Like games, their highly complex visual and interactive nature makes them poorly suited for accessibility.
I don’t agree with this premise at all. What makes games hard for accessibility is not that they have complex visuals, but that the entire gameplay is designed for sighted people… and despite that, you often find stories on internet forums of blind users who completely super hard games without any specific assistive technology.
As for super complex GUI applications, if you already have key-bindings and text labels, you have 90% of what it takes to make it accessible. The workflow is not the limitation in terms of accessibility (blind users with braille readers can have really complex workflows), as long as the UI widgets don’t require any visual feedback. For example, a music editor could be harder to make accessible because editing a setting would change an audio curve and the feedback would be visual and hard to convey in a text medium.
For most kinds of applications, i agree with the post that the problem is that accessibility is definitely not a priority for the developing studio. But i disagree that it would be impossible or make things harder in any way. (the hard part is supporting assistive technologies within your UI toolkit, once that’s done supporting accessibility for complex workflows has nothing special about it)
That’s cool! I had no clue Godot was a good pick for GUI. Do you know if it’s good for accessibility?
It seems NO. See: https://scribe.nixnet.services/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-advance-gui-applications-b1cfb941df3b
Thanks for sharing!
I don’t agree with this premise at all. What makes games hard for accessibility is not that they have complex visuals, but that the entire gameplay is designed for sighted people… and despite that, you often find stories on internet forums of blind users who completely super hard games without any specific assistive technology.
As for super complex GUI applications, if you already have key-bindings and text labels, you have 90% of what it takes to make it accessible. The workflow is not the limitation in terms of accessibility (blind users with braille readers can have really complex workflows), as long as the UI widgets don’t require any visual feedback. For example, a music editor could be harder to make accessible because editing a setting would change an audio curve and the feedback would be visual and hard to convey in a text medium.
For most kinds of applications, i agree with the post that the problem is that accessibility is definitely not a priority for the developing studio. But i disagree that it would be impossible or make things harder in any way. (the hard part is supporting assistive technologies within your UI toolkit, once that’s done supporting accessibility for complex workflows has nothing special about it)