The mention of inclusiveness in the reworking of the Transvestite flaw brought up, for me, another form that games, generally, can be more inclusive, that around ableism. I am not disabled in a way that impairs my ability to read or enjoy games but had a player with visual impairment. He was quite computer savvy and had some really good tools on his end but he still had to muddle through trying to read his pdf copy of the books on his braille reader. He did not want to be treated differently so didn’t say anything about this until he sent me a character sheet in Word that I couldn’t read, I just assumed the formatting got corrupted in transit. It seemed the plain text formatting was the easiest way to display character information that worked well for both of us. There wasn’t much I could do to make the books easier for him to read but it quickly became apparent this would be less of a chore and require less guesswork on his part if the books were available in different formats, perhaps with slightly different layout. One issue I think with the layout of many RPG books is the sidebar, great if you can see it but for these devices it would probably be best for these to be set into the end of the relevant sections. Anyway, I came across a non profit that works on visual impairment accessibility issues in games, braille dice, character sheet layouts that work well for braille readers, etc. and figured at worst we can share these sorts of resources here, but hopefully this post would let the folks at Atlas know and we could see more industry support for these even if it’s just permission for certain materials to be reworked by the folks at these sorts of non profits:
This is a good thing to bring to the community's awareness. Thank you for doing so.
Very cool to know! I liked the option to sponsor a set of braille dice
nullsettings: Thank you for your thoughtful post. In her previous position, my wife actually worked for the Minnesota Department of Health to make PDFs and other documents accessible, so it's something I care about quite a bit. It's beyond Atlas' current means to retroactively fix older PDFs, but it's a priority to continue improving our e-books.
I am temporarily closing the thread due to later comments. We are having a backstage discussion about how to handle this.
Thank you.
We at Atlas Games feel this is an important thread with information that's useful to the Ars Magica community. But it's veering off track. In the interests of preserving the discussion about ableism, I've deleted all the sidetrack posts. If you'd like to contribute to this discussion, please keep it on topic and respectful. Thank you.
I'm glad to see Atlas is on board with your proposal. Anything that improves the books is a good thing.
Yeah, I definitely don’t know that I think the pdfs should all be reworked as I suggested. I was more thinking an alternate file type where the same text was available and arranged differently for those using braille readers.