Apple Arcade: is it a good time to ask Apple to encourage game developers to improve gaming accessibility?

I honestly don't know. Apple's commitment to accessibility appears to be wavering. Look at the poor state of VoiceOver on macOS as an example. It certainly can't hurt to suggest it, and I'll do it myself. The cynical part of me says "Why would they care about third parties when they can't invest the time and effort to make their own products more accessible?"

This reminds me very much of Microsoft. Microsoft gave people the tools to make their games more accessible on the Xbox, but aside from EA making improvements to their sport games, I've heard nothing else from other companies. The sad thing is that these tools have ben out for about a year and a half now.

Having said all that, it would be cool if the pioneer of mainstream accessibility promoted the development of accessible games. Maybe more people would start paying attention if a company like Apple got behind this.

Well, how big is their accessibility team? I know this isn't in the right topic, but... maybe they're focusing on other things right now and the Mac side won't probably get a big accessibility boost until a later release. Who knows? I'll be sticking with MacOS X until something really goes die, then probably switch, but for the time being... It's working fine on my side. The arcade idea seems cool, but won't have any interesting titles. or at least, that's my view right now.

Hello everyone! I love to play games on my iphone, and I do not see why we can't.

I like this idea. I must admit I've not played that many games on my Mac or iPhone. As a matter of fact I don't believe I've played any on my iPhone. But having said that, I'd love to see more accessible games and hopefully I'll eventually have the time to actually sit down and play them. I, too, don't see a need to abandon Apple products at this time. My mid-2013 MBA is still holding up very well. I just got my first i-device last year and am still learning, but have been super impressed thus far and wouldn't change a thing.

Game developers aren't obligated to make their games accessible, as nice as that would be.

I think the best we can hope for is to have something like google did and have a filter, but then one game may be accessible to some, but not playable for others.

Indie companies like choice of games would probably not even be listed, since they're not really arcade.

Who knows, I could be wrong, and you would probably need to be a pretty big company to even coap with the amount apple will charge for these developers to be listed in the arcade in the first place.

In other words, I doubt you'll be seeing small audiogame companies list their games there.

After seeing what happened to the developers of Gold Gun, I don't think we are really in a position to demand developers to make their games accessible. I am still sad about those people out there attacking a developer who tried to make something good for us. If we are constantly attacking developers who try to make their games accessible, how can we have the nerve to demand developers to make their games accessible? Just saying.

As i see it, you most likely won’t get many results within a short timeframe, but the accessibility of Apple Arcade games will probably be added on to a list of things Apple will work on if it’s mentioned. As previous people said, the mainstream developers (Epic Games for instance), might think it isn’t worthwhile adapting their already very successful games for a very small, notoriously critical and hard-to-please market, but it’s worth a try, in any case.

Sounds like the typical canned response.

I wouldn't hold my breath, not for such a small minority.

I did a similar thing to what use to be known as BTSync, now known as Resilio Sync and received a similar response.

There's just no way of knowing if they actually take your suggestions into account.

If no one ever tries to advocate for progress, it will never happen.
The key is communication that is grateful, optimistic, and respectful. In other words, indicate gratitude for what's already been done, be optimistic as opposed to demanding, and above all, be respectful in the request. If we all did that, I imagine that at the very least, blind gamers as a community would be in a much better position to ask for what we want and need.
I recently found a 50% accessible browser game, EMailed the developer about it, and he contacted me saying he'd never learned much about screen readers but was happy to try. Within a week, that game is 95% accessible!
So let's go for it!

Not to be necly negative, but a response such as "We'll pass that on to our team," "We will consider it," "We'll pass it on," etc, are usually replies that are not technically always trustworthy.
At least, from my experience, if I get a reply such as the ones mentioned above, most of the time, updates to that app come and go, and there's no sign of anything happening. I'm not saying all devs reply that way, but some may and some may not, instead giving you a detailed reply, like Marty for example, or the developer of Kalyl, an accessible graphing calculator app.
Hope this hasn't sent the vibes back down the hill.

I definitely think Apple should make these games accessible. :-)

I'd be surprised if anything in Apple arcade is accessible, especially since Apple's own just released game isn't. Yeah it's made by another developer, but it has an Apple copyright. A lot of the games Apple arcade will have probably can't be adapted to be accessible. That's just how a lot of popular games are. It's not like a movie where they can just put a descriptive track over the top of it.