captions

One of the coolest things about academia is free access to Lexis-Nexis. Each week I search for "accessibility" and never tire at the interesting things I stumble upon. A couple weeks ago, it was an article in Game Developer magazine that ends:

It's important to keep in mind that game accessibility isn't strictly about contributing to the gaming experience of disabled gamers. As Reid Kimball, creator of the Doom3[CC] mod and a colleague of mine at LucasArts, states, "GA equals 'games for all,' in my opinion," and that's a sentiment commonly found throughout the GA community. Closed captions can help younger children learn to read, clarify foreign language or heavily accented dialog, and add an additional important piece of gameplay feedback for a richly immersive environment. For designers, audio-only gameplay represents a largely unexplored area of game design. [From AUDIO ACCESSIBILITY, Jesse Harlin]

Cue the dreamy music as I leave the real world with its uncaptioned youtube videos and I enter into my utopic dream world where "We are the web" + scrabulous + dotsub.com + Amazon Mechanical Turk = a community-driven process that rewards people for writing and synchronizing captions.