Y'know, this is something I've been chewing on for a while. I figure outside opinions would be a good thing.

As I've made clear during discussions, in Real Life, I'm disabled. Not totally (I can still read print), but I am blind. I also won the lottery by also having cerebral palsy and various learning disabilities.

So I'm in a strange position; I straddle the line between disabled and able-bodied. Which brought me to a thought lately, as I flipped through the latest mailing from the state library for the blind.

Where the hell is gaming?
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A quick introduction:

For those who don't know, every state in the United States (plus each of the territories) has a circulating library for the blind, those with dyslexia, etc.

At the federal level, it's coordinated by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) of the Library of Congress. (Link. Clickey.) It, like it's larger print parent, has a *massive* catalog of titles, all on tape or, although less frequently these days, in Braille, and often in both formats.

It usually takes time for titles to reach the system (as the books are produced by contractors or volunteers), but I've never once seen gaming stuff in the system.

From what I've been told by the local library here in New Jersey, nobody's done them, at least not in recent years. (Vaguely recalled GURPS stuff being made accessible, but that was 10-15 years ago.)
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Which strikes me as odd. This is something that would be *free* for publishers (unless, of course, authors or industry types wanted to contribute as volunteer narrators). There's no copyright issues; Federal law makes a specific exception for efforts like this. It could easily help expand the hobby as those served by these books get others who happen to be sighted involved.

Why's it never happened?

Why, in these days of PDF-books, do we not see an attempt at making gaming books accessible (even if only in electronic format)?
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To fend off some arguments:

For those who argue "tables" and "sidebars": Post-graduate-level science and math texts are routinely produced in these formats. Their tables and similar are just as, if not more, complex than anything gaming has put out.

For those who argue "markets": The issue has never, seemingly been explored, actually.

Also, this could be efforts as simple for the gaming industry as ensuring that PDFs are accessible for things such as screen-readers, and giving libraries license to distribute (there's already an infrastructure for distributing electronic formats to the blind in ways that prevent piracy, for what it's worth).
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I don't know. This struck me as...very odd.

What gives?
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Postscripts (Links and links and links on gaming of all types and disabilities):

Hey, neat. There's a Wired article on...er....The blind fragging the blind.

An IGDA white paper on the topic of gaming and disabilities.

<shudder> I am now a research subject. An academic paper on the "technical bias" of gaming.

Google search for "role playing games" and disabilities

Out of interest, in what way are the current PDFs not accessible to screen-readers? I haven't tested any, but they're all text…

~J

I would think, though i'm sure Penta will confirm or deny this, that, atleast for text to speach programs, the pdf has to be encoded especially for that, i don't THINK you can take any PDF and play it as such.

I am pretty sure you're right Aku. PDF's are basically images, not text. They would have to be specifically made to be read as such. Of course it wouldn't take much I think to do that.

The PDFs that FanPro has released have had text that is fully accessible to text services such as searching, copying, and out-of-reader indexing like Spotlight. While it's not impossible that there's something else that needs to be done, I can't imagine what.

~J

PDFs, so far as I know, require use of a special plugin and special coding to be usable by TTS software like screenreaders.

Admittedly, life gets interesting when you add in tables and sidebars, buuut that could, I think, be handled. (It's certainly done with books-on-tape.)

In any case, for most SR sourcebooks (as an example), those aren't an issue. It's more often a straight text-to-speech job. (Since one hopes that the art isn't totally essential to understanding the text.)

The only problems I could see would be the crunchy books like the core books.