I so often see image descriptions for things that spend, like, a paragraph of text talking about the background and give barely any space to the actual point of the image/gif/video. like. I don't need the image descriptions, but it does seem rather unhelpful.
for example
IMAGE ID: An empty basement room with beige tile; in the background are stairs going up into the rest of the house and draped on the wall is a sparkly banner saying Happy Halloween. In the foreground are three young Black men in shorts and t-shirts and socks, all three keeping sync as they dance joyfully to the song. The shortest guy smiles so big and so much for most of the video you can’t not smile back. END ID
Every single time I watch it. Every single time I smile. They’re perfect. THEY. ARE. PERFECT.
The room they are in is not relevant. The tile is not relevant. I did not notice the Happy Halloween banner at all, because it is simply not the focus of the video.
My example would be:
Video description: Three young Black men do a beautifully synchronised dance to Take On Me. Every move is synced perfectly to the beat and each other, though it is clear that this is an amateur production made for the joy of making it. / end ID
Which one is more helpful? Here is a link to the video in question, I didn't include it in the post because my understanding it that, for the people who need image descriptions, they wouldn't see the image anyway.
Re-posting here because I thought it might be relevant for other people!
1. Contact 1iota.com, the ticket giveaway people, to make accommodations in advance, they have a phone number/email on the bottom of your ticket (it should look like this)
Now, I recognise that I'm possibly just talking out of my arse here, but given there's a feature to switch the priority of mouse buttons (presumably for left handed people), I couldn't help wondering if there's any market for an mirrored QWERTY keyboard for the same?
I'm fairly certain I've heard of keyboards with the numpad on the left rather than the right, but given the layout is designed for right hand dominant people, surely fully reversing the keyboard would help....
At this point, some 40 years after the beginning of console gaming, and about 30 years after console gaming's initial heyday, there are certain aspects of games that gamers should no longer tolerate.
Static / Limited Control Schemes
This is perhaps the most fundamental problem facing games today - the inability in many titles to remap controls. I was never a WASD gamer - I always remapped those controls to arrow keys and, later, to the number pad. Whatever facility I have with 10-key typing is directly due to associating 8 with north or forward for so many years, yet many newer games don't offer remappable controls. Even worse, many games only offer a single controller layout, without even a left-handed option.
With the console power and development skills available, there is no reason why every game's controller layout can't be as flexible as the controls for the original "Resistance: Fall Of Man" for the PlayStation 3. "Resistance" not only allowed remapping the entire controller, including the d-pad, the game provided tutorials and instruction using the controls that the player defined. If the player had changed R1 to fire and R2 to aim for ease of use or as an accessibility accommodation, "Resistance" used those controls when providing information about weapons. Even more important, the player could change those controls at any time and the tutorial would update and provide instructions using the new definitions. It was extraordinary, better than "Fallout 3" or "Fallout: New Vegas" (which, while it's not nearly as good as a game as "Fallout 3," is still exceptionally accessible in terms of controller remapping). It is, to this day, the single best example of giving the player control over the commands that I have seen on consoles.
As I struggle through games with bizarre control schemes which seem inverted from everything I've ever played (and I'm thinking specifically of "Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots" here), I remember "Resistance" and how exceptional it was, how user-friendly it was, how good it felt to be able to assign controls to buttons that felt right for me.
Although this was really just icing on the cake, "Resistance" also provided a number of pre-defined schemes for players familiar with a variety of games like "Halo," "Modern Warfare" and "Battlefield." While that was a nice touch and mapped controls to buttons and triggers that players were familiar with, the ease of use that Insomniac Games put into that PS3 launch title was amazing.
While many players would simply use the defined controls, offering such flexibility makes games vastly more accessible to disabled people who have limited use of one or both hands, and / or a complete inability to use one hand. They can remap the A / B / X / Y or Circle / Triangle / Square / X buttons to the d-pad, and assign things like aiming and firing to the trigger and bumper on one side of the controller.
And allowing players to toggle (i.e. turn on and turn off by clicking a button like R3 or L3, rather than having to hold a control to keep an option activated) options like crouching, sprinting, running, aiming, free running (and I'm specifically considering "Assassin's Creed" and "Assassin's Creed 2" as egregious examples here - both require pressing and holding the right trigger and A button while using the left stick to move during free running) and so on is equally important and directly related to controller remapping.
Lack Of Subtitles
Subtitles are one of the simplest and most broadly-supported accessibility accommodations, but somehow, they are not universally accepted or included and it's an utterly appalling oversight considering how many games manage to get this right. The original "Assassin's Creed" game was released without subtitles. "Singularity" was released without subtitles. "Forza Motorsport 3" and "Forza Motorsport 4" were both released without subtitles, an oversight which is even more glaring on "Forza 4" because of the increase in voice-over content. Many sports games are released without subtitles (although it's somewhat more understandable omission here, due to the variety of situations that would need to be subtitled, "MLB The Show 2011" managed to include play-by-play subtitles for the game's announcer, which is what every sports game should strive for).
Subtitles aren't just an accessibility accommodation for deaf and hard-of-hearing gamers - many gamers, myself included, prefer to read the text in a game. In my case, it's because I read much faster than someone can speak, and I prefer the certainty of reading what characters are saying instead of having to decipher a pronunciation.
Checkpoint Save Systems
Checkpoints are one of the most obnoxious aspects of contemporary gaming. They don't make a game more challenging, they make a game more frustrating, especially for adults who have responsibilities. Every single game should allow players to save on demand. It should also allow players to decide whether auto-save is enabled. And every single game should save on exit, in addition to allowing players to save whenever they choose.
This isn't just a design issue, it's also an accessibility issue for disabled gamers. Gamers with conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis (as well as a broad range of other disabling conditions) cannot predict how long they can play, or whether they can reach the next checkpoint. In such cases, gamers are often faced with two choices: quit and lose whatever progress they had made, or struggle to continue in the hope that the next checkpoint isn't too far away.
Save points, such as the ones in "Final Fantasy XIII," are functionally identical to checkpoints. They do not allow players to save whenever and wherever they want, and force players to either lose progress or struggle through.
When games were more directly targeting kids - whose responsibilities were homework and chores - perhaps that convention made some sort of sense. Now that most prominent game titles explicitly target adults, designers must adjust to the reality of adult life - adults have relationships, jobs, children, family obligations and responsibilities. It is unreasonable to expect adults to jump through the hoops that a game designer considers a challenge so that they get the reward of saving their progress.
I can't think of any other creative or entertainment industry that behaves that way and it's long past time that video games caught up with the rest of the world. This isn't asking for fan service - this is pointing out specific, measurable and quantifiable concerns with game design and how designers regard their customers.
The best designers seem to give as much control to their customers as they can and let them decide what controls they want to use for what actions. They ensure that people don't have to sit through cutscenes if they can read more quickly and advance through lines of dialogue. And they respect their customers enough to let them start and stop the game as the customer needs to, instead of requiring them to reach some arbitrary location to fit the designer's idea of a challenge.
