[prof1515]

Ugh, life's been keeping me busy so I'm a bit late in coming in.

Text-based games are one of the few types of gaming where visually-impaired players are on an equal footing with other gamers. Even then, the combat spam of a typical H&S can be too much too keep up with, even for those with 20/20 vision. Thus, I applaud every game that takes measures to make their game accessible to visually-impaired players.

My own game's coder and webmaster is legally blind and uses accessibility software (text enlarger). He and I go way back to college (we used to raise hell about ADA compliance all over campus) in our shared quest to keep those considerations in the forefront of the design of anything we encounter, including our MUD and its website (we still laugh about a meeting we had with a university administrator that told us there was a "handicap-accessible" computer in the University Union, by which he meant it was wheelchair-height; he hadn't even thought about any type of disability consideration beyond that such as software and speakers, etc.).
We're still trying to find ways to overcome some in-game problems and likely will be devoting even more time to that issue later as well.

So the important question is not how many visually-impaired players are out there. The real question is how many games are there that don't ignore them and what can be done to encourage more games to put time and effort into making their game accessible to everyone?

Take care,

Jason