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Re:Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux and th... by miki123211 on Friday September 22, 2023 @11:32AM (#37613385)
> but for their never ending support on making sure “gaming” can be enjoyed by all.

Oh how I wish that was true. Steam's accessibility story is an utter and inexcusable piece of garbage. Using Steam with a screen reader is a constant struggle, to the point where people had to write guides [1] on how to go about this. It got a bit better recently, at least on Windows, Mac still sucks. There are plenty of Steam games that a blind person can play, sometimes natively[2][3], sometimes through special accessibility mods[4][5][6]. Not to mention the Steamdeck, which has no accessibility support at all, despite the fact that Linux screen readers do exist[7], and consoles like PS5 and Xbox implement their own[8][9]. Valve really doesn't care.

[1] (outdated) https://www.mail-archive.com/audiogames-reflector@sabahattin... [2] https://blind.shadows1428.com/ [3] https://mortalkombatgamessupport.wbgames.com/hc/en-us/articl... [4] https://github.com/bradjrenshaw/say-the-spire [5] https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/16205 [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQC6TJkBElY [7] https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/getting-started-with-orca/ [8] https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/account-profile/accessib.... [9] https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps5-acces...

Re:Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux and th... by idontknoworcare on Friday September 22, 2023 @12:48PM (#37614343)
Their policy is for you to get a Gameboy clip on magnification panel. Ebay has them.
Re:Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux and th... by danShumway on Friday September 22, 2023 @03:33PM (#37616634)
I don't think that would help blind users.

In before Steam has moved off of web interfaces (I haven't checked in a couple of years so they might be doing something different now particularly with big picture mode), but I'm frustrated that we all started building interfaces for native platforms in HTML/Javascript and it didn't lead to embracing any of the accessibility features that those same interfaces would get by default inside of a web browser.

To be fair, my understanding is that Linux screenreader support is pretty bad, but it does seem like if a developer is going to the trouble to build the majority of their interface in a semantic XML-like pure-text format, there should probably also be an option to read that text out loud.

Re:Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux and th... by miki123211 on Friday September 22, 2023 @03:38PM (#37616705)
Part of Steam is indeed HTML, and that is the accessible part. They're rewriting more and more of their UI in that technology, and that's definitely a good accessibility move.