It’s been a month and a half since this was published, but I wanted to talk a bit about my Polygon feature on games for the blind. Because the people involved in that community are incredible.
I came up with the basic idea in a brainstorming session. “Playing with blindness/playing blind,” I wrote in my notebook, right in the middle of the list. (None of the other items on there have turned into a pitch…yet.) It stuck with me. I ran it by my mum — usually a good metric for stories with broad appeal. She didn’t like it. But I kept thinking about it, because my instincts screamed there’s something in the idea.
Then I started digging, and boy was I impressed. I found Brandon Cole, a blind gamer who for years has run a website for other blind gamers interested in the big console releases that sighted people take for granted. I discovered the amazing world of audio games, which I had previously thought started and stopped with BlindSide. I read about Guitar Hero and Rock Band haptic modifications that were designed to open those games up to the visually impaired.
The more I looked, the more I was blown away by the passion of blind gamers and the community trying to service them. And nobody was telling their story — not at any scale, at least. So I picked out half a dozen narrative threads that I thought would serve as a compelling introduction to the field, came up with a hook to tie them all together ("Meet the people trying to make games accessible to the blind and partial-sighted, and the gamers who stand to benefit"), and wrote up a pitch for Russ Pitts, the Features Editor at Polygon. It was a longer pitch than I’d normally write on this kind of article — about 350 words — but I was angling for a big word count and I had a lot of threads to describe.
Russ said, quite simply, “I love this story.” And asked how I felt about 5,000 words with a particular deadline. Two-and-a-bit weeks later, I had 30,000 words worth of interview transcripts — nearly a third of which came from my interviews with the stars of the show, Brandon Cole and Liam Erven — and a completed draft. How I managed to compress all that stuff into a cohesive story is beyond me, but I did.
I was personally delighted with how I managed to get the human angle across, showing, with a lot of help from my subjects, that blind people are just people who can’t see — and they have lots of interests and multi-faceted personalities, just like sighted folks.
And the feedback has been tremendous. I’ve had emails and tweets to thank me for writing it. The comments were all lovely, and many expanded the story. One person told me it wouldn’t be out of place in a science journal, since it was so thorough and in-depth. I’m getting all sorts of random contacts. And, most importantly, developers are taking notice. I saw over a dozen tweets from game developers about the article. Some were thinking about designing an audio game; others had their minds opened to a disadvantaged portion of their audience. Here’s hoping this helps lead to change.
Please read it, if you haven’t already. And share it around.
For my part, I’ll be pushing to cover games and tech accessibility — not just for the visually impaired, but everyone —whenever and wherever I can. I’m shopping a few stories around at the moment, and I’m on the lookout for more. Editors: if you’re keen on an accessibility-related feature, hit me up. Other folks: If you have leads, or if you are doing something cool in the field, let me know. It doesn't have to be about games. I’ll do what I can.
