Agh, the one comment I feel I gotta share is that it bums me out that someone harangued Tim about criticizing the 3DS for being hard to see for him. I say, let’s completely stop letting anything in gaming get a free pass on failing to make themselves Capital A Accessible. It’s good that games are becoming more accessible but I don’t think we’re really truly at a point where people are meaningfully reckoning with the fact that the default for gaming, and indeed many things in the world, is Inaccessible, if not outright hostile with regards to many different disabilities. Developers of games for the 3DS if not the 3DS as a platform failed to provide an accessibility option for someone, and that is an objectively bad thing about it.
How is any of this going to change if even just the idea of identifying an accessibility concern with a console or a game makes people want to defend it as if that was on a similar level as a matter of taste? It’s not like someone who would do that is arguing in favor of random battles or some other subjective thing, they’re really arguing that a deficiency in the design of a console or game is beyond reproach because that deficiency isn’t a barrier of access to them. That’s what I mean by the giving of a free pass, as if the accessibility of a game or console is somehow a compartmentalized parameter that most players and developers can opt out of caring about.
Accessibility in games simply must be of concern to everyone if it is ever going to meaningfully change. That’s unavoidable, in my opinion–disability almost definitionally speaking is always going to be about serving a minority of people, if not sometimes an extremely small minority. Yet, I think it is worth it to everyone who makes games or gaming platforms to serve them anyhow, for reasons of, you know, the supposed universality of human rights. If all it was going to take was disabled gamers asking politely, it wouldn’t have taken the decades that it did for accessibility to even begin to become a major part of the conversation as it has more recently. Some uncles at Nintendo would have made sure that Tim and others with similar visual impairments would have had more tools at their disposal to play 3DS games, for sure.