After Thursday's presentation on disabilities and gaming, I read an article in the Daily Dot (https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/deaf-gamers-accessibility/) titled Deaf gamers are rating games on their accessibility. While the presentation in class mentioned how the Xbox adaptive controller helps those who have problems with motor skills or how certain games have color schemes that help/hurt those who are color blind, not much was discussed on deafness and gaming. Thus, I didn't really understand just how difficult it could be for deaf gamers to play certain games until I read this article.
This article talks about OneOddGamerGirl.net, which rates games based on their accessibility for deaf gamers. Specifically, a deaf gamer will play a game for a couple of hours and then have a non-deaf gamer play it to see if issues in the game are due to poor accessibility or just poor design. As a result, we can see just how accessible games are for deaf gamers using a letter-grading system. For example, Spider Man received an A because because of its subtitle resizing and visual cues that alert players of approaching enemies. Other games, like Far Cry 5, received poor grades because of their lack of accessibility.
As more attention is focused towards making games more accessible for all, I am interested to see how developers will try to make games more user-friendly for the deaf. I think the attention that is being given on this issue now is definitely a step in the right direction. I'd also be curious to know any of your thoughts as to possible ways that developers might be able to make games more accessible for deaf gamers.
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