Jeff Kaplan says Blizzard “wants to do a better job” in making Overwatch League more accessible

Blizzard vice president Jeff Kaplan says the studio “wants to do a better job” on making the Overwatch League accessible for viewers. In an interview with our sister site The Loadout, the dev says the company has a group called User Research that has “put an entire focus on creating [...] Blizzard accessibility guidelines”, and worked hard on addressing a range of accessibility-related aspects, such as vision and hearing impairments, and colour blindness. However, Kaplan says realising there’s some room to improve in relation to OWL broadcasts gives the studio “something to focus on”. The interview, which Kaplan gave alongside Blizzard president J. Allen Brack, comes after The Loadout spoke to London Spitfire supporters’ group Hangar 9, whose founder Cameron Akitt has developed his own version of Overwatch sign language to help hard of hearing fans enjoy OWL broadcasts. Akkit believes that OWL could be “a lot more inclusive” by employing knowledgeable transcribers to write captions, rather than relying on AI to convey game-specific terminology. “To try and explain the game we had to create our own vocabulary which didn’t exist,” Akitt told The Loadout. “So we have to kind of set up base concepts and, you know, look at pictures of the heroes to give it visual context. Through my conversations with [Akkit’s deaf housemate] about the game, and all the fun that I was having, the lexicon of new signs were being put together.”
Syndicated from here: Jeff Kaplan says Blizzard “wants to do a better job” in making Overwatch League more accessible