The incident motivated Kimball to get the ball rolling, and the anger stirred up in the thread helped him recruit programmers. "Pretty soon we got other people from all over the world who wanted to help out with the mod," says Kimball. id Software, the game's developer, obliged the mod team with dialogue scripts and lists of sound files. In the end, the system Kimball and his global teammates devised was simple: Text files associated with important sounds popped up with the audio, color-coded to distinguish between speech and sound effect, aggressive threat and ambient spookiness. To deal with the lack of echolocation, the team created a radar system that tracked monsters as blips. A game that was once unapproachable for deaf players was now completely accessible. The mod was a hit. "The response has been really amazing," says Kimball. "I would estimate that it's gotten over 20,000 downloads. I haven't gotten one negative e-mail."
So if a team of amateurs can do it, why isn't closed captioning an industry standard? For the most part, the issue flies under the radar. "What I've found is that developers aren't doing this out of pure intent," says Kimball. "They're just not aware of it." Besides his normal game design duties, Kimball is also a member of the Game Accessibility Special Interest Group, which promotes game accessibility for the disabled as part of the International Game Developers Association. Over the years, he's spoken to many developers about the frustrations of deaf gamers. People are listening. In September, mega-publisher Ubisoft announced that it would include subtitles in all in-house games. It's not full captioning, but it is a first step.
One company, however, is ahead of the curve. Valve Software, makers of the Half-Life series, made closed captioning standard in all it games with the release of Half-Life 2. Kimball interviewed series scribe and sci-fi author Marc Laidlaw about the process in 2006. "After [the original] Half-Life shipped, I started getting a trickle of letters from deaf gamers pointing out that scenes reliant on audio were completely incomprehensible to them, and I felt terrible," says Laidlaw. "I went to Jay Stelly, one of our chief programmers, and he explained that it was not at all a hard problem to solve and that it made sense to solve it right away." The system Valve ended up with employed full closed-captioning, and was integrated into the Source engine, the heart of all of Valve's games. "The expense of doing it was very small and there was no negative aspect to it," says Laidlaw. "The embarrassing thing is that it never occurred to us until after we had shipped the first Half-Life." All told, creating the captioning system took Valve about two weeks.
People can have all kinds of disabilities that keep them from gaming. They can lack the muscle coordination to press buttons. They can have no hands at all. They can have weak or colorblind sight. They can be blind entirely. How can game developers ever hope to make games truly accessible to all? Kimball believes it's possible. "I feel like closed-captioning is solved," says Kimball. "No one really has to invent or be innovative in that space, so we can move on to other areas like mobility or sight. I feel like we can just concentrate on one area at a time until we solve it. It's like this with everything in game development. A few years ago, normal mapping was a huge challenge. Now it's in every game. It's standard. I think eventually we'll get there."
Robert Ashley is a freelance contributor to The Escapist.
