“There is no such thing as fully accessible, but what we can strive for is a world in which everyone’s needs are acknowledged, accepted, and catered to. And that begins with listening to disabled people.”
Here’s some examples awkward accessibility being a thing:
Your at a hotel that has a lift to get you from one sub-floor to another, but the lift can only be unlocked and operated by one specific person that the hotel now has to go find. Sure, they’ve made the entrance to the sub-floor is accessible, but now it’s a thing.
The buses are wheelchair accessible but the driver has to stop the bus, take 30 seconds to lower the goddamn ramp, move passengers out of their seats, hook up the straps and then secure you in the bus. Sure, they’ve made the busses accessible but now it’s a thing.
The restaurant has an accessible entrance, but it’s past the trash room and through the kitchen. Sure, the restaurant is accessible, but now it’s an insulting thing.
Here’s some great examples of accessibility not being a thing:
The train to the airport pulls up flush with the platform. I board with everyone else and sit wherever the fuck I want. Riding the train is accessible and not a thing.
In Portland, I press a button the side of the streetcar and a ramp automatically extends at the same time the door opens. I board in the same amount of time as everyone else. This is not a thing.
I get that it is difficult to design for wheelchair accessibility, but folks need to start considering the overall quality of the experience versus just thinking about meeting the minimum requirements.
For the love of all things holy please pay attention to this
I have been avoiding calling my doctor’s office to schedule a physical out of social anxiety, but I know it’s getting close to time for one. I was planning to do it on my birthday, since it’s a weekday and I’m off work.
I just got a text from the doctor’s office telling me to schedule it and giving me a link to click or a phone number to call. If I click the link and that results in me being able to schedule it without having to call a stranger, I will get down on my knees and thank the universe.
Seriously, more places need to let you schedule things through texts or online. I’m not the only person out here with horrible anxiety about calling strangers on the phone.
Seriously though. Besides for deaf/HOH/APD people. Plenty of reasons voice calls might not be accessible.
(Including combo deals. My hearing and auditory processing make voice calls a really miserable experience most of the time now, so of course I get nervous whenever there’s no more accessible choice. Especially considering how crappy too many people on the other end will act when you’re obviously struggling and need to ask for repeats/hear something wrong.)
Can rarely make myself do that unless it’s an emergency situation anymore. And patients/customers should not be placed in that situation, when they’re basically having to work at not implementing any more accessible communication options by now.
Apparently needed to rant some, but definitely wishing you luck dealing with the doctor’s office!
Next up on Worth Reading: The other team should just fucking let me win when I play baseball.
well this isn’t necessarily a bad point. there are games with great stories and really awful shoehorned fighting sequences. then you also have handicapped/disabled gamers who don’t necessarily have the dexterity to finish a game but would still like to be able to.
optional “cakewalk” modes aren’t that bad of an idea.
what if i want to just see the story of the game and dont want to actually play it? like??
as it is i would never pay for a bioshock game or a fallout game but i am very interested in the story. so i just watch youtube videos of it. they could get money from me if they sold the skip combat mode
i’m a games developer and an avid gamer and i really really think games should let you skip combat
honestly one of my favourite things about la noire was when you failed a sequence twice the game was like “yo do you just wanna skip this bit?”
the gaming industry/community has a huge problem with accessibility tbh. like, thank god for standardised control schemes (although bring back full customisation jfc not enough games have that anymore) but fights require time, literacy in both that type of gaming & in the individual game, you need to be able to navigate the system which can be anywhere from slightly difficult to hellish for people with visual/audio processing disorders. and tbh sometimes you just wanna enjoy the story and not get stressed the hell out doing the sAME FIGHT 700 times. it’s why i always put a game on easy/casual when I’m replaying unless i’m specifically going for difficulty based achievements.
not to mention SO MANY GAMES have either poorly designed battles or fights that have been shoved in for no reason other than to pad out the game (dxhr & da2 come to mind immediately) that sometimes it’d honestly improve the gameplay to just skip them altogether
Imagine if you were a gamer with arthritis or MS or some other disability that took away your ability to click buttons quickly, and every fight became as frustrating as THAT GODDAMN DA: ORIGINS OH FUCK I’M ON FIRE SLIDE PUZZLE.
Yeah. Skipping combat might seem like a not bad idea then.
Mass Effect 3 has this:
[Screenshot from a Mass Effect 3 menu, with title: “Choose Your Experience”, showing the options ‘action’, ‘role playing’ and ‘story’.]
‘Action’ makes most story choices for you and conversations become straight up cutscenes. ‘Role playing’ is the default experience, both challenging gameplay and character/story building. And ‘story’ has the roleplaying but very easy combat, letting you breeze through it. (You also have a ‘casual’ difficulty setting that’s a bit more rewarding but still pretty easy.)
The thing about video games (particularly RPGs or in general games that allow you to explore or direct the story) is that the interactivity is what makes it different from movies or watching LPs on youtube. And I’ve played games that got FAR stronger emotional reactions out of me simply because I had to carry out the actions myself rather than just watching. And that experience should be more accessible.
Because SHOCKINGLY: games aren’t always about winning, or being good at it. It’s about having fun. This is kindergarten education here.
Yeah, it always baffles me when I see people react so negatively to a perfectly reasonable suggestion like this.
Why the hell shouldn’t games let you skip combat if you want to? Why shouldn’t there be a super-duper-easy-peasy mode for everything? No-one is gonna force YOU to play it like that if you don’t want to! Continue to be as hardcore as you like!
I just don’t understand the resistance at all. What we’re talking about is simply having more options for gamers. You’re adding something that would make games more accessible and fun for loads of new fans, and you’re not taking ANYTHING away from existing fans.
Like…do you…not want more people to enjoy these games?? Do you really hate the idea of other people having fun so much that you’ll rile against it even when it literally has no effect on you or your experience whatsoever?? Are you honestly that selfish??
I am *horrifically* bad at gaming, but it’s a genre that I’m intensely interested in and very desperately want to be more immersed in. I would HAPPILY buy so many more games if combat was a skippable option.
Not to mention one of the best indie games out right now is pretty much telling you if you want the best ending, don’t fight.
Yeah, I hate the elitist mentality that only those ~*~*hardcore*~*~ enough should be allowed to enjoy video games. I mean, gaming should be an experience to be had and not just an obstacle to clear, right?
Then again, my poor mental health situation and chronic pain+mobility issues on my right hand means that my gaming options are severely limited nowadays. So I’m all about making gaming accessible for everyone in the first place.
Anyone who thinks gaming will be ruined by making it more accessible need to realize that they have already ruined gaming for many.
Anyone who thinks gaming will be ruined by making it more accessible need to realize that they have already ruined gaming for many.
I’m so grateful for things like story mode and being able to skip if you die a couple times. Like, I have a lot of experience playing games and have no disabilities that would hamper me doing so, but I still really appreciate the ability to skip or make things really easy. Sometimes you just don’t want to play the same mission 50 times to finally beat it. Sometimes folks just need a frickin break. And that’s okay.
I’m just amused that the second commenter is totally confusing single-player with PVP.
Anyway…
Games are for fun.
Games have lots of ways to make playing them be more fun than tedious, starting with the option to save and going on to tutorials, multiple or infinite lives, instant healing, unrealistically large inventories, automatic mission notes, autocompleting maps, in-world GPS, hints, highlighting interactive objects, key prompts, ability to replay dialogue, buffs and power-ups, undiscardable mission items, easy to parse HP bars for the player AND the enemy, blocked friendly fire, selective damage from weapons….the list goes on.
This is all to enable FUN via INCREASING ACCESSIBILITY. Yes, the term applies to everyone, not just the officially disabled. You want to strip your average game of all the stuff I mentioned above?
No, you don’t, because while insanely difficult games with permadeath and no save points used to be the standard and are a valid subgenre, they are not what most people want to be limited to when choosing their entertainment.
So, really, an option to skip combat or puzzles you’re not able or willing to do is not exactly out of line with the concept of making a game enjoyable, is it? Which would be the priority, since it’s…you know…a game?
Skipping gameplay is not accessibility.
So, really, an option to skip combat or puzzles you’re not able or
willing to do is not exactly out of line with the concept of making a
game enjoyable, is it?
Those make playing the game easier, by skipping you’re not playing the game.
video games are for fun, but they’re also the artistic vision of the people making it and they have a specific gameplay feel and goal of the game overall in mind when it’s in development
thanks for making me realize why single player games keep getting worse over time lol
That artistic vision can and often does include accessibility. It doesn’t have to be elitist to be good.
You can also campaign for the option to turn off things that make games easier for you. 🙂
gamers just need to chill a little a bit. Why should I have to choose whether to play a game that’s too hard or watch a movie?? I want to fluidly adjust the difficulty level of my game at hand to my current level of acuity and alertness.
on a tangent: Fallout 4 let’s me run around in Very Hard, but also let’s me change anytime to Very Easy if I just don’t wanna give a damn. I’m still bitter I can’t do the same with the built in survival mode, cuz I’m a sucker for survival games, but trusting a Bethesda game to not crash until you can save at a checkpoint is absolute folly. And made me quit that safe game in frustration cuz I can’t quickly jump to Normal mode to safe if I realize the goddamn game hasn’t saved in an hour and I just rearranged my inventory.
long story short: videogames are an interactive medium, so let people take charge of how they interact with it
Trunign difficulty up and down and skipping gameplay aren’t remotely that same thing.
I would skip a lot of the fights if I could, at least in very easy mode I can outrun the raiders without dying. since I am not given the option, the choose the next closest thing to skipping. I also played mass effect 1&2 on the easiest mode cuz the fighting system is just boring to me.
again, videogames are an interactive medium; let people take charge how to interact with them. I don’t see why people need to die on the hill trying to defend elitism. To me, games are about fun, and sometimes that means tackling the hardest difficulty at hand, and sometimes that just means immersing myself in a virtual world in super easy mode.
Because it affects how games are designed.
You play mass Effect? Great. In ME1 there’s a cult, if you kill the leader everyone fights you, if you just arrest him nobody attacks you and everyone lives. If you skip the battle your choice of killing the leader has no consequence, no meaning, because you as the player are not paying for the choice of killing somebody.
In the section where everyone is being mind controlled you can choose between using a knock out gas or killing them. Again, if you skip the fight you remove any message that the game is trying to say.
Another quest has you choose between arresting a criminal or letting her go, if you try to arrest her she’ll fight back. If you were skip it you’d have your cake and eat it too because you’d choose the moraly right opinion but with no hardship coming from it.
These are just examples of how skippable gameplay can make games lose any message or meaning they try to transmit.
I don’t know what you want from me man, giving this super specific example as if there was no solution to it even if the gameplay doesn’t make the player fight. I want games to be fun, and games are fun for different people in different ways, and Mass Effect 3 is a prime example that you can make both groups happy, those who want to enjoy the fight mechanics and those who simply want to enjoy the story.
I suggest that you take a hard look on yourself and ask yourself why you are so eager for games to be played only one single way, which is your own way. Videogames are art and entertainment, there is no single one way of enjoying and interacting with them.
I am not willing to discuss this with you any further, if you want to learn more you can read up my tags on elitism and gatekeeping.
Wait but those two examples… you’re missing the fact that skipping fighting manually does not have to mean skipping the choice of fighting. The computer can run the fight for you. The choice remains, the message remains, the story runs as planned, the only difference is the player does not have to be skilled enough to complete the fight by themselves.
The ‘hardship’ that makes the message work is not mashing buttons in the right order, it’s making the choice.
The player is still not dealing with the consequence of their choices, they’re just letting the game do it for them. “It doesn’t matter if you took the easy way out in an imoral manner, someone else will deal with the consequence of your actions”
It’s hilarious how you’re simplyfying to “mashing buttons” like it’s a mindless, stupid task for morons. Have you considered you don’t like playing videogames?
It heavily depends on the genre of the game to begin with, something like a true to the rule rpg, where your actions directly affect the story could not allow you to skip gameplay because the gameplay is part of the story, while something like an adventure fantasy or a looser rpg where the story is laid out and you play as the same time as it unfolds would have sense in letting you skip the game in order to just enjoy the cutscenes.
Then again most games I enjoy are about the challenge of surpassing them, so I would never ask to skip the gameplay and I felt insulted when Mario for wii suggested me to do so, but hey, different strokes for different folks, if y’all want an interactive movie there’s those overrealistic western versions of Visual Novels, like Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human.
Can I add: for many games, adding a combat-free version would make them much more accessible for the purpose of litarary/artistic study. Video games as an art form have not been studied much, and I think one of the big reasons is the time committment that goes with them. You’d need to balance it with mechanics, but for instance, I’d love a version of Planescape: Torment where you don’t get attacked by random thugs, worms, and tropacapacas or whatever they’re called and the only meaningful combats are the ones that matter to the story.
“Gameplay is not worth studying and has no artistic value” okay gotcha.
No you dont get it. Gameplay can be varied and accessible while retaining its artistic value. If this was not so we would only have one type of game with the exact same gameplay.
Accessibility is in no way an enemy of art.
Skipping gameplay isn’t accessibility.
Difficulty modes are
accessibility. Custom controls
are
accessibility. Colorblind options and subtitles
are
accessibility.
They make playing and interacting with the game possible for those who can’t, by skipping you’re not making the game portion accessible, just the cutscenes.
Videogames should not be a mechanism of simply delivering cutscenes and text where the “pressing of buttons” is a secondary aspect, a chore and ultimately disposable.
Wrong.
Hi, actual academic that had written cultural studies papers before.
I don’t want to sink thirty hours into a game for analysis purposes if half of that is going to be artificially bulked up with random encounters that don’t drive the plot.
Gameplay is worth analyzing, but if I have to slog through it I’m going to focus my attention elsewhere.
Moreover why does it matter how people enjoy things? Put in accessibility features and move on. This is a stupid hill to die on. You can have your fun and someone else can have theirs.
Exactly. It’s like getting mad that some people skim parts of a book they don’t like, or miss an episode of a series. What’s it to you?
But I think, @alexxdz, that you are confused about what skipping actually means. It doesn’t mean you just turn the game on and then go directly to the credits screen without playing.
It means developers anticipate people needing assistance with certain parts of the game, and allowing them to move forward regardless of skill. For example by automating certain parts, user’s choice. Or providing alternative ways of progressing- such as displaying symbols instead of colours for the colourblind. Why not argue against this as well?
Accessibility is already being implemented in so many ways in games- the line you want to draw is arbitrary and has moved back so many times already, at no loss to the art of game creation, despite what you think. In fact, it’s BECAUSE games can be more and more complex that they’re more and more accessible. You don’t notice it as long as it’s useful to you (minimaps, save points, highlighting, skippable dialogue, respawns, all of that increases accessibility), but the minute you don’t need it, you’re upset that it’s going too far.
But videogames are not catered only to you. Your outrage is fueled by a desire to be part of an elite, to be able to cut somebody, anybody off and say ‘that person is NOT a true gamer like me’.
Like you’re trying to do to me right now in another reblog by claiming I don’t like videogames. You have no way of knowing this, in fact you made it up in direct contradiction to what I said- you just really need to believe that I am someone who is not part of the same group as you, that elite group who plays videogames the right way.
Buddy. That group is a myth. Your elite does not exist. I like videogames. 😛
‘Videogames should not be’ is ultimately only your opinion. Videogames are a vast genre that range from pressing buttons quickly to typing in text based commands. They can be whatever people want them to be, and videogames whose creators choose to make them accessible to the disabled are to be celebrated. Those who decide not to do it despite having every possibility- well, they deserve the criticism they get.
Just enjoy the damn games the way YOU like, and stop worrying about who else plays them and how. It doesn’t even affect you.
Reblog if you believe phone call anxiety is real and it isn’t childish bad behavior.
Trying to prove a point to this job helper.
Phone calls can be harder on your anxiety bc you cant pick up on the other persons behavioral cues as you talk with them
^^^^
After 10+ years of psychotherapy, almost all of my social anxiety triggers are now at a manageable level—even academic public speaking, which was my #1 worst trigger for most of my life—except for my phone anxiety. It’s literally the one and only thing I’ve never been able to significantly improve.
I have to talk the whole conversation through with my friends beforehand.
I have to get explicit confirmation from my friends that “yes, you really need to ring that person right now”.
I have to write scripts.
I have to take anti-anxiety meds, or get drunk.
I only ever ring someone as the very last resort, when all other methods are unavailable.
I hyperventilate and cry afterwards.
I’m also a 28-year-old scientist with three degrees and a teaching position. I’m normally a logical (albeit emotional) person. But anxiety is not logical.
Anxiety is due to inability to correctly perceive threats—more specifically, due to both increased expectation and increased frequency of false recognition of threats in response to neutral stimuli (this is called “pessimistic bias”). Social anxiety simply means that this inability to correctly perceive threats is specific to social interactions, rather than generalised to all aspects of life. (For example, a resting facial expression or lack of verbal acknowledgement
is more likely to be perceived as anger, disgust or rejection by a
socially anxious person than a neurotypical person. But a socially anxious person is not particularly more likely to worry throughout the day that they’ve left their stove on.)
Therefore, socially anxious people learn to cope with this bias by becoming hypervigilant to social cues such as posture, hand gestures, nodding, eye contact, eyebrow position, mouth tightness, tone of voice, talking speed etc., and then using all the available information to attempt to be logical and “talk down the anxiety”. We also learn to be high self-monitors, which means that we closely observe our audience and constantly (subconsciously) monitor their responses in order to ensure that they accept us and deem us “appropriate”.
But non-verbal social cues aren’t available
during phone calls!
There isn’t any body language to read, or eyes to look into. You can’t monitor your audience for approval. They don’t follow the script you prepared. All you have is their voice, which is usually masked (everyone seems to have a “phone voice”, “customer service voice” or “professional voice”) and distorted by the phone and is therefore useless. All of a sudden you’re back to relying on a single neutral stimulus, and the pessimistic bias kicks in, and you start to panic because you’re not getting constant feedback.
It’s a Recognised Psychological Thing™.
Phone anxiety (actually, phone phobia) is one of the most common, most recognised and most treated phobias in the world. Social anxiety—of which phone phobia is an extremely prevalent trigger—is one of the most common, most recognised and most treated
anxiety disorders in the world.
It’s most definitely real, most definitely not “childish”, and you’re not alone.
also, if you have any degree of sensory processing disorder, difficulty processing language, or hearing problems – which aren’t limited to just ‘volume too quiet’ but also include things like being unable to pick out speech from background noise, or distinguish phonemes when someone has an accent or talks too fast – then voice calls are legitimately REALLY DIFFICULT.
it’s like trying to read semaphore in a snowstorm while having an allergy attack.
yes, that is hard.
no, it’s not just you.
no, you’re not making it up for attention, being a baby, or lazy.
voice calls are simply not as good as text.
the fact that most businesses will not communicate via text is a combination of inertia and ableism, not a sign that everyone but you loves voice calls and you’re a weirdo. frankly most people kinda hate them unless it’s a loved one whose voice you want to hear.
Auditory processing is a major part of phone anxiety for me.
I’ve dealt with more calls than I’d like where, even after asking someone to repeat themselves, I just could not catch what they were saying. It got to be frustrating for both me and the other person as I kept asking for repetition and struggling to understand. And it’s totally luck of the draw if I’m calling anywhere new, or answering a call from an unknown number, so the anxiety skyrockets in both of those cases. (Will the pitch and timbre of their voice be something that I can hear clearly, or something that gets distorted by the phone line? What accent do they have? How fast will they talk?)
My auditory memory is not that great even when I can hear clearly, and it gets even worse when I’m using up mental processing cycles trying to decipher what I’m hearing, so any call that’s really information-heavy is probably going to result in some information getting lost in transmission. And it’s only worse if the information is numeric (like prices, product codes, times, or credit card numbers), because all the contextual cues that I typically use for disambiguating what I’m hearing are not really useful. (“Sorry, was that six fifty or six fifteen?”)
Another problem for me, though slightly less of one, is worrying about being misunderstood by the other person. This is especially true for any call where I would need to give my name and/or address, because it feels like every time I try to give this information over the phone, it gets misspelled or mistranscribed in new and interesting ways.
And then there are the times my brain just glitches out and I end up saying something completely different than what I meant to. This happens to me in person too (like the time I meant to order chocolate chip cheesecake ice cream and said “cookies and cream”), but it feels like I’m even more prone to this kind of mistake over the phone. (Probably because I’m using so much more in the way of mental resources to follow the conversation, I guess?)
I think I bookmarked posts with recommendations for text-to-speech phone apps, but I don’t have my home laptop synced with my work one and I’m shitty at tagging things on here.
If anyone has any recommendations for an app that lets you take a pic with your phone and then reads the text, I would REALLY appreciate your advice!
I’ll be asking my coworkers at lunch if their visually impaired students know of any.
My phone is pretty good at reading text from PDFs and web pages, but it would really help if we could use our phones to read text from images.
Feel free to reblog and add tags you think might help!
Finally put together another grocery delivery for Sunday, and couldn’t resist adding this when I saw it.
It may or may not be very good, but I haven’t had any cheesecake I didn’t make myself since like 2005. Which means maybe 3 times total 😅
The ingredients sounded reasonable, at least, so we’ll see.
I’m still pretty pissed off that I couldn’t put in a Sainsbury’s order this time, because I specifically wanted a few things from there. So, I messed up trying to log in, and they won’t unlock the account without a voice call 😬 Guess I may be setting up a new account.
“This case, which may have wider applicability for college students [in the US]…asserts that students have a right to university resources even during mental health crises, and that universities must accommodate mentally ill students under the law.”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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