Blind video gamer sues Sony over accessibility

From AbleGamers.com:

Hot off the presses of many major gaming and technical news outlets is a story about a visually impaired gamer who is suing Sony online entertainment for game accommodations in massively multi-player online games. Alexander Stern, a disabled gamer from California, filed suit against multiple Sony publishing entities alleging that many gaming titles do not offer the proper accessibility as demanded by the Americans with disabilities act (ADA).

The ADA was created to ensure equality for all disabled people across America. The document states that reasonable accommodations must be made for all disabled patriots to be able to access goods and services provided to the public.

Stern alleges many games make accessibility accommodations such as color options for the colorblind, voiceover dialogue for visually impaired, close caption for the deaf gamer, and content assistance (i.e. giant arrows pointing which way to go) for cognitively disabled gamer, but allegedly none of these enhancements enable him to play SOE titles. He also claims that Sony has hindered his financial situation because Sony allows the player base to sell in game items legally on their sanctioned website. The items he could have been gathering for himself, if the game was more designed for his specific disability, would have helped aid his income stream.

Many opponents to the ADA state that the document is too loose and allows anyone to demand unreasonable accommodations. In the past, some lawsuits have included wheelchair-bound employment seekers suing strip club owners for inaccessible stripping poles, and other absurd situations.

Proponents of the ADA cite accommodation such as wheelchair ramps on street corners, verbal cues at street crossings, and Braille for common signs in public places like parks and zoos that would not have been in place without the legal document.

Even as the ADA nears its twentieth birthday, some still take objection to being forced into making accommodation for the disabled. While many disabled gamers, even members of AbleGamers, have had their lives enriched by the ADA, the real question is whether to risk this kind of backlash to the accessibility movement in gaming.

AbleGamers Stand:

In today's society, we want everything given to us right now. Our staff would love to be able to contact every single game manufacturer and demand that they put in accessibility for every type of disability known to man, but we also know that is an unreal request.

The problem is that video games are proprietary, private, and often considered intellectual property. Adding accessibility to the industry has been a voluntary effort by the gaming publishers, and so far, the pendulum has been swinging to adding increasingly more accessibility, allowing more to participate in the gaming market.

AbleGamers has been working with developers for the past five years to incorporate as much accessibility as possible to each and every video game. However, it is important to remember that the gaming must come first and all other issues second. We are gamers who happen to be disabled and who need some small accommodations to help make gaming possible. We believe that going in speaking to the gaming companies, developers, producers, writers, directors, and everyone in between that actually makes the video games and showing them that there is a variant community of avid gamers just waiting to hand over their money, is a far better way to move game accessibility forward.

Moreover, this is not about AbleGamers or what we feel we do very well. Although, AbleGamers has been directly responsible for helping multiple accessibility options to be placed into video games, this situation is about the cause. Places like the IGDA, GDC, and other profit and nonprofit organizations helped push the cause of accessible gaming forward every single day by showing the positive aspects of the disabled people which represents 15 to 17% of the total population. However, while our and other organizations push the movement forward by speaking to the people directly responsible for making the games, lawsuits such as this can serve to severely distract from what we have been working so hard to do over the last decade as an overall cause, not just this organization.

Mark Barlet, president of the AbleGamers nonprofit foundation has been issuing the following statement to press organizations contacting AbleGamers for our take on the situation:

While I can understand this gentleman's frustration I do not believe that the courts are the place to forward accessibility in the gaming space. As a gamer, I want games to be fun for as many people as possible, but as a person with disabilities, I understand that there are limitations that I am going to face in life. This is the nature of having a disability. I think that this approach does little to endure our community and our mission to the gaming public, and this move may lower the willingness of content producers to work with organizations like AbleGamers in making reasonable changes to their games to help accommodate as many disabled gamers as possible for fear of legal action.

As you can see from the comments section in Gamespot, Evilavatar, Slashdot, and a dozen other popular gaming magazine sites have already begun to fill up with negative comments. One part of our job is to convince game developers that adding accessibility is not only the right thing to do, but profitable for them as well. This ensures that the people sitting in the boardrooms who make the decisions on what features to add will be more inclined to okay the accessibility options. However, the other part of our job, and by "our" I mean everyone fighting for the accessibility cause from nonprofit organizations like this one down to the individual blogs, is to help remove the stigma from adding accessibility.

We need non-disabled gamers to understand and support the accessibility movement. We need them to understand that adding options for accessibility will in no way harm the creativity of the developers or the fun of the game. Many of the comments on the articles linked above include people fearful or hateful about accessibility cramping the style of the game. It is imperative that the message coming from our movement of accessibility be that these options can be added without anyone who doesn't need them ever knowing that they even exist in any given title.