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00:00Turn our attention to our segment that is Bloomberg Equalitywhere we examine the bottom line impact of diversity our focus this week gaming accessibility. IBEX Scarlet Fu sat down withBrandon Cole. Now he's a video game developer who is completely blind. Works with studios to develop video games that areaccessible to those with visual impairments. Take a listen. I worked directly with game developers to first convince them tosell them on the idea and then to help them make their games will be accessible even to the totally blind. My biggest currentcareer highlight is the fact that I worked on a very popular game called The Last of US Part two three years to make thatgame fully accessible even to the totally blind. And we'll get to how you do that in a moment. But I have to confess that I wassurprised that visually impaired people to play video games. And it might be because I'm lame and I only play puzzle type games.So I don't know how you could do that with actually seeing the pieces fall. So and so talk about what kinds of games what genreof games can be made more accessible. Well the thing is I'm ever the optimist. So if you ask me that question my answer willalways be anything. I fully believe that if given the developers willingness to try even their time and yes given their work wecan make any genre accessible. In fact that is how I make my goals that that's how my career goals are set. My career goalsare genre based. Know I say to myself OK with last was too. I gave people an action adventure title. I want to give people ahuge role playing game. I want to give people a puzzle game. I want to give people you know a shooter that they can play.That's that's how I set my career goals. Everything is the answer. OK. Then how exactly do you design games for those whoare visually impaired. What is the key guiding principle here. There are a few key things that are gonna apply to every gamebut I think the biggest ones are probably things like UI narration. For one thing meaning every text element in the gameneeds to be accessible to the blind via either text to speech narration or via a human voice narration. Either way the blindneed to know any anything that's in text. That's the menu of the game. Whether that's a note you pick up off the ground. That's ajournal a dusty journal. You pull from a bookshelf and read you know all that all that needs to be accessible to blind. And thenanother key component is audio cues games games that require you to move around a bit and to navigate an area and to find thingsto pick things up and interact with things. Since we can't see those things audio cues or how we find themhow we locate the different objects in the game world and interact.And then in some cases where games have huge open giant monstrous worlds we need something like navigational assistancewhich helps us traverse those areas that we still can't see you know with all the information that these things are giving us.We still can't see the environment. So a little bit of help a traversal combined with all these other things together. It's ait's a subset of features that you add to a game to make it accessible. This is blowing my mind. It's so fascinating. Tellme a little bit about the size of the gaming audience that needs some kind of accommodation or accessibility feature.The size is large. It's larger than anyone thinks. That's the thing.Disability that the people with disabilities in the world is a number that is constantly growing. We're you know billions ofpeople already have disabilities actual millions. And that's not small in the gaming market. That's not a small number ofdevelopers. You know the developers that aren't instant accessibility might tell you that there's not a big enoughmarket. But I promise you there is. And the thing is if you if you make a game accessible you're also future proofing. It doesbecause more people are becoming disabled all the time. Old age tends to add disabilities to people you know whether they'revisible or invisible disabilities. You know maybe you can't see as well as you used to. That's a real entry point. I mean allthese Gen Xers who are gonna get into their 60s and 70s they're going to want to continue playing video games. Talk a little bitabout the future here with the metaverse with VR with A.R.. What are the opportunities that arise because of that.It's even that actually it's more than you might think. There's tremendous potential even for the totally blind with VR. Iactually wrote an article about this a long time ago and I had a VR experience where I successfully played a virtual realityshooting game simply because the 3D audio in the game the 3D sound effects used in the virtual reality were so good that Icould actually locate my targets with sound alone all interest and I was able to successfully play the game. It's tremendous.VR actually has potential.

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Blind Video Game Developer's Mission to Make Play More Accessible

In this edition of Bloomberg Equality, Scarlet Fu sat down with Brandon Cole a video game developer who is completely blind and works with studios to develop video games that are accessible to those with visual impairments. (Source: Bloomberg)

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