Hi Lenron, Yes, it is possible to create accessible games for Android. Nobody is disputing that. The problem is weather or not it is practical to do so. The answer in many cases is that it is not practical to do so for a lot of reasons. Possible is not always practical which is the point being discussed here.
For example, assume I wanted to write a quick and dirty text adventure. Let's call it Super Cave Adventure. On Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, or almost any modern os all I have to do is create a standard text control to display my text on screen. On Android the text controls are not accessible and now I have to spend extra time and effort creating my own accessible text control just so the screen readers can read it. I of course could get around that issue by outputting my text directly to Espeak or another synth, but we are only digging the hole deeper because that is a hack to get around an access issue in Droid OS's accessibility API. Outputting directly to speech might be an acceptable alternative to you personally, but it is considered to be bad practice simply because the app or game should be accessible to everyone regardless if they are blind, sighted, deaf-blind, whatever, and by outputting directly to speech you are excluding the deaf and deaf-blind users of that device in deference to blind users only. So the point here is in order to offer universal accessibility, which should be the goal of any game developer, I'd have to do much more work onDroid OS to make a game like Super Cave Adventure accessible all because Google is not doing their job by offering up an accessible text control in the first place. My time is limited as I am sure Josh's is too, and while it might be possible to make an accessible game for Android it is not as practical to do so. Not when we can easily create a standard text control using the Windows API on Windows, standard text control using GTK+ 3 on Linux, a standard text control in Cocoa on OSX, etc without having to go making our own hacks to get around the broken APIs on Android. That is why some of us won't consider it until things improve on Android. Cheers! On 2/22/14, lenron brown <[email protected]> wrote: > I have seen the accessible games there is for android and the are > awesome so I still think it is possible. > --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
