[games_access] suits about discrimination on the basis of disability?

[Ian Hamilton]

(apologies if this isn't readable, my line breaks often get stripped out from the mailing list for some reason)

Agreed that it did a great deal of damage. It can and does work very well in both web and construction but for gaming it's far too early, at the moment what's needed is purely advocacy and education / awareness raising.

Legislation doesn't really start to have value until it's established as standard industry best practice, at which point it's a useful way to persuade organisations who are insistent on lagging behind. Cases very rarely go through the courts, they're settled out of court by the offending organisation fixing the issue.

Here's a pretty high profile example from the web industry:

http://www.mediaaccess.org.au/transcript-update-on-the-disney-access-court-case


Certainly in the UK in the past year or two there has been an increase in agencies and private companies (as opposed to public sector) putting effort into accessibility, coinciding with more legal action, such as this -

http://www.rnib.org.uk/livingwithsightloss/copingwithsightloss/parentsplace/news/insightmagazine/news/pages/legal_battle_airline.aspx


The climate around this kind of action (for web in the UK) is pretty different now, even just few years ago it was exactly as Steve is describing, reactions along the lines of anger and denial. It's only due to awareness and best practices spreading and accessibility becoming more seen as the norm that things like this can have a positive impact, encouraging some of the remaining slackers to put in a bit more effort due to the possibility of bad publicity. To see where things go from there look at construction, they now have accessibility pretty nailed (or at ahead of web and massively ahead of games). They've had far longer than web and games to get to where they are, but legislation was an essential part of it... at the right time.

The real area of difference between the other industries and games is the inability to have a set level of universal accessibility for games, but then that's where things like reasonable adjustment come in.

So just to emphasise as I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea, the above is describing the status quo in web and construction industries, not what should be happening right now for games. Although legal action over inaccessible games is now possible in most countries in the world due to culture/society/recreation human rights breaches under the UNCRPD, until there's wider awareness and majority voluntary uptake it's not a productive route to pursue.

So I'd agree with both Steve and Barrie - no it doesn't have to cause more harm than good -long term-, but yes it does at the present time, where it clashes directly with our current goal of advocacy. It can't work on its own, I'm sure Scott will have some ideas on this but as far as I can tell, to have the best chance for cultural change across an entire industry it needs to come from multiple angles, so also from top down from publishers and bottom up from developers. 

Ian
 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist7.pair.net/pipermail/games_access/attachments/20120624/425ee334/attachment.htm>