October 8, 2025 • 37 mins
Ross Minor plays a lot of videogames. He is also completely blind. Despite losing his sight at 8 years old, he’s now working in the industry, making video games accessible for blind players like him. Dexter talks to Ross about his journey in video games, from figuring out how to play Pokémon through sound cues alone to experiencing the biggest game with real accessibility features, The Last of Us 2. If you’re a developer and want to incorporate blind accessibility in your game, hit up Ross at: https://rossminor.com/
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Read + Watch:
Dexter’s profile of Ross on WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/ross-minor-the-blind-leading-the-gamers/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yop it's dexter. So before we start the show, quick announcement,
Killswitch has been nominated for the Signal Awards under the
Technology category. If you want to support the show, please
go vote for us at vote dot Signal Award dot
com and voting closes tomorrow Thursday, October ninth.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
All Right, on to the show. I was in the
hospital for around a month, had a lot of people
come and visit. It's two thousand and six. Pokemon was like,
arguably at the peak OF's popularity, and I heard my
(00:40):
friends playing Pokemon. I will listen to my friends play
and like asked him, Oh, what was that sound? What
does that sound?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Ross Minor works in the video game industry. He's also
totally blind, and he has been since two thousand and six.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I played video games before I was blinded, and then
after I was blinded, you know, I still wanted to
play video games.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Pokemon is a really important game for Ross. It's the
first game he was at least kind of able to
play blind, and it ended up having some pretty profound
impacts not just on his childhood but on his career.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Playing Pokemon helped me learn how to navigate the world.
Being blind and being blind helped me learn how to
navigate the world of Pokemon, because they both required keeping
track of your surroundings and like spatial orientation, Like that's
what being blind is all about.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
I'm afraid.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
I'm all right, goodbye.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
I first talked to Ross about five years ago. The
pandemic had just started and everyone was inside. And if
you remember, just around that time, Animal Crossing had also
come out and it was getting really popular. And I'm
looking on YouTube and I see this video of this
guy explaining how he plays the game blind.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
What's up, everyone, it's your favorite blind guy. My name
is Ross mind there, and I'm gonna be showing you
guys how I play Animal Crossing New Horizons without any
site whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
We talked a little bit back then, but I always
wanted to know more about how he not only figured
out how to play a farming simulator without being able
to see the screen, but why he would make YouTube
videos about it when again, he can't see the screen.
So finally this year I ended up writing a feature
about him in Wire magazine, and I learned a lot.
Ross has been a gamer for his whole life, but
(03:26):
he wasn't born blind. Playing video games without sight was
something he had to figure out.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
That's probably my cue to say how I was blinded.
A lot of people think that people with disabilities are
just like born that way, when like a lot of
people with disabilities become disabled in some way, and so
for me, it was actually a pretty tragic story. So
like trigger warning for gun violence and domestic violence and
(03:52):
all that.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Ross just said it, but for real, heads up, this
is a pretty difficult story to hear.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Two thousand and six. So when I was eight years old,
my mother was divorcing my father and and an act
of retaliation, he shot me in my sleep, shot and
killed my brother Ryan, and then committed suicide. A lot
of times, I just to keep it really sure, I
just say, you know, family annihilation pretty much, which is
sad that there's a term for that now, But that's
(04:21):
how I was blinded. So I pretty much went to
sleep with sight, you know, twenty twenty vision, and then
woke up in the hospital completely blind.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I can't imagine what it's like to explain that to
people constantly, because you have to do this a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, yeah, like it is a fine line. I'm gonna
be real like when I was younger, you know, I
say like, oh, I'm so used to it, I don't
mind talking about it, and like I don't mind talking
about it, but you're right, like the repetition begins to
make it feel almost like it didn't even happen, if
(04:55):
that makes sense, Like it feels like just something I'm
like rehearsing, but really, I her said, just to like
emphasize that, yeah, it happened to me. But then kind
of just like, Okay, you have the background. Now let's
like talk about what we actually want to talk about.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
When Ross woke up in the hospital, he was completely blind,
but he was still Ross, and he still wanted to
play video games, especially the game he'd been playing at
the time, Pokemon Ruby. He listened while his friends would
play in the hospital room, and he'd try to figure
out what the sounds he was hearing. Men.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
With Pokemon, there are sounds for everything. There are sounds
for each different Pokemon, like the cry that they make
when you throw them out. There sounds for all the
different attacks. There's music for each different town. But most importantly,
there's a sound that plays when you bump into a wall,
and I another bunch of black people call it like
the bump sound, because if that sound didn't exist, we
(05:53):
quite literally wouldn't be able to play the game in
the way that we do or did back then, because
if we don't know that we're bumping into something, we're
not able to memorize the map. We're not able to
like figure out where things are, you know, walking around
bumping into things, memorizing where things are. That's kind of
(06:13):
how blind people navigate in the first place, Like in
real life. Just the inclusion of that one sound allowed
me to memorize pretty much all of the games. That's
how good the sound design was.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
When you mentioned that, even without having to really think
about it, I can immediately register especially the bump sound.
I know exactly what you're talking about. And then the
fact that different Pokemon have different cries, different sounds, even
in the old school games, yeah, even the first Pokemon games. Yeah,
Pikachu kind of sounds like Pikachu, and an electric Pokemon
(06:50):
sounds like an electric Pokemon. A big rock Pokemon sounds
big and low and heavy.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yeah, And it's that they're able to do all that
with like eight bit sounds. But kind of fun little
fact is that I think they ran out of memory
in their original games. And so out of the first
one hundred and fifty one Pokemon, there are some that
are like just straight up duplicates of each other. So
like Charizard and rye Horn have the same exact cry.
(07:21):
Really yeah, And so this is where it's like my
knowledge of Pokemon like goes deep, because you know, if
I'm like playing the game and I hear either the
Charizard or the rye Horn sound, I'm thinking, Okay, well,
most trainers in games out in the wild like don't
(07:45):
have charis ars, Like they just don't.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
They're very rare to see.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
So I'm like, okay, by process on elimination, this is
probably a rye horn.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Ross probably knows the sounds of Pokemon Ruby better than
most people because he had to, and if he was
going to play the game, he wanted to really play
it on his own. I started a new.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Save file, and you know, sometimes I think about that.
I'm like, that's like really symbolic in a way, like
why did I feel the need to start a new
save file? Like after I was blinded? It was almost
like starting a really new chapter of my life. I
guess my thought process was, maybe if I can play
the game, I want to know I can play all
of it, like from beginning to end, and if I can't,
(08:26):
well then it doesn't matter if I delete my safe
because I'm not gonna be able to play the game.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Having that bump sound, having the cries all be different,
and even having attacks that have different distinctive sounds for
people like me who can see the screen, that's just
good sound design, especially for early two thousands technology. It's
kind of cool that the cut sound kind of sounds
(08:51):
like a cut, but it's not crucial. But if you
can't see the screen will or you can't see it
at all, it is crucial because it's all the information
you have now. Pokemon probably wasn't made with blind accessibility
in mind, games like this we could maybe call accidentally accessible.
But eventually even the Pokemon series started getting harder for
(09:14):
Ross to play.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
As of generation eight of Pokemon, so Pokemon Sword and
Shield anything after that is just strictly not accessible.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Really, it's got worse.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Oh yeah, yeah, like down the Drain, and the reason
is mainly because of camera perspective, you know, when you
think about it. When you walk around, you know, your
camera perspective is fixed, but like, imagine if you were
walking around in life, and like the way you imagined yourself,
the perspective constantly changed based on how you were walking,
(09:48):
it'd be really disorienting. And so once the camera starts
moving around, you have no orientation because when it's fixed,
you can like count steps. That's not something that a
lot of people necessarily do in real life, but like
in a video game, it works. You know, the Pokemon
center is twenty steps to the left once you enter
town or whatever, but that suddenly changes when you have
different angles that you can walk around the overworld end
(10:09):
and suddenly you're no longer walking in a grid. And
so because of that, I haven't been able to experience
the new games.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
As Pokemon became more advanced but less successible, there weren't
a whole lot of options for new games that Ross
could play, so he'd spend a lot of time listening
to his friends play picture of this.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
He's twenty eleven. Skyrim comes out. Everyone is talking about
this game, right, yeah, everyone and my friends are all
telling me about it, and so they get the game.
I come over on the weekend and like, I listen
to them play this open world fantasy RPG with music
that was recorded by like a live orchestra, and I
(10:49):
have all these incredible sounds, and like, I'm not able
to play it, and my dream is one day be
able to play Skyrim.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Skyrim is an open world game, which means that you
can explore the entire game world at your own pace.
It's not like those kinds of games where you beat
level one and okay, time to go to level two.
The entire map is open to you and you can
decide if you want to do a mission right now,
or you can just look around and explore, which sounds
like a great time for someone like me, but it
(11:18):
makes basically impossible to play if you're blind. And regardless
of whether they were open world or not, most of
the games coming out at this time were not accessible
to ross. That is until leftore Dead.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
That game really showed me like what the potential was
for accessibility in games and like how easy it could
be because in Left for Dead one and two, all
of the zombies have different sounds tied to them, and
so through knowing what they sound like and then through
knowing their abilities, you know how to prepare for them,
(11:56):
and so you know, I still remember, like the hunter
when and it's getting closer to you, like a eerie
piano sound plays, but that's the only sound cue you get.
Or like if there's like a bloater, you know, I mean,
it pretty much sounds like someone's about to get sick.
That's what it sounds like, and you hear off of
the distance.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
I was able to.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Like help my friends play the game because you know,
like during the chaos of the game, they couldn't always
like see their visual cues, and so I was able
to hear as we played.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Left for Dead is a first person shooter, the kind
of game where you see the point of view of
the main character. These are gonna be hard to play
if you're blind because you have to aim and shoot,
So most first person shooters are simply not possible for
Ross to play. But Left for Dead had some really
good sound design. Different zombies make different noises and also
(12:55):
kind of like Pokemon, different attacks make very different sounds,
and Ross was able to use this as cues and
fight back.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
When you swung your melee weapon, certain ones, you could
really tell when you connected with a zombie versus like
hitting a wall. My favorite was frying pan because like
it made like a really loud metal on body impact
like frying pan sound, you know, like almost like cartoons
were loud. But it made it really easy for me
(13:28):
to tell when I.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Was I was hitting something, and those small cues added up.
There's one particular level that stood out, carnival.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
I think it was called where you like you make
your way through this carnival or whatever, and then you
get to this like staging area and you have to
turn all the lights and all the music like a
bunch of zombies flooding. They're rock music blasting and like
just tons of zombies just screaming. So I'm there like
(13:58):
music is playing, I'm swim an electric guitar and like
killing zombies and like you know, I can feel the
vibrations in the control where I can hear the sound
it makes, and so I'm just swinging my guitar, having fun,
feeling my guitar connect with zombies. And in my mind
I'm thinking, like you know, I'm I'm catching the stragglers,
you know, and my friends are taking care of the rest.
But turns out they're like holy shit. Ross you just
(14:19):
killed like two or three tanks, which are like the
biggest the biggest zombies in the game. Yeah, that's the
core memory right there, Like just thinking about that. This
is where it's like video games and their importance, like
bridge beyond entertainment. It's about socialization, it's about escapism, it's
(14:41):
about i mean, even in this case, like validation, because
it's like after I was blinded, I was quickly aware
of just like how differently people treated me and back
then and even now as a grown ass man, it's
like people don't think think you can, or don't want
you to or don't let you help whatever the reason is.
(15:04):
You experienced that entire life and it just kind of
wears on you. And so then like to play a
game where you're still playing with friends but you're able
to just partake and like being helpful when society makes
you or wants you to think that you aren't to
be a part of the team, and like work cohesively
is something cool to be able to do. It's just
(15:28):
a good feeling.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
I mean, honestly, that's the best feeling in a game period,
any kind of online multiplayer just team game is knowing
that oh yeah, we would have died if it wasn't
for me. Yeah, yeah, right, absolutely, Okay, this is cool.
But again, these games that Ross could kind of sort
of play, like Left for Dead or Pokemon, they were
(15:51):
only accidentally accessible. So what happens when someone wants to
do all this on purpose? That's where people like Ross
come in. That's after the break. So much of how
(16:12):
you're able to play games has been people who are
not the developers figuring out ways. But it's not the
company themselves.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of reasons why. It's
mainly due to budget and lack of awareness. So like
half the battle is making people aware, but then the
bigger battle is budget. Gaming industry is volatile as is
I mean, as of recording this, you know, what was
it a month or two ago, Like Microsoft laid off
nine thousand employees, and that also includes games that were
(16:42):
likely going to have some type of accessibility feature in
some way, and so like a lot of times accessibility
is like the first like when there are budget cuts
to be made, like accessibility is the first one to
get acted, and so it's like it's hard for you
to prioritize it, so it's.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Down to the people who need these features to advocate
for them. At first, Ross would just write emails to
game studios saying, like, all my friends are playing this game,
I really want to be able to play too, could
you please add features so that blind people like me
could play it? He usually wouldn't get a response. So
Ross started planning on how he could get himself into
(17:18):
the game industry and started out by trying to consult
on games so that more accessibility features would be incorporated.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Madden twenty eighteen was the first thing I did that
was like my first taste into like game accessibility and
for context, my payment for that was assigned copy of
Madden twenty eighteen that was pretty much like not accessible
except for like the one feature I worked on. I
worked on as justin Falls. I think that was the
first game I was credited, and then I'm in the
(17:48):
credits for Sea of Thieves.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Sea if Thieves is an online open world game that
first came out in twenty eighteen. It wasn't built to
be blind accessible at first. I mean, remember what I
said about open world games usually being most impossible for
blind people to play, but partially because you could also
play with sighted people on your team, and partially because
of some other features, this game was also kind of
(18:10):
accidentally accessible.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
The most successful thing to do on the ship was
like to steer the ship. I know this sounds kind
of ironic, a blind person's steering a pirate ship, but
think about it, Like you're in the open ocean. There's
really not much to hit, relatively speaking. But then the
wheel when you rotate it, there are like notches in it,
and you can feel those vibrations in the controller, so
(18:33):
like you're able to kind of tell where the wheel's
positioned and therefore like how hard you're turning and things
like that, So it was really easy for people to
like call out directions on where to turn.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
This is maybe the most impressive thing to me about
how Ross does his work. It's not just that he
has the lived experience of being blind. It's that he
prepares a lot. He's taught himself how to program, He's
read every game design book he can get his hands on.
He studies the industry, he lives and breathes this stuff,
and so he's able to come in and identify when
(19:02):
a small change would make a huge difference for a
blind gamer. One tiny feature that could turn a game
from being unplayable into being your new favorite franchise.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
The future I helped work on was when a person
is sailing the ship, it turns up the sounds of
the waves that are specifically like hitting against the rocks
out at sea, to allow blind players to avoid the
rocks at sea, which gives a more agency and steering
the ship, focusing on that one task that they're good
(19:35):
at doing already, and just like improving it.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Video game accessibility has been improving here and there, but
a lot of it kind of felt like small steps,
at least until twenty twenty with the release of a
game called The Last of Us Part two.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
I mean that was like kind of like the final kick,
Like okay, developers are actually taking triple A big budget
games and making them accept like they're taking that seriously.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
The Last of Us is a game series that involves
exploring environments and shooting enemies, which normally places it pretty
squarely in the long list of games that you can't
play if you're blind, And sure enough, when the first
Last of Us came out in twenty thirteen, it wasn't
blind accessible. But for the Last of Us Part two,
the developers brought on one of the best known consultants
(20:23):
in blind gaming at the time, Brandon Cole.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
One of my buddies, Brandon Cole, he was the totally
blind consultant who worked on The Lost of Us Too.
He passed away a year ago, a little over a
year ago, but he was a huge inspiration for me
and I I never thought that game accessibility would be
taken seriously in the industry, Like he was kind of
(20:46):
the one who was like always spearheading things.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
And for real, you really can't talk about blind accessibility
and gaming without also at some point talking about Brandon Cole.
For example, you might remember that for the Racing Simulator
announced that they're knew this installment was going to be
playable by blind people. Actually, hold on a second. You
might not know this, but it is possible now for
blind people to play a cutting edge race car simulator,
(21:10):
and Brandon was involved with that. He was a veteran
in the scene who Ross really looked up to. So
when Ross plays games like The Last of Us two
in his streams, it's not just about the technical accomplishment,
it's about recognizing one of the people that made that
life changing event possible for him.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Lost of US is like it's one of those games
that it was just like a genre where I never
thought I'd be able to play again, any genre with
like free moving camera, any genre where I could like
shoot a gun anything like that. I just never thought
I'd be able to do. It is really cool just
riding the horse around and like using the navigation assistance
and like experiencing that for the first time. And I
(21:49):
remember all I could say was like, guys, like, I'm
literally playing an accessible game on the PlayStation. Guys, I'm
playing a PS four game right now.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Do you guys understand this.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I'm playing a PS four game. It was really surreal
to be able to explore and do combat and read
all the menus and adjust the game to the settings
I want. Yeah, it's just it reminds me of like
what I wanted when I was eight years old. You know,
I don't even know the words for words for it, man,
(22:22):
Like this is just like a lifelong dream coming true.
Like that's the only way that I can describe it.
I'm sure many of you guys understand.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
The Last of Us Part two is a game where
you need to shoot at enemies. So how do these
features work that allow blind people to play the game
and get into that after the break.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I always tell people that there are three things to
make a game blind accessible, sound cues, text of speech,
and navigation assistance. And the sound cues are meant to
tell players when specific things in the game happen. For
the Last of Us was break it down. First, we
have the navigation assistance. You know, how does a blind
person navigate through a world like that? Well, if you
turn on navisist and it basically asks like a golden
(23:16):
path where if you press in the left thumbstick, it
will like play a sound and then point you in
the direction you need to go. We're gonna explore every
bit we can, and then you'll walk forward and then
eventually it'll play like a higher pitch sound to let
(23:37):
you know, hey, you need to press all three again
to like reorient yourself. You don't have to press it,
but it's there if you need to. And so basically
you're walking through like a string of nodes that will
bring you all the way through the game, that will
bring you to every single objective, every single encounter.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
All that.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Then there's a screenered aspect. The Last of Us has
a fully fledged screen reads everything in the game touch
and then there's sound cues, and there are sound cues
for different types of enemies. If you hold down R
one and then you can press circle scan for items,
square to scan for enemies, and it sends out basically
(24:18):
like this sort of like sonar wave, like this sort
of like sound, and then it will play a sound
if there's an enemy or if there's an item, and
you can kind of gauge how far that item is
and like what direction it's in, and then you can
press a button and it'll help guide you to that item.
(24:38):
Check this out.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
One half rag rag sweet.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
And so like through all these things it's able to
kind of form this picture and allow us to navigate.
And then through combat, if you're aiming your gun, there's
a sound que that plays for if you're aiming at
their body, and then like a higher pitch down to
show that you're aiming at their head.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
You can headshot without see it.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Wow oh yeah yeah, like and like that's so satisfying,
And the thing is like there's amosis. Yeah, but you
know that's the thing about accessibilities that you can customize
it to your liking, and so you know, I don't
like my game to play itself for me, right, So,
like I don't have the amasis like set the max
or whatever, and even if I did, it still doesn't
just do everything for you. You still have to try for
(25:29):
the headshot, and so like it's very satisfying like when
I'm able to pull it off, and it's very frustrating
when I miss and die, you know, Like that's that's cool.
Like I want that experience, the both good and the bad.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
That's the point of video game.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, that's the point of video games. I have this
clip where it was the first time I was playing
The Last of Us. It was like the tutorial section
and I was fighting five infected at once, and literally
I was like dodging and weaving throughout all of their
attacks because there is a sound cue when I need
to dodge, and like I literally took on the five
(26:02):
infected hand to hand combat. It was really cool to
be able to do because like, while I'm playing, I'm
not speaking out all. I'm just like completely locked in
and focused. That's what it should look like when I'm
playing and enjoying a game. And it was just like
really really cool.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
The Last of Us Part two and the inclusion of
features for blind and low vision people is a success
on two levels. First off, the features actually work, which
means that there's a group of people who will now
buy the game. This is a small group, sure, but
from what I've heard, when a disabled game where finds
a video game that they can actually play, they will
put money down Deluxe version, sign them up DLC. If
(26:43):
it's playable, they're on it re release on a new system,
they'll probably buy that too. But also announcing that your
game is accessible is always good press for a game,
and it might even nudge an able bodied player to
buy the game just because they're curious and it seems interesting.
But we got to go back to those fundamentals. Do
those accessibility features actually work? And sometimes the answer is
(27:07):
kind of so.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
God of War Ragdrock, It's got a lot of accessibility
features similar to lots of us, you know, screen reader, navasists,
combat assistance, but all of it across the board is
like very half baked, and like that's not to discredit
a hard work that people probably already did at the studio,
but it's just it's true. It's the perfect example of
(27:29):
what a half bag game looks like because like the
navasist works great most of the time, except if you
come across a puzzle, then it suddenly you are completely
like stonewalled from a game unless someone helps you. Or
combat assistance is great in that, like there's dodge cues,
there's block cues, and there's pery cues, but they don't
play for every type of enemy, and they're not timed
(27:50):
the best. And then like there's a screen reader, but
you can't read the skill menu and you can't read
the armory menu. You know, probably the most two important
menus in the entire game you can't read. And it's
such a shame because I enjoy playing the game a lot,
Like the combat is so fun, but I still haven't
been it because like it's very tedious to get through.
When the systems work, you could see it work, but
(28:13):
then you can see immediately like when there's friction, and
like it just comes to a grinding halt.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Unfortunately, this is a problem that a lot of games
that have accessibility features end up running into and a
lot of the time it's because that accessibility was added
late in the development of the game, too late for
the features to be really integrated. Instead, these features are
added in piecemeal or as a layer on top.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
A common example that people use in the game accessibility
space is like baking a blueberry muffin and the blueberries
are the accessibility. So you don't bake the entire muffin
and then put the blueberries in after you bake the muffin,
because then you got to like rip out pieces, you
got to put the blueberries in and cover them back up.
You know, it's like, it doesn't make sense. I suppose
(29:01):
it's just building it or baking it from the ground up.
It's just a much more mature mindset that people are
having with accessibility now, where they realize they need to
implement it at the same time as they're implementing everything
else and not making an afterthought.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
So there's something I noticed about how you and a
lot of other blind people that I see when they
talk about games. How you talk about games is when
there's a criticism of a game, it's usually very gentle. Yeah,
which this is something that I'm not used to in
gamer circles because you know how gamers get. It's like
(29:37):
a pixel is ever so slightly at a place, or
a game has a slightly longer load time than you
would want and it's just these devs are lazy. I
hate all these people who made it. What are they doing?
I want my money back. What I've seen from blind
gamers and other people who are in this space is
when there's a criticism of a game, it's very light. Yeah,
(29:58):
and it's very charitable.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, that's pretty much because there's something like any minority
will get is not just a disabled thing. And it's
like the concept of you have to show that you're
grateful or else you're not going to get opportunities. You
can't be too opinionated, or else you'll seem ungrateful. At
the end of the day, we all just want to
(30:21):
play video games the disabled community, and it's very fragile,
like the relationship that gamers have with developers and studios.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
And this brings us to another reality, the fact that
even though Ross and other consultants have worked on some
pretty big games, they often still don't make a living
wage from it. A lot of the time they just
got to take what they can.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
I'm very transparent with how much this kind of work
pace because I just think it matters, because I get
a bunch of blind people saying like this is such
a cool job, Like, how'd you get into it? I
want to do it, and I always tell them I'm like,
first off, it's a grind. Second, I'm on Social Security still,
Like that's how little I make Right now? The budget
for paying for game accessibility consultants is at an all
(31:07):
time low. There were going to be some games I
was going to work on that ended up being closed
or shut down or whatever. It's rough. It's why I'm
going back to college to finish my bachelords because I
don't want to put all my eggs in one basket.
It's why I do audience scription narration on the side.
It's why I do social media on the side, just
to like have different revenue streams because the industry has
made a lot of progress, but it's still got a
(31:28):
lot of work to do.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Ross right now is as close to living his dream
as he's ever been. He's helping to make video games
accessible for players like him, but the industry isn't taking
that seriously enough that he can rely on his work
for his livelihood. But he's still passionate about this project
and he knows that this is a path that he
wants to take. He even has a tattoo to prove it.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
This is the Garrettos tattoo. So when I was a
Paralympic swimmer, I was training full time at the Olympic
Training Center and I got the tattoo because I mean
I was nineteen nine one tattoos, I was able to
get him. And then I also wanted something.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Cool, right forgot to mention on top of everything else.
Ross is also a world class athlete. When I first
talked to him, he was training as a Paralympic swimmer
for the twenty twenty Games of Japan. And if you're
not familiar with Garo Dos, it's this big water dragon
looking thing that wraps around his right bicep, and it
makes sense. It's a water type Pokemon, so like a
(32:27):
powerful swimmer. And he was where a lot of people
would assume that he'd want to be, but it just
wasn't really his dream.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
I retired from the Paralympics, retired early and didn't go
to Japan, and I realized, like that, the tattoo just
has like a new meeting. Now it's really about what
games me to me, what Pokemon means to me. Pokemon
was like where it really started, you know, that's why
I have it now, and I'm kind of glad that
(32:56):
it took on that meaning because I think it's just
like a lot more true to who I am when
you go blind in the way that I have people
say that you're a miracle, or that you're strong or
that you're going to do great things because you survived
a gunshot or because you're living your life blind. And
(33:19):
it's like, okay, but I don't have a choice to
live my life blind. But growing up, all that was
like kind of like instilled in me, and not in
a good way. Hmmm, what do you mean, Well, just
the feeling of like I need to do something great
because of what happened to me, as opposed to just
(33:39):
living my life. And so that was the difference between
the Paralympics and gaming scessibility, because like the Paralympics, you know,
all my life I have people say like, oh, you're
great at swimming. You should go all the way to
the top, all the way to the Paralympics. And then
in my mind, I'm like, yeah, like this, I'm gonna
do great and I'm gonna win medals and hire people
(34:00):
because I felt like that was my mission to inspire people.
But with game accessibility is like I can do something
great that I also actually care about.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
The gaming industry still has a long way to go,
but Ross, along with other accessibility consultants and advocates, are
working hard to make this medium playable for all abilities.
The dream would be that one day Ross could walk
up to the shelf, pull any game down and just
play it, and that any other gamer could also, even
if they're blind or deaf or have difficulty holding the
(34:32):
controller in the way that I hold it. But you know,
first things first, he's still thinking about that dream that
he had back in twenty eleven. You mentioned Skyrim? What
would it take for you to play Skyrim?
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Pretty much the same features that exist in the Loss
of Us. The only one I would really like modifies
like the navigation system to make it more dynamic as
seat of linear, because that's kind of what you have
to do in general for an open world game is
find a way to allow the player to go wherever
they want, whenever they want, not where you think they
want to go, or not in like one set path,
(35:06):
because that's like what the Loss of Us does right now.
That's all it would take, you know, one day if
they ever like re remaster it or whatever, maybe they'll
watch them reach out to me or something and help
make it accessible, because like, like that is that is
the game for me.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
So if there's any developers out there, Ross's info is
in the show notes or actually I'll just tell you
right now, Rossminder dot com High Ladder. But in the meantime,
I do happen to know some people who are working
on something that can make accessibility like this a little
easier to implement. We'll get into that in part two
of this episode, which comes out later this week. Thank
you so much for listening to kill Switch. If you
(35:48):
want to talk, we're here at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope
dot NYC, or on Instagram at kill switch pod and
wherever you happen to be listening to this, leave us
a review. It helps other people find the show, which
helps us keep doing our thing. Killswitch is hosted by
Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Shina Ozaki, Darluck Potts,
and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by me and
(36:10):
Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show from Kaleidoscope.
Our executive producers are Ozma lashin On, Gesh Hajikador and
Kate Osbourne from iHeart Our executive producers are Katrina Norvil
and Nikki E.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Tour.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Also, Killswitch is now on YouTube. We're starting to put
some of our episodes on there, so if you want
the experience with the visuals, like seeing what these anime
girl YouTuber concerts from a few episodes ago look like,
the link to that is in the show notes. And
one more thing, I mentioned that I wrote about Ross
Minor for Wired magazine, so there's some details in there
that we just didn't have time to get into in
(36:45):
this podcast, like what happened when we tried to go
get pizza, especially on the way home, So if you
want to check that one out, the link to that
is in the show notes. Anyway, catch on the next one,
(37:08):
well along, good Bye,
Yop it's dexter. So before we start the show, quick announcement,
Killswitch has been nominated for the Signal Awards under the
Technology category. If you want to support the show, please
go vote for us at vote dot Signal Award dot
com and voting closes tomorrow Thursday, October ninth.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
All Right, on to the show. I was in the
hospital for around a month, had a lot of people
come and visit. It's two thousand and six. Pokemon was like,
arguably at the peak OF's popularity, and I heard my
(00:40):
friends playing Pokemon. I will listen to my friends play
and like asked him, Oh, what was that sound? What
does that sound?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Ross Minor works in the video game industry. He's also
totally blind, and he has been since two thousand and six.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I played video games before I was blinded, and then
after I was blinded, you know, I still wanted to
play video games.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Pokemon is a really important game for Ross. It's the
first game he was at least kind of able to
play blind, and it ended up having some pretty profound
impacts not just on his childhood but on his career.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Playing Pokemon helped me learn how to navigate the world.
Being blind and being blind helped me learn how to
navigate the world of Pokemon, because they both required keeping
track of your surroundings and like spatial orientation, Like that's
what being blind is all about.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
I'm afraid.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
I'm all right, goodbye.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
I first talked to Ross about five years ago. The
pandemic had just started and everyone was inside. And if
you remember, just around that time, Animal Crossing had also
come out and it was getting really popular. And I'm
looking on YouTube and I see this video of this
guy explaining how he plays the game blind.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
What's up, everyone, it's your favorite blind guy. My name
is Ross mind there, and I'm gonna be showing you
guys how I play Animal Crossing New Horizons without any
site whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
We talked a little bit back then, but I always
wanted to know more about how he not only figured
out how to play a farming simulator without being able
to see the screen, but why he would make YouTube
videos about it when again, he can't see the screen.
So finally this year I ended up writing a feature
about him in Wire magazine, and I learned a lot.
Ross has been a gamer for his whole life, but
(03:26):
he wasn't born blind. Playing video games without sight was
something he had to figure out.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
That's probably my cue to say how I was blinded.
A lot of people think that people with disabilities are
just like born that way, when like a lot of
people with disabilities become disabled in some way, and so
for me, it was actually a pretty tragic story. So
like trigger warning for gun violence and domestic violence and
(03:52):
all that.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Ross just said it, but for real, heads up, this
is a pretty difficult story to hear.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Two thousand and six. So when I was eight years old,
my mother was divorcing my father and and an act
of retaliation, he shot me in my sleep, shot and
killed my brother Ryan, and then committed suicide. A lot
of times, I just to keep it really sure, I
just say, you know, family annihilation pretty much, which is
sad that there's a term for that now, But that's
(04:21):
how I was blinded. So I pretty much went to
sleep with sight, you know, twenty twenty vision, and then
woke up in the hospital completely blind.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I can't imagine what it's like to explain that to
people constantly, because you have to do this a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, yeah, like it is a fine line. I'm gonna
be real like when I was younger, you know, I
say like, oh, I'm so used to it, I don't
mind talking about it, and like I don't mind talking
about it, but you're right, like the repetition begins to
make it feel almost like it didn't even happen, if
(04:55):
that makes sense, Like it feels like just something I'm
like rehearsing, but really, I her said, just to like
emphasize that, yeah, it happened to me. But then kind
of just like, Okay, you have the background. Now let's
like talk about what we actually want to talk about.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
When Ross woke up in the hospital, he was completely blind,
but he was still Ross, and he still wanted to
play video games, especially the game he'd been playing at
the time, Pokemon Ruby. He listened while his friends would
play in the hospital room, and he'd try to figure
out what the sounds he was hearing. Men.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
With Pokemon, there are sounds for everything. There are sounds
for each different Pokemon, like the cry that they make
when you throw them out. There sounds for all the
different attacks. There's music for each different town. But most importantly,
there's a sound that plays when you bump into a wall,
and I another bunch of black people call it like
the bump sound, because if that sound didn't exist, we
(05:53):
quite literally wouldn't be able to play the game in
the way that we do or did back then, because
if we don't know that we're bumping into something, we're
not able to memorize the map. We're not able to
like figure out where things are, you know, walking around
bumping into things, memorizing where things are. That's kind of
(06:13):
how blind people navigate in the first place, Like in
real life. Just the inclusion of that one sound allowed
me to memorize pretty much all of the games. That's
how good the sound design was.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
When you mentioned that, even without having to really think
about it, I can immediately register especially the bump sound.
I know exactly what you're talking about. And then the
fact that different Pokemon have different cries, different sounds, even
in the old school games, yeah, even the first Pokemon games. Yeah,
Pikachu kind of sounds like Pikachu, and an electric Pokemon
(06:50):
sounds like an electric Pokemon. A big rock Pokemon sounds
big and low and heavy.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yeah, And it's that they're able to do all that
with like eight bit sounds. But kind of fun little
fact is that I think they ran out of memory
in their original games. And so out of the first
one hundred and fifty one Pokemon, there are some that
are like just straight up duplicates of each other. So
like Charizard and rye Horn have the same exact cry.
(07:21):
Really yeah, And so this is where it's like my
knowledge of Pokemon like goes deep, because you know, if
I'm like playing the game and I hear either the
Charizard or the rye Horn sound, I'm thinking, Okay, well,
most trainers in games out in the wild like don't
(07:45):
have charis ars, Like they just don't.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
They're very rare to see.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
So I'm like, okay, by process on elimination, this is
probably a rye horn.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Ross probably knows the sounds of Pokemon Ruby better than
most people because he had to, and if he was
going to play the game, he wanted to really play
it on his own. I started a new.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Save file, and you know, sometimes I think about that.
I'm like, that's like really symbolic in a way, like
why did I feel the need to start a new
save file? Like after I was blinded? It was almost
like starting a really new chapter of my life. I
guess my thought process was, maybe if I can play
the game, I want to know I can play all
of it, like from beginning to end, and if I can't,
(08:26):
well then it doesn't matter if I delete my safe
because I'm not gonna be able to play the game.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Having that bump sound, having the cries all be different,
and even having attacks that have different distinctive sounds for
people like me who can see the screen, that's just
good sound design, especially for early two thousands technology. It's
kind of cool that the cut sound kind of sounds
(08:51):
like a cut, but it's not crucial. But if you
can't see the screen will or you can't see it
at all, it is crucial because it's all the information
you have now. Pokemon probably wasn't made with blind accessibility
in mind, games like this we could maybe call accidentally accessible.
But eventually even the Pokemon series started getting harder for
(09:14):
Ross to play.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
As of generation eight of Pokemon, so Pokemon Sword and
Shield anything after that is just strictly not accessible.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Really, it's got worse.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Oh yeah, yeah, like down the Drain, and the reason
is mainly because of camera perspective, you know, when you
think about it. When you walk around, you know, your
camera perspective is fixed, but like, imagine if you were
walking around in life, and like the way you imagined yourself,
the perspective constantly changed based on how you were walking,
(09:48):
it'd be really disorienting. And so once the camera starts
moving around, you have no orientation because when it's fixed,
you can like count steps. That's not something that a
lot of people necessarily do in real life, but like
in a video game, it works. You know, the Pokemon
center is twenty steps to the left once you enter
town or whatever, but that suddenly changes when you have
different angles that you can walk around the overworld end
(10:09):
and suddenly you're no longer walking in a grid. And
so because of that, I haven't been able to experience
the new games.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
As Pokemon became more advanced but less successible, there weren't
a whole lot of options for new games that Ross
could play, so he'd spend a lot of time listening
to his friends play picture of this.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
He's twenty eleven. Skyrim comes out. Everyone is talking about
this game, right, yeah, everyone and my friends are all
telling me about it, and so they get the game.
I come over on the weekend and like, I listen
to them play this open world fantasy RPG with music
that was recorded by like a live orchestra, and I
(10:49):
have all these incredible sounds, and like, I'm not able
to play it, and my dream is one day be
able to play Skyrim.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Skyrim is an open world game, which means that you
can explore the entire game world at your own pace.
It's not like those kinds of games where you beat
level one and okay, time to go to level two.
The entire map is open to you and you can
decide if you want to do a mission right now,
or you can just look around and explore, which sounds
like a great time for someone like me, but it
(11:18):
makes basically impossible to play if you're blind. And regardless
of whether they were open world or not, most of
the games coming out at this time were not accessible
to ross. That is until leftore Dead.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
That game really showed me like what the potential was
for accessibility in games and like how easy it could
be because in Left for Dead one and two, all
of the zombies have different sounds tied to them, and
so through knowing what they sound like and then through
knowing their abilities, you know how to prepare for them,
(11:56):
and so you know, I still remember, like the hunter
when and it's getting closer to you, like a eerie
piano sound plays, but that's the only sound cue you get.
Or like if there's like a bloater, you know, I mean,
it pretty much sounds like someone's about to get sick.
That's what it sounds like, and you hear off of
the distance.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
I was able to.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Like help my friends play the game because you know,
like during the chaos of the game, they couldn't always
like see their visual cues, and so I was able
to hear as we played.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Left for Dead is a first person shooter, the kind
of game where you see the point of view of
the main character. These are gonna be hard to play
if you're blind because you have to aim and shoot,
So most first person shooters are simply not possible for
Ross to play. But Left for Dead had some really
good sound design. Different zombies make different noises and also
(12:55):
kind of like Pokemon, different attacks make very different sounds,
and Ross was able to use this as cues and
fight back.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
When you swung your melee weapon, certain ones, you could
really tell when you connected with a zombie versus like
hitting a wall. My favorite was frying pan because like
it made like a really loud metal on body impact
like frying pan sound, you know, like almost like cartoons
were loud. But it made it really easy for me
(13:28):
to tell when I.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Was I was hitting something, and those small cues added up.
There's one particular level that stood out, carnival.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
I think it was called where you like you make
your way through this carnival or whatever, and then you
get to this like staging area and you have to
turn all the lights and all the music like a
bunch of zombies flooding. They're rock music blasting and like
just tons of zombies just screaming. So I'm there like
(13:58):
music is playing, I'm swim an electric guitar and like
killing zombies and like you know, I can feel the
vibrations in the control where I can hear the sound
it makes, and so I'm just swinging my guitar, having fun,
feeling my guitar connect with zombies. And in my mind
I'm thinking, like you know, I'm I'm catching the stragglers,
you know, and my friends are taking care of the rest.
But turns out they're like holy shit. Ross you just
(14:19):
killed like two or three tanks, which are like the
biggest the biggest zombies in the game. Yeah, that's the
core memory right there, Like just thinking about that. This
is where it's like video games and their importance, like
bridge beyond entertainment. It's about socialization, it's about escapism, it's
(14:41):
about i mean, even in this case, like validation, because
it's like after I was blinded, I was quickly aware
of just like how differently people treated me and back
then and even now as a grown ass man, it's
like people don't think think you can, or don't want
you to or don't let you help whatever the reason is.
(15:04):
You experienced that entire life and it just kind of
wears on you. And so then like to play a
game where you're still playing with friends but you're able
to just partake and like being helpful when society makes
you or wants you to think that you aren't to
be a part of the team, and like work cohesively
is something cool to be able to do. It's just
(15:28):
a good feeling.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
I mean, honestly, that's the best feeling in a game period,
any kind of online multiplayer just team game is knowing
that oh yeah, we would have died if it wasn't
for me. Yeah, yeah, right, absolutely, Okay, this is cool.
But again, these games that Ross could kind of sort
of play, like Left for Dead or Pokemon, they were
(15:51):
only accidentally accessible. So what happens when someone wants to
do all this on purpose? That's where people like Ross
come in. That's after the break. So much of how
(16:12):
you're able to play games has been people who are
not the developers figuring out ways. But it's not the
company themselves.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of reasons why. It's
mainly due to budget and lack of awareness. So like
half the battle is making people aware, but then the
bigger battle is budget. Gaming industry is volatile as is
I mean, as of recording this, you know, what was
it a month or two ago, Like Microsoft laid off
nine thousand employees, and that also includes games that were
(16:42):
likely going to have some type of accessibility feature in
some way, and so like a lot of times accessibility
is like the first like when there are budget cuts
to be made, like accessibility is the first one to
get acted, and so it's like it's hard for you
to prioritize it, so it's.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Down to the people who need these features to advocate
for them. At first, Ross would just write emails to
game studios saying, like, all my friends are playing this game,
I really want to be able to play too, could
you please add features so that blind people like me
could play it? He usually wouldn't get a response. So
Ross started planning on how he could get himself into
(17:18):
the game industry and started out by trying to consult
on games so that more accessibility features would be incorporated.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Madden twenty eighteen was the first thing I did that
was like my first taste into like game accessibility and
for context, my payment for that was assigned copy of
Madden twenty eighteen that was pretty much like not accessible
except for like the one feature I worked on. I
worked on as justin Falls. I think that was the
first game I was credited, and then I'm in the
(17:48):
credits for Sea of Thieves.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Sea if Thieves is an online open world game that
first came out in twenty eighteen. It wasn't built to
be blind accessible at first. I mean, remember what I
said about open world games usually being most impossible for
blind people to play, but partially because you could also
play with sighted people on your team, and partially because
of some other features, this game was also kind of
(18:10):
accidentally accessible.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
The most successful thing to do on the ship was
like to steer the ship. I know this sounds kind
of ironic, a blind person's steering a pirate ship, but
think about it, Like you're in the open ocean. There's
really not much to hit, relatively speaking. But then the
wheel when you rotate it, there are like notches in it,
and you can feel those vibrations in the controller, so
(18:33):
like you're able to kind of tell where the wheel's
positioned and therefore like how hard you're turning and things
like that, So it was really easy for people to
like call out directions on where to turn.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
This is maybe the most impressive thing to me about
how Ross does his work. It's not just that he
has the lived experience of being blind. It's that he
prepares a lot. He's taught himself how to program, He's
read every game design book he can get his hands on.
He studies the industry, he lives and breathes this stuff,
and so he's able to come in and identify when
(19:02):
a small change would make a huge difference for a
blind gamer. One tiny feature that could turn a game
from being unplayable into being your new favorite franchise.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
The future I helped work on was when a person
is sailing the ship, it turns up the sounds of
the waves that are specifically like hitting against the rocks
out at sea, to allow blind players to avoid the
rocks at sea, which gives a more agency and steering
the ship, focusing on that one task that they're good
(19:35):
at doing already, and just like improving it.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Video game accessibility has been improving here and there, but
a lot of it kind of felt like small steps,
at least until twenty twenty with the release of a
game called The Last of Us Part two.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
I mean that was like kind of like the final kick,
Like okay, developers are actually taking triple A big budget
games and making them accept like they're taking that seriously.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
The Last of Us is a game series that involves
exploring environments and shooting enemies, which normally places it pretty
squarely in the long list of games that you can't
play if you're blind, And sure enough, when the first
Last of Us came out in twenty thirteen, it wasn't
blind accessible. But for the Last of Us Part two,
the developers brought on one of the best known consultants
(20:23):
in blind gaming at the time, Brandon Cole.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
One of my buddies, Brandon Cole, he was the totally
blind consultant who worked on The Lost of Us Too.
He passed away a year ago, a little over a
year ago, but he was a huge inspiration for me
and I I never thought that game accessibility would be
taken seriously in the industry, Like he was kind of
(20:46):
the one who was like always spearheading things.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
And for real, you really can't talk about blind accessibility
and gaming without also at some point talking about Brandon Cole.
For example, you might remember that for the Racing Simulator
announced that they're knew this installment was going to be
playable by blind people. Actually, hold on a second. You
might not know this, but it is possible now for
blind people to play a cutting edge race car simulator,
(21:10):
and Brandon was involved with that. He was a veteran
in the scene who Ross really looked up to. So
when Ross plays games like The Last of Us two
in his streams, it's not just about the technical accomplishment,
it's about recognizing one of the people that made that
life changing event possible for him.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Lost of US is like it's one of those games
that it was just like a genre where I never
thought I'd be able to play again, any genre with
like free moving camera, any genre where I could like
shoot a gun anything like that. I just never thought
I'd be able to do. It is really cool just
riding the horse around and like using the navigation assistance
and like experiencing that for the first time. And I
(21:49):
remember all I could say was like, guys, like, I'm
literally playing an accessible game on the PlayStation. Guys, I'm
playing a PS four game right now.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Do you guys understand this.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I'm playing a PS four game. It was really surreal
to be able to explore and do combat and read
all the menus and adjust the game to the settings
I want. Yeah, it's just it reminds me of like
what I wanted when I was eight years old. You know,
I don't even know the words for words for it, man,
(22:22):
Like this is just like a lifelong dream coming true.
Like that's the only way that I can describe it.
I'm sure many of you guys understand.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
The Last of Us Part two is a game where
you need to shoot at enemies. So how do these
features work that allow blind people to play the game
and get into that after the break.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I always tell people that there are three things to
make a game blind accessible, sound cues, text of speech,
and navigation assistance. And the sound cues are meant to
tell players when specific things in the game happen. For
the Last of Us was break it down. First, we
have the navigation assistance. You know, how does a blind
person navigate through a world like that? Well, if you
turn on navisist and it basically asks like a golden
(23:16):
path where if you press in the left thumbstick, it
will like play a sound and then point you in
the direction you need to go. We're gonna explore every
bit we can, and then you'll walk forward and then
eventually it'll play like a higher pitch sound to let
(23:37):
you know, hey, you need to press all three again
to like reorient yourself. You don't have to press it,
but it's there if you need to. And so basically
you're walking through like a string of nodes that will
bring you all the way through the game, that will
bring you to every single objective, every single encounter.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
All that.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Then there's a screenered aspect. The Last of Us has
a fully fledged screen reads everything in the game touch
and then there's sound cues, and there are sound cues
for different types of enemies. If you hold down R
one and then you can press circle scan for items,
square to scan for enemies, and it sends out basically
(24:18):
like this sort of like sonar wave, like this sort
of like sound, and then it will play a sound
if there's an enemy or if there's an item, and
you can kind of gauge how far that item is
and like what direction it's in, and then you can
press a button and it'll help guide you to that item.
(24:38):
Check this out.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
One half rag rag sweet.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
And so like through all these things it's able to
kind of form this picture and allow us to navigate.
And then through combat, if you're aiming your gun, there's
a sound que that plays for if you're aiming at
their body, and then like a higher pitch down to
show that you're aiming at their head.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
You can headshot without see it.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Wow oh yeah yeah, like and like that's so satisfying,
And the thing is like there's amosis. Yeah, but you
know that's the thing about accessibilities that you can customize
it to your liking, and so you know, I don't
like my game to play itself for me, right, So,
like I don't have the amasis like set the max
or whatever, and even if I did, it still doesn't
just do everything for you. You still have to try for
(25:29):
the headshot, and so like it's very satisfying like when
I'm able to pull it off, and it's very frustrating
when I miss and die, you know, Like that's that's cool.
Like I want that experience, the both good and the bad.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
That's the point of video game.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, that's the point of video games. I have this
clip where it was the first time I was playing
The Last of Us. It was like the tutorial section
and I was fighting five infected at once, and literally
I was like dodging and weaving throughout all of their
attacks because there is a sound cue when I need
to dodge, and like I literally took on the five
(26:02):
infected hand to hand combat. It was really cool to
be able to do because like, while I'm playing, I'm
not speaking out all. I'm just like completely locked in
and focused. That's what it should look like when I'm
playing and enjoying a game. And it was just like
really really cool.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
The Last of Us Part two and the inclusion of
features for blind and low vision people is a success
on two levels. First off, the features actually work, which
means that there's a group of people who will now
buy the game. This is a small group, sure, but
from what I've heard, when a disabled game where finds
a video game that they can actually play, they will
put money down Deluxe version, sign them up DLC. If
(26:43):
it's playable, they're on it re release on a new system,
they'll probably buy that too. But also announcing that your
game is accessible is always good press for a game,
and it might even nudge an able bodied player to
buy the game just because they're curious and it seems interesting.
But we got to go back to those fundamentals. Do
those accessibility features actually work? And sometimes the answer is
(27:07):
kind of so.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
God of War Ragdrock, It's got a lot of accessibility
features similar to lots of us, you know, screen reader, navasists,
combat assistance, but all of it across the board is
like very half baked, and like that's not to discredit
a hard work that people probably already did at the studio,
but it's just it's true. It's the perfect example of
(27:29):
what a half bag game looks like because like the
navasist works great most of the time, except if you
come across a puzzle, then it suddenly you are completely
like stonewalled from a game unless someone helps you. Or
combat assistance is great in that, like there's dodge cues,
there's block cues, and there's pery cues, but they don't
play for every type of enemy, and they're not timed
(27:50):
the best. And then like there's a screen reader, but
you can't read the skill menu and you can't read
the armory menu. You know, probably the most two important
menus in the entire game you can't read. And it's
such a shame because I enjoy playing the game a lot,
Like the combat is so fun, but I still haven't
been it because like it's very tedious to get through.
When the systems work, you could see it work, but
(28:13):
then you can see immediately like when there's friction, and
like it just comes to a grinding halt.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Unfortunately, this is a problem that a lot of games
that have accessibility features end up running into and a
lot of the time it's because that accessibility was added
late in the development of the game, too late for
the features to be really integrated. Instead, these features are
added in piecemeal or as a layer on top.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
A common example that people use in the game accessibility
space is like baking a blueberry muffin and the blueberries
are the accessibility. So you don't bake the entire muffin
and then put the blueberries in after you bake the muffin,
because then you got to like rip out pieces, you
got to put the blueberries in and cover them back up.
You know, it's like, it doesn't make sense. I suppose
(29:01):
it's just building it or baking it from the ground up.
It's just a much more mature mindset that people are
having with accessibility now, where they realize they need to
implement it at the same time as they're implementing everything
else and not making an afterthought.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
So there's something I noticed about how you and a
lot of other blind people that I see when they
talk about games. How you talk about games is when
there's a criticism of a game, it's usually very gentle. Yeah,
which this is something that I'm not used to in
gamer circles because you know how gamers get. It's like
(29:37):
a pixel is ever so slightly at a place, or
a game has a slightly longer load time than you
would want and it's just these devs are lazy. I
hate all these people who made it. What are they doing?
I want my money back. What I've seen from blind
gamers and other people who are in this space is
when there's a criticism of a game, it's very light. Yeah,
(29:58):
and it's very charitable.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, that's pretty much because there's something like any minority
will get is not just a disabled thing. And it's
like the concept of you have to show that you're
grateful or else you're not going to get opportunities. You
can't be too opinionated, or else you'll seem ungrateful. At
the end of the day, we all just want to
(30:21):
play video games the disabled community, and it's very fragile,
like the relationship that gamers have with developers and studios.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
And this brings us to another reality, the fact that
even though Ross and other consultants have worked on some
pretty big games, they often still don't make a living
wage from it. A lot of the time they just
got to take what they can.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
I'm very transparent with how much this kind of work
pace because I just think it matters, because I get
a bunch of blind people saying like this is such
a cool job, Like, how'd you get into it? I
want to do it, and I always tell them I'm like,
first off, it's a grind. Second, I'm on Social Security still,
Like that's how little I make Right now? The budget
for paying for game accessibility consultants is at an all
(31:07):
time low. There were going to be some games I
was going to work on that ended up being closed
or shut down or whatever. It's rough. It's why I'm
going back to college to finish my bachelords because I
don't want to put all my eggs in one basket.
It's why I do audience scription narration on the side.
It's why I do social media on the side, just
to like have different revenue streams because the industry has
made a lot of progress, but it's still got a
(31:28):
lot of work to do.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Ross right now is as close to living his dream
as he's ever been. He's helping to make video games
accessible for players like him, but the industry isn't taking
that seriously enough that he can rely on his work
for his livelihood. But he's still passionate about this project
and he knows that this is a path that he
wants to take. He even has a tattoo to prove it.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
This is the Garrettos tattoo. So when I was a
Paralympic swimmer, I was training full time at the Olympic
Training Center and I got the tattoo because I mean
I was nineteen nine one tattoos, I was able to
get him. And then I also wanted something.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Cool, right forgot to mention on top of everything else.
Ross is also a world class athlete. When I first
talked to him, he was training as a Paralympic swimmer
for the twenty twenty Games of Japan. And if you're
not familiar with Garo Dos, it's this big water dragon
looking thing that wraps around his right bicep, and it
makes sense. It's a water type Pokemon, so like a
(32:27):
powerful swimmer. And he was where a lot of people
would assume that he'd want to be, but it just
wasn't really his dream.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
I retired from the Paralympics, retired early and didn't go
to Japan, and I realized, like that, the tattoo just
has like a new meeting. Now it's really about what
games me to me, what Pokemon means to me. Pokemon
was like where it really started, you know, that's why
I have it now, and I'm kind of glad that
(32:56):
it took on that meaning because I think it's just
like a lot more true to who I am when
you go blind in the way that I have people
say that you're a miracle, or that you're strong or
that you're going to do great things because you survived
a gunshot or because you're living your life blind. And
(33:19):
it's like, okay, but I don't have a choice to
live my life blind. But growing up, all that was
like kind of like instilled in me, and not in
a good way. Hmmm, what do you mean, Well, just
the feeling of like I need to do something great
because of what happened to me, as opposed to just
(33:39):
living my life. And so that was the difference between
the Paralympics and gaming scessibility, because like the Paralympics, you know,
all my life I have people say like, oh, you're
great at swimming. You should go all the way to
the top, all the way to the Paralympics. And then
in my mind, I'm like, yeah, like this, I'm gonna
do great and I'm gonna win medals and hire people
(34:00):
because I felt like that was my mission to inspire people.
But with game accessibility is like I can do something
great that I also actually care about.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
The gaming industry still has a long way to go,
but Ross, along with other accessibility consultants and advocates, are
working hard to make this medium playable for all abilities.
The dream would be that one day Ross could walk
up to the shelf, pull any game down and just
play it, and that any other gamer could also, even
if they're blind or deaf or have difficulty holding the
(34:32):
controller in the way that I hold it. But you know,
first things first, he's still thinking about that dream that
he had back in twenty eleven. You mentioned Skyrim? What
would it take for you to play Skyrim?
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Pretty much the same features that exist in the Loss
of Us. The only one I would really like modifies
like the navigation system to make it more dynamic as
seat of linear, because that's kind of what you have
to do in general for an open world game is
find a way to allow the player to go wherever
they want, whenever they want, not where you think they
want to go, or not in like one set path,
(35:06):
because that's like what the Loss of Us does right now.
That's all it would take, you know, one day if
they ever like re remaster it or whatever, maybe they'll
watch them reach out to me or something and help
make it accessible, because like, like that is that is
the game for me.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
So if there's any developers out there, Ross's info is
in the show notes or actually I'll just tell you
right now, Rossminder dot com High Ladder. But in the meantime,
I do happen to know some people who are working
on something that can make accessibility like this a little
easier to implement. We'll get into that in part two
of this episode, which comes out later this week. Thank
you so much for listening to kill Switch. If you
(35:48):
want to talk, we're here at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope
dot NYC, or on Instagram at kill switch pod and
wherever you happen to be listening to this, leave us
a review. It helps other people find the show, which
helps us keep doing our thing. Killswitch is hosted by
Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Shina Ozaki, Darluck Potts,
and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by me and
(36:10):
Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show from Kaleidoscope.
Our executive producers are Ozma lashin On, Gesh Hajikador and
Kate Osbourne from iHeart Our executive producers are Katrina Norvil
and Nikki E.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Tour.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Also, Killswitch is now on YouTube. We're starting to put
some of our episodes on there, so if you want
the experience with the visuals, like seeing what these anime
girl YouTuber concerts from a few episodes ago look like,
the link to that is in the show notes. And
one more thing, I mentioned that I wrote about Ross
Minor for Wired magazine, so there's some details in there
that we just didn't have time to get into in
(36:45):
this podcast, like what happened when we tried to go
get pizza, especially on the way home, So if you
want to check that one out, the link to that
is in the show notes. Anyway, catch on the next one,
(37:08):
well along, good Bye,
kill switch News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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