Vision Impared and indie's place in the market.

[Seth M. Drebitko]

I think that one of our greatest abilities as small time press's to gain an edge in sales on larger companies is our focus. Larger companies focus on the largest number of possible sales and so tend to sometimes leave little niche groups behind and unable to participate. For example I have a couple friends who have shown great interest in gaming but have just never gotten into it because they are vision impaired and it is just to tedious for them to search through piles of tables in order to find one specific thing.

By simply increasing font size and making it capable for them to actually read the book this allows an entire new group of people who may have never checked out what was to offer. One of the reasons I wanted to post was to see if producing books like this was on any ones agenda, and to see what other groups of people could be catered to.

One of the things I am looking into is having a mirror site set up when I create mine specifically slanted towards vision impaired peoples and allowing them to purchase my books POD through lulu or something. To increase total sales for people I would also be looking to create a listing of publishers who also helped to support those with disabilities be able to get into the game.

Any opinions and insights into this would be greatly appreciated!
Regards, Seth

[Christian Liberg]

Hey Seth.

I did a project a few years ago, where i tried to get govermental funding for a project to translate roleplaying articles into Braille, giving blind people the possibility to read the books in their own solitude. The project was also provided with a small box with earphones, allowing a person to roll dices, and get the correct number into one ear.

I had a test group of 20 blind people, who loved the idea, however in the EEC it was turned down, so i never got funding for it, and at the time i did not have the possibility to go further with it. However as ( in denmark atleast ) visually impaired people get quite some aid from the social security, i think it would be easier to sell such a product, than a general book(IMHO)

Christian

[Seth M. Drebitko]

Hey Christian,

Sorry to hear that funding fell through on you. I have found two resources that I will be looking into further when I get home today but thought I would throw them up.

http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/production/request_begin.html A non profit company that does braille books and everything.

http://www.tecsol.com.au/Toy-TalkDice.htm an Australian company who produces a talking die. You record all the possibilities you want (which means you could replicate fudge dice and all) and then by shaking or clicking it randomly produces a result in speech.

I have been looking into card based mechanics because they are probably cheaper to get in braille than the talking die but over all its a nifty thing. Another thing I was looking into was a wheel that had three rings with arrows on the rings which could slide along a track. The arrows would point to numbers in braille for the person. This way the visually impaired person would also be able to track things like damage and stuff that needs to be constantly altered.

Regards, Seth

[MatrixGamer]

This certainly is a nich market. I can see doing something like this with a PDF product (it doubles layout work but nothing more). I personally find reading large print to be hard on my eye - so as an only nominally vissually impaired person (glasses) I'd not go for a big print product.

My impression of big type books is that they are mainly aimed at the elderly - not a big game buying demographic.

Please keep us posted on what you find. If you generate sales doing this method it will encourage others to follow. Until people see results I bet not one pursues it. This is your time to be a leader!

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

PS: I do try to keep the type in my products at 12pt type or bigger so that mildly impaired folks like myself can read them. I recently bought HackMaster and find reading the tiny type hard. It must be 9pt - I don't think it's 10 and it might be 8!

[Jason Morningstar]

I work with visually impaired students in higher education and am delighted by the number of gamers among them.  One guy I know uses Excel to record all the stats he needs to track for his Iron Heroes character and that works well for him in conjunction with a screen reader.  Another keeps it all in her head (and plays more freeform stuff).  A third uses screen magnification.

Seth, accommodating visually impaired users is a great idea.  With electronic content, it isn't difficult to set up a style sheet specifically for low vision users, or to add functionality allowing font size to be set by the user.  Just building pages that validate to established grammars will allow users to substitute their own CSS and is very helpful.  PDF documents can be tagged to allow screen readers to parse them correctly, although getting this right is a non-trivial task, and (ironically) Microsoft Word documents are generally screen-reader accessible. 

I'd suggest that arbitrarily increasing font sizes across the board isn't really an appropriate way forward, since visual impairments are so varied and the strategies for addressing them are likewise diverse.  As a publisher, offering a large print, Braille, or text version of your products on demand is probably a better way to go, both for you and the customer. 

I'd be glad to talk in more detail with anybody interested in exploring this topic further, here or via email.

[Seth M. Drebitko]

The thread was certainly created to address the over all problem. I want to run the gamut from hard of sight to completely blind.

Here are my methods for solving the problem right now.

Site:
Well as far as this I see a couple solutions
1.   Large font for the hard of sight
2.   Special programming that has screen reading built into the web site.
3.   The web pages can be broken down into sections so that A person can tab to a section hit enter and then be locked into that part of the page to be able to further tab and explore more freely.
4.   Anything that people interact with one another in I want the visually impaired to be able to feel part of so complicated rss feeds that take stuff from the normal site and filter it into the new format are a must for me. The best part of this for sure would be that people interacting with one another on the same level.
5.   An important aspect of the site will have to be links that talk when people tab over          them.

Books
Well as a publisher second from site comes books so there has to be something set up there.
1.   Large font books
2.   Braille books produced by non-profit brail companies.

Accessories
This is where it gets tricky because accessories in role playing are often visual tools.

1.   Electronic speaking dice/Braille cards depending on your system
2.   A three ringed disk with numbers in Braille from 0-9. Each ring will have an arrow on it which can slide along the track. This tool will allow the blind player the ability to track numerical values. ( I am still exploring this method)
3.   Peg boards with raised strips they can be placed in to show layouts. Other peg pawns can be placed on the board. These types of tools could be used so the blind player could run their hands across the map without moving things around. Also trying to look into other methods for this.
4.   Character sheets, this is a big one and I am not sure how to handle character sheets and blind players at the moment. The best thing I have so far would be a program similar to the site in which the player could tab to different parts of the sheet which would be read to them. They would be able to updated information on the sheet without having to have a paper copy. (this could also get rid of the need for the ring counter)

Any other ideas people have in regards to this, or other disabilities would be greatly appreciated.

[Jason Morningstar]

Seth, seriously, your motivation is obviously good but the methods you are suggesting are not.  Go talk to some people with low vision, or who are blind.  Ask them what makes a Web site functional and useful to them.  This is well-traveled territory.  Maybe think more about universal design rather than finding ways to address specific disabilities.  There are blind/low vision gamers managing all these factors now - asking them what works and what doesn't would be a great start. 

[Andy Kitkowski]

One thing that I considered is that, if anyone emailed me who was visually impaired (to downright blind, like my buddy Jim), saying "Hi, I'm visually impaired and I bought a copy of your game", I would totally give them a TXT version of the game. From talking to Jason and others, it seems that a plaintext file (or collection of files) is a great start, as most folks can do *something* with that.

The hard part would be getting the word out that you do such a service.

-Andy