How blind players succeed at sports video games they’ve never seen
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Also what I've found very annoying were text games done in some fancy weird UI framework screen readers can't make sense of, usually Unity. WHen a game is written using the native UI toolkit or a toolkit that uses native controls under the hood, screen-readers can, by using the system APIs, retrieve the info the user wants to read. For those who don't know, screen-readers are programs that allow the blind to use the computer, mostly by reading the information on the screen with synthetic speech, putting it on special devices called braille displays and providing audio cues. They don't work in some magical way, describing the screen like a human would, usually they need good APIs to communicate with the app (or underlying OS), get as much info as possible about what's on the screen and what the user is doing, a bit like a malware and then present that information to the user, either automatically or upon request, after pressing some shortcut keys. If the app uses non-native UI toolkits, draws the UI by drawing things on the screen directly and doesn't expose the required information to screen-readers, absolutely nothing can be done with that app. This is, unfortunately, the case with most (all?) Unity games, as Unity's UI is not compatible with any native APIs. Plugins for built-in Unity screen-readers have been built, but I honestly have no idea how good they are (reinventing the wheel, when it comes to screen-readers, usually doesn't end well so I'm sceptical).
For example, can a 'blind' agent, that's fed just the (stereo) soundtrack of a game, become good at it? (While not, add more audio cues.)
Can another cooperative agent, which can see the screen but only emit audio, learn to help the blind-agent do better? (Train up this helper-agent during playtesting, then add its audio cues to the main game – either always, or in a special 'audio assist' mode.)
(Parts of this could wind up like a rotated version of this "sound of pixels" work:
http://sound-of-pixels.csail.mit.edu/
But, instead of learning which pixel-regions are responsible for sounds, it'd be adding sounds to second-medium-communicate relevant visual information.)
To achieve this, you'd add yet another adversarial agent, that's trying to discriminate original audio from the helper-enhanced audio – without access to the video.
Only audio-help that successfully fools this 3rd agent, and is thus relatively-indistinguishable from the unassisted-audio, gets added to the game.
I'm not saying EA hasn't done things I don't agree with, but I do believe they get more than their fair share of hatred on the internet. Actually, I should say "we", not "they".
Just because they do some good things doesn't mean that the company is good overall, hence the comments.
And you are right that a lot of the problems are really industry-wide. I really hope that this pay-to-win system can start to fade away again.
I actually share this - I won't get BF5 until a few months after release because it'll be pushed to release to compete with CoD and be bug-ridden until a few months later.
So, I can say: "At least they fix their games after a few months".
In addition, please don't take these things personally - the company can be nice to work for and everything but in general the idea the public has are due to its actions as a company, and not the effort of the individuals. I'm sure the developers are competent.
I know it's a bit petty, but I'm still upset at the Sony BGM rootkit scandal. There are several other similar things, from different companies, that have my upset. Like I said... I know it's petty, but it really can be difficult to erase a negative image people have.
[Edit: Formatting]
Good will takes a year to earn but a second to lose.
I'm going to take issue with you and say that EA deserves every ounce of hate that it gets.
EA gets hate because it buys and screws up beloved franchises. EA gets hate because it has game properties that it is clearly milking that would be much better if they weren't in its hands. EA gets hate because it yanks critical content out of its games and makes it pay to download. EA gets hate because it (used to?) make you install their buggy pile of crap online service to play your single player mode game.
And their only defense is: "Well, everybody else does it too."
When your child makes that statement, you generally have a not terribly sympathetic reply. Why should EA get any more sympathy?
Indeed. My "never again" moment is from 10 years ago, and is missing from your list: The DRM used on Spore bricked my Windows install, in the middle of the semester. I was just lucky I'd switched to Ubuntu a few months before.
Most of it is wrong on many levels unfortunately, I feel like reading someone that has no idea of how the industry work. You think EA as company is screwing franchises on purpose, never occurs to you that the studio that is developing the game is doing the mistakes and EA as a whole has pretty much nothing to do with it?
"EA gets hate because it yanks critical content out of its games and makes it pay to download"
Please give an example of a game where the dev were done finishing the game weeks / month in advance and chose to not include part of the game in the release.
Read this: https://kotaku.com/former-bioware-studio-head-talks-about-li...
Content gets cut because games release on a set schedule, rather than "when it's done", so corners are cut. This problem is seen as normal in the game industry, especially as they often want to target Christmas releases. The side effect is that things that might be mostly done get cut out, or removed because they couldn't test it, etc.
I get that things get cut. The problem is not that it's unfinished, it's that remaining things are _added as DLC_, or things that masquerade as "free" unlocks, but where buying it with real money is far more appealing than the time they allocate to it (e.g. recent star wars battleground game). This is not solely EA's fault, but it's endemic in the industry. I don't want to buy a "season pass" for my game, I want to _buy the game_.
For an example game release, and pretty much started this thing. I'd be very surprised if it were not developed pre-release. Gran Tourismo HD even had a plan where buying the things you'd want to play was the big plan (though it never made it to release).
Javik, in Mass Effect 3, evokes considerable ire.
It was quite clear that Javik was expected to be a standard character (several things simply don't make sense if you don't interact with him) but they ripped him out specifically for the purposes of creating a downloadable available ON RELEASE DAY.
While I'm sure lots of individuals over there are doing good work the company as a whole deserves the hate that it gets.
It's like working at Google and being upset when someone says, "Google is evil" because you're working on a morally good project.
Accessibility is something that can be really difficult to get enough focus on during development even when a few people are aware and care.
For my own sake I'm just glad that some recent games (such as Battlefield) have added colour blind modes.