We’ve talked about the challenges many disabled people face when playing video games. I’ve mostly looked at it from the perspective of actual games.

Hardware is another issue. Think about how far controllers have come along in the past decades. Looking at just the systems I’ve owned — the Atari 2600 had one button and a joystick; the Nintendo Entertainment system had four buttons and a directional pad; the Sega Genesis, 5 buttons and a pad. Then came the PlayStations and Xboxes, which threw in trigger buttons, bumpers, more buttons, more thumbsticks…you get the picture.

Imagine the challenges people with physical disabilities face with such complex controllers.

I was just visiting the wonderful AbleGamers website (a site I talked about at length last year in a series of posts including an interview with Steve Spohn), and read some interesting news on the topic of accessible video game controllers.

Evil Controllers and the AbleGamers Foundation jointly unveiled the Adroit Switchblade, a remarkable assistive technology device that allows massive amounts of customization for Xbox gaming or, with an additional plugin, the Playstation or PC. It comes with a pair of thumbsticks, plus you can use its 19 ports to set up a slew of switches to perform whatever actions you need.

Being new to the subject, I was still a little bit unsure of how this all worked. Joystiq posted a video of AbleGamers’ Marc Bartlet explaining the Switchblade. It’s a little hard to hear the audio at times, but it’s worth a viewing.

It’s always great when there are accessibility strides in the world of video games. Hopefully the Switchblade makes it easier for more disabled people to enjoy the world of gaming.

I’ve blogged before about accessibility features that Apple has put into their products, from their operating systems to the iPhone. While it’ll forever be a debate if they’ve gone “far enough” with their considerations for those with disabilities, the point I continue to maintain is that they seem to take it seriously enough to continue adding enhancements.

We’re on the cusp of another Mac OS update, with Lion roaring in any day now. I for one can’t wait to get my paws on it, especially at its ridiculously reasonable price of $29.99. They’re touting that it’s littered with over 250 enhancements.

Here’s a rundown of some of the touted new accessibility features:

• Addition of picture-in-picture zoom – to enhance the zooming experience and providing greater overall context of how what you’re focusing on fits in with the overall page/screen.
• Support for 80+ Braille tables across multiple languages
• Greater control over how and how much information comes across via a refreshable Braille device
• Greater precision in the appearance of the pointer when viewed at larger zoom levels
• Greater customization of VoiceOver, enabling it to perform in different manners for different activities
• Screen sharing – enabling users to assist other users directly

You can find out about all the new features of Lion at Apple’s OS X Lion Features.

As always, we’ll have to see these features in action to gauge whether they truly make disabled Mac users’ lives easier. Hopefully by the end of this month, we’ll start finding out.

Further reference:

• Current Mac OS X accessibility features
• Apple’s accessibility statement

At one point, a young man approached us and gestured to a small pamphlet he was holding. It had a message on the front that read, “I am selling this Deaf Education System card to make living. Will you kindly buy one? Pay any price you wish! Thank you.”

These sorts of things definitely tug at my heart strings, so I gave him a $5 (for both me and my friend). He gave me a complicated handshake that I feebly imitated, and went on his way. It looked like the next several people he approached similarly give him donations.

After mentally wishing him well in whatever struggles he was facing, I got to thinking about portable “deaf education systems” like the hand-drawn representations in the pamphlet.

I naturally wondered what sort of mobile applications are out there for this sort of thing. So I did a search in the app store.

I expected to see a handful of results, but was surprised to find several dozen when I typed in “sign language”.

Like any subject matter, I’m sure some of these apps are good, some are mediocre, and some are just plain bad. I can’t say as I want to check all of them out, but I think I’ll rummage through a few of them and post some thoughts later on.

Are there sign language or deaf-assisting applications that you’ve experienced that are worthwhile? Are you a deaf person who uses his or her iPhone or mobile device to make your life a little easier?

Needless to say, this place has collected some dust.

But anyway…I’m back and hopefully to stay.

I was searching around the Web for interesting news in the world of video game accessibility, and found a fascinating video. It’s of a gamer who broke his neck and, as a result, is paralyzed from the neck down. He has limited usage of his arms and no movement in his fingers. Even so, he has found the means to effectively play video games.

Check it out:

If you head over to Brashant Entertainment – Video Game Experts, you can get a deeper explanation.

Watching this drives home a couple things. First and foremost, it’s absolutely amazing to see how people overcome disabilities. Before I got into this accessibility thing, I wouldn’t have imagined someone with this man’s degree of paralysis playing a shooter video game….and playing it very well!

It’s inspiring, to say the least.

mkeUX is a laid back, anyone-welcome group dedicated to promoting user experience. They host presentations in casual settings. It’s light on the formal and stuffy, and heavy on the open sharing of ideas and having fun. My good friends and colleagues Michael Seidel and Mike Kornacki are responsible for it, and it’s been a huge success.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun yakking accessibility. We talked about the different types of disabilities, the laws as they exist today in the United States, and some of best-known lawsuits pertaining to accessibility. I covered some of the types of assistive technologies out there.

The second part of the presentation was sharing examples of some accessibility culprits – but by no means all of them! That included the often-villainous CAPTCHA, and some disturbing and downright offensive examples of it.

I’ve never been overly impressed with slideshows put up on SlideShare. More often than not, it’s out-of-context slides that don’t tell you much.

That being said, I do want to share my presentation. So here it is — but I will add some notes about what each slide means, very soon! This is more a reference for those who attended the event.

Thanks to everyone who did attend, and for everyone who expressed interest. I hope to do this presentation or some form of it again very soon!

It doesn’t seem long ago when accessibility first piqued my interest, and when I dove headlong into both learning as much as I could about it and blogging happily along the way.

Though I haven’t always posted as much as I’d have liked, it’s been a rewarding year here at theaccessibility.com. I’m definitely going with a mantra that it’s better to post when you have something interesting to say, than to just post for the sake of posting. Quality over quantity — which is also a mantra that I’ve ruthlessly adopted for following people on Twitter (again, a post for another day).

I’ve gotten to interview amazing people like Jennison Asuncion, Carol Voss of IndependenceFirst, and Steve Spohn of AbleGamers. I’ve continued to meet a lot of great people in the industry, particular through social media outlets like Twitter. I’ve provided accessibility consultation on a number of web site designs.

Far and away, the 2010 highlight is when I took the User Experience Lead position at Johnson Controls.

I could go on and on about all the things that I love about Johnson Controls — the culture, the people, the green initiatives, the location — but I’m going to sum it all up by saying taking the job is easily one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.

Though there are many things I learned in my last job, the truth is that I was mostly just stuck at a dead-end. I was in middle management, toiling over other’s issues and concerns and filling out paperwork. I did the occasional web design, but as I’ve posted before, my heart just hasn’t been in strict web design for a long time now…and certainly not in coding. My calling has been user experience, and of course that spoke in its wheel called accessibility.

When your reasons for staying somewhere mostly revolve around comfort and security (which can be important, especially when economies stumble and fall), you run the risk of not giving it your best anymore. Though I didn’t see it for the longest time, I needed to expand my professional world. I needed a change.

Enter Johnson Controls.

It continues to amaze me how much trust the place has in those of us on the User Experience team. While the company doesn’t have this grand vision of the exact details of user experience, they genuinely see its importance. They know that to be world leaders in anything, you have to truly understand the wants and needs of the people using your products. It can’t be “designed by developers for developers” or “designed by engineers for engineers”.

Here’s the icing on the cake — just last week, we had a great meeting with developers who are looking to the UX team to help clearly define the proper markup (HTML, CSS, etc) we ought to adhere to on the massive project we’re all undertaking. As part of that, I’m supplying accessibility guidelines.

Yup, we’re building a huge application from the ground up, and there’s an actual opportunity to make sure accessibility is factored from the onset.

I had just about resigned myself to accessibility being a side project, a labor of love that wouldn’t make any meaningful headway into my fulltime job…but now I’m very optimistic that that’s no longer the case.

Yeah, this turned more into gushing over my career change than this blog, but oh well.

Here’s to Year Three of theaccessibility.com!

Of course, I’ll share my presentation on this blog in the near future, but I’m calling it “Accessibility: An Even Playing Field.” I thought back to January when Glenda Watson Hyatt asked the accessibility world to answer this question in exactly 25 words — What Does Accessibility Mean to You?

As I answered then:
Accessibility is all about lack of restrictions. It is about opening pathways to all people regardless of any limitations. It is an even playing field.

I’ll talk about: what accessibility means to me; what types of disabilities and assistive technologies are out there in any web, application, or game audience; some successes and failures (lawsuits included!); some easy things to avoid…and more.

If you’re free, come on down for it!

I missed that one, so I promptly removed the justification.

Why?

Justification may lend web sites (and magazines, newspapers, etcetera) a certain aesthetic appeal, creating neatly lined-up left and right margins. However, they do pose some accessibility problems.

To line up those margins prettily, gaps of varying sizes are placed between words. Sometimes, these gaps can be pretty sizable.

For people with cognitive disabilities as well as those with dyslexia, these uneven spaces can be distracting. It can disrupt their ability to follow the flow of words and make reading and understanding the content difficult, if not hopeless.

Whatever the perceived aesthetic value, it just isn’t worth it to me. Big deal that my right margin is jagged and uneven.

This wasn’t some hissy fit move because something in particular outraged me.

I just hit a point where I asked myself, “What’s the point?”

When I first got an iPhone last year and was starry-eyed about everything, I found it very cool to check in just about every place I went, spurred on by incentives like mayoralships and badges.

It was kind of neat to see where friends were checking in, occasionally finding that they were nearby.

Sure, I’d shrug off the good-natured ribbing by my wife and others, calling me a nerd for whipping out the phone upon arrival just about anywhere, to get that check-in entered right away.

I’d get obsessed with trying to attain mayor status for favorite haunts.

Somewhere along the way, it lost its luster.

I started getting requests from “friends” I barely knew, if at all. And I’d ask myself, “are these people that I really want knowing all my moves around town?”

After time and becoming the mayor of places like the bank and oil change places, a question gnawed at me – “Really, I’m checking in when I’m getting a friggin’ oil change?”

It took less than a year for me to find Foursquare both lame and pointless. I’m not about to get sanctimonious and judge others — if people enjoy it, that’s all that should matter to them. If they get value out of it, great.

I just don’t. As its popularity has grown, it gets harder and harder to become mayor of anywhere. Once the easier-to-attain badges are knocked off, the incentives and rewards are few and far between.

It also annoys the hell out of me when a business offers an incentive to becoming the mayor, but an obvious employee of the place holds the title. I’ve noticed that a few times. If you’re a waiter at a restaurant and they give deals to the mayor, it’s bad form to bar actual patrons from it. And good luck ever getting a mayoralship from a place like Starbucks, just to get a pittance off your coffee drink.

I think, in short, Foursquare became a hassle. A routine I put myself through for diminishing, if any, return.

I remember going through a similar mindset with some “world-building” iPhone apps on which I briefly got hooked. They were Tap Fish, We Rule and iFarm. I started the building, be it buying fish, planting crops, whatever. Next thing, every single morning I was feeding those damn virtual fish, cashing in crops, and collecting money. If you missed a day, you’d have dead fish or lost revenue. So it became an obligation to keep at it.

Until one day, I said, “Holy crap…this isn’t even close to fun anymore!” So I up and deleted all three apps and felt an immediate relief.

Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with Foursquare, Tap Fish, We Rule or iFarm. If it’s an app you enjoy, you use it. If it’s a hassle, you do what I did and move on.

But I don’t know…there’s just something about some aspects of social media that, at least to me, feels like a bursted bubble.

There are days I even struggle with Facebook and Twitter. Though I’m nowhere near ready to abandon either, my strategy has changed. I’ve gradually been conducting mass purges of people I follow/friend, in an attempt to push away the noise and get back to a point where I’m getting actual information of interest and value. But that’s for another blog post!

I wanted to take a moment tonight to call attention to a great accessibility blog’s milestone. Web Axe is celebrating its five year anniversary.

If you haven’t had the opportunity, check out what they’ve got going on. It’s really an excellent resource by Dennis Lembree and Ross Johnson.

I’m honored that they asked me to supply an audio contribution to their Podcast #84, Web Axe 5-Year Anniversary. While it reminded me that I’d need plenty of practice were I to ever entertain doing my own podcast, it was a fun experience expressing thoughts about Web Axe and accessibility as a whole. It’s also really cool to include myself among the ranks of noted accessibility voices like Bruce Lawson of Opera, Jennison Asuncion (whom I interviewed on this blog earlier this year), Tom Babinszki of Even Ground, and others.

As I mention in my piece, when I first jumped into the subject of web accessibility, Web Axe was one of the first blogs that I came across. Whether you’re an expert on the subject (if such a thing is possible) or just getting started, do make a point of reading their posts and listening to their podcasts.

You’ll find that the posts and podcasts have a down-to-earth, plainspoken style in delivering news, tips, tricks and all sorts of accessibility knowledge.

Keep doing an awesome job, guys! You’re an inspiration to all of us striving to make a difference in the field.