Tag: Accessibility

Hearthstone Access

In my day job, I have spent years struggling to get vendors in compliance with accessibility standards, so I have mixed feelings about Hearthstone Access.

Hearthstone, of course, is an online collectible card game created by Activision Blizzard . Hearthstone Access is “a custom Hearthstone mod built by Guide Dev that makes Hearthstone accessible for visually impaired screen-reader users who wouldn’t otherwise be able to enjoy the game.”

For the time being, you can:

* Play through a fully accessible tutorial composed of 6 games to learn how to play

* Play practice games against AI opponents in order to unlock all 10 classes and their basic decks

* Use any of the 10 different classes in practice games to unlock all basic cards as you level up

* Build standard decks for any class you’ve unlocked

* Play practice games against expert-level AI opponents to get familiar with all the classes and game mechanics

* Play the first two adventures of Book of Heroes which cover the story of Jaina and Rexxar

Once you’ve gone through all of this, you’ll probably want to move on to other things such as playing against other players or going through Hearthstone’s solo adventures to learn more about the lore of Warcraft. While these things aren’t available yet, I do intend to work on them if there’s enough interest. In the meantime, several players have successfully been using OCR to access other areas of the game and created Golden Cursor scripts for NVDA players who would like to use them. You can find these in the FAQ section.

I am not an NVDA or JAWS user, but by all accounts, this is a well-done mod, and the developer deserves nothing but praise for their efforts.

The obvious question this raises, however, is why visually impaired users had to wait for some dedicated community member to provide what Blizzard should have implemented years ago.

Hearthstone was released in 2014. While I haven’t played it in years, back in 2017 VentureBeat reported that Hearthstone was raking in $40 million each month.

Activision Blizzard had revenue in 2020 of $8.09 billion, with a net income of $2.197 billion. And yet, it leaves support for visually impaired users to random users in its community.

That is epic level “we don’t give a shit.”

I’d say that Activision Blizzard should be ashamed of itself, but I doubt the company is capable of that.

Silktide Disability Simulator for Chrome

Silktide is a toolbar add-on for Google Chrome that will simulate some disabilities, including dyslexia, color blindness, myopia, and blindness. This is designed for non-disabled users who are developing and testing websites for accessibility.

They also have a screen reader simulator that will simulate using something like JAWS to read and navigate a website without needing JAWS or something similar installed.

Netflix and Time Warner Sued Over Lack of Closed Captioning

The National Association of the Deaf recently filed a lawsuit against Netflix and Time Warner for failing to provide closed captions on their online video offerings. According to the lawsuit, less than 5 percent of videos offered over Netflix streaming contain closed captions. The Time Warner lawsuit targets the lack of closed captioning on CNN’s online videos.

The odd thing is that Netflix has in the past blamed technological difficulties for the lack of captioning. According to Reuters,

In 2009, Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt reported on the company blog that technological difficulties were hindering its attempt to add captions to streaming video. The advocacy group argued that captioning is technically possible, pointing to titles already captioned.

That is apparently a reference to this blog post in which Hunt wrote,

Encoding a separate stream for each title is not an option – it takes us about 500 processor-months to make one encode through the entire library, and for this we would have to re-encode four different formats. Duplicating the encoded streams is prohibitive in space too.

So we are working on optionally delivering the SAMI file (Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange), or similar, to the client, and having it render the text and then overlay it on the video at playback time. Unfortunately, the tools for rendering SAMI files in Silverlight, or in CE (Consumer Electronics) devices, are weak or non-existent, and there is some technology development required.

I would expect to deliver subtitles or captions to Silverlight clients sometime in 2010, and roll the same technology out to each CE device as we are able to migrate the technology, and work with the CE manufacturer to deliver firmware updates for each player.

That is absurd. By that I don’t meant that it isn’t correct — Microsoft Silverlight was always full of fail and Netflix committed to moving toward HTML5 back in 2010. Rather it is the frequency with which the technological objection is raised in issues like this.

Accessibility is an issue that should be easily addressable by contemporary technologies in a way that wasn’t possible in the past (or at least much more cheaply and seamlessly than in the past). Instead software companies keep churning out products that actually take us several step backwards and often make it much harder to implement accessibility.

If I walked into someone’s office and pitched a new Internet-based collaboration tool that was the bee’s knees except for the fact that it wouldn’t allow people in one state to collaborate with employees in another state, I’d be laughed out of the room. But walk in with a system that works great except that it is completely unusable by blind or deaf people and nobody seems to give a shit.

We need to do a better job of holding developers’ feet to the fire on this one. Having a system that can’t accommodate blind or deaf people isn’t only a legal and moral issue, but its also a failure of imagination on the part of those developing these technologies. Really, you want me to spend thousands to millions of dollars on these systems and you’re not skilled enough to make them accessible to the blind and deaf? Not impressed.