Game accessibility news roundup: 1/13/09

Yet another trilogy of news related to game accessibility:

Google engineer T.V. Raman

For the Blind, Technology Does What a Guide Dog Can't A profile in the New York Times of Google engineer T.V. Raman, who is blind and specializes in making technology accessible for people with disabilities. However, as Miguel Helft writes in the article: "Instead of asking how something should work if a person cannot see, he says he prefers to ask, "How should something work when the user is not looking at the screen?"

In Truly Innovative Controllers For Disabled Gamers, Stew Shearer of The Game Reviews interviews engineers like Mark Felling and writes about some interesting accessible controllers in history, including Nintendo's sip-and-puff Hands Free Controller from 1989.

Not a news story, but still neat: 7128 Software, which makes games for people with disabilities, hosts a color chart that can aid in developing software that's accessible to people who are color blind.

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Tera Kirk

Tera Kirk grew up in a small Nebraska town called Papillion. Although she has a nonverbal learning disability that affects her visual-spatial skills (among other things), she's always loved video games. Her first game system was a Commodore Vic-20, which her mom bought at a garage sale for $20. With this little computer Tera learned to write Mad Libs in BASIC, to play chess and to steal gold from Fort Knox.

But then a friend introduced her to the seedy underworld of the Mario brothers and she spent her saved-up birthday and Christmas money to buy a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Her mom didn't like the Nintendo at first, but The Legend of Zelda changed her mind. (When Tera got Zelda II: The Adventure of Link one Christmas, she suspected it was as much for her mother as for her).

Though she graduated from Agnes Scott College in 2002 and recently learned how to find the movie theater restroom by herself, Tera still loves video games. Far from being a brain-rotting waste of time, they've helped her practice spatial skills and discover new passions. Her love of games like Kid Icarus and The Battle of Olympus led to a degree in Classical Languages and Literatures. She thinks games have a place in discussions on disability and other cultural issues, and is excited to work with the like-minded staff at GameCritics.com.