Three of the 4 forums I’m active on are dedicated to, for lack of a better term, “low-tech” computer games(and the fourth is dedicated to mechanical puzzles, particularly those where the primary means of manipulating the puzzle is twisting)… This one mostly focuses on text as the primary means of output, one is dedicated primarily to the technical aspects of video games from the 16-bit era, particularly Sega’s hardware and franchises), and one is dedicated to Audio games. Of course, there’s overlap, especially between audio and text, especially from a blind perspective since modern screen readers not call JAWS(and it’s debatable if JAWS can really be called modern as it has legacy code dating back to the Win9x or even DOS days) are generally free whereas Braille displays start at a few hundred and that’s with order of magnitude drops in prices in the last decade or so(building and actuating a grid of 2.5mm diameter pegs that need to be raised and lowered by about 2mm gets really expensive really quick with anything resembling a halfway decent refresh rate and there just aren’t enough Braille literate(the Braille literacy rate among the blind is estimated between 1 and 10%) blind people to drive economies of scale).
But yeah, good sound design can communicate a lot of information efficiently, though sadly, I can’t really point to any good examples off top of my head.
In the context you described, it makes sense that most blind people do not know how to read braille. I looked up numbers from 2020, and it seems like less than 1% of deaf people in the US know sign language. Crazy!
It’s like trying to find a kid who knows how to read and write in cursive these days.
Huh, wasn’t aware sign language had a similar problem, though I suppose it makes sense considering the tech situation, at least from an outside perspective, seems to disfavor sign language even more than the inside view disfavors Braille… After all, I’d argue the Internet is mostly written/visual communication, which isn’t hindered by deafness, subtitles/close captioning is used enough by people with fully functioning eyes and ears to enjoy foreign language media and practically trivial to implement compared to dubbing or descriptive audio, and sign language is really only useful when you have two people who know it interacting, so even a sign fluent person needs a back up when dealing with the general population, and there are tons of low tech and common tech options(flash cards with common words/phrases, pen/pencil and notebook, carrying a portable dry eraseboard, or just typing on a smartphone). Braille might see more use if a 14 or 20 cell display could be had for $30 and braille embossers were price competitive with inkjet printers or if a tablet that replaces the touchscreen with a full page grid of Braille cells cost the same as the touchscreen tablet… but instead, the first price I found googling was right at $700 for a 20-cell display(granted, it was for a device that’s also a book reader and note taker, but those aspects are technically trivial compared to the braille) and the 40-cell version was more than twice the price… There is a tactile display out there that sacrifices proper braille support in favor of having 5 different height levels for each peg and a braille display that has 10 rows of 32 cells each… and they have price tags in the 15-20 thousand range. And for those who don’t know, a modern computer Braille cell is 8 dots in two columns of 4, so 10 rows of 32 cells is basically equivalent to a 6440 dot matrix display(compare a TI-83 graphing calculator at 9664 or the original Game Boy at 160*144)… and we’re talking a large tablet, not something that fits in a decently sized pants pocket… and that’s the cutting edge in tactile display tech.