 
into making the things I use every day work for me and many others as 
well as they do. On the other hand, as for me, I can only consider 
something fully accessible if it can be installed and run successfully 
by a single blind, visually impaired, or otherwise so-called disabled 
person. That doesn't preclude the possibility of cludgy work-arounds 
until an installer or captcha solution becomes accessible, but something 
cannot be considered fully accessible unless there is at the very least 
a temporary cludge available for making it possible to start and use 
without help, and hopefully the promise of a better solution in the long 
term.

That being said, many Windows installers allow installation of an 
application simply by pressing enter a few times, with the exception of 
accepting the license agreements, which can usually be done by randomly 
pressing alt a or alt y. So if pressing the enter key 6 times doesn't 
work, alt a or alt y should get you to the place where it finishes 
normally, and the game will just play after that. So in this case, the 
cludgy work-around could be a central repository, i.e. a forum, wiki or 
some other type of website, where keystrokes guaranteed to work for a 
specific game's installer could be input, e.g.

<example>
To install Dungeons of the Creepy Castle, download the installer from
http://example.com/audiogames/3daudio/creepycastle.html
Upon running the installer executable, press enter twice, and accept the 
licence agreement by pressing alt y. Then, press enter 4 more times, and 
the game will be installed to your computer. You will find it in your 
desktop menu in Wine->WinViz Audio->Dungeons of the Creepy Castle->Play 
Dungeons of the Creepy Castle.
</example>

In such a repository of wine-based audiogames, it may also help to 
indicate exactly how playable the game is, indicate, if possible, what 
version of Wine works best, and indicate any problems during game play 
and their suggested fixes. Something like this could go a long way 
toward having a better accessible gaming experience until more native 
Linux and/or cross-platform games can be developed, and likely wouldn't 
take more than a handful of volunteers to maintain, and if it requires 
someone with eyes to read the installers, they would only need to read 
them once for the entire community,which is much less resource intensive 
than rewriting Wine from scratch so that installers talk to Orca, 
although that is indeed a goal worth achieving. Heck, if we could just 
get NVDA to run in Wine, it would make a lot of people, including 
myself, very happy.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk