Comment I'm blind myself (Score 2, Informative) 213
OK, as a blind person myself, let me try and address these questions.
- games for the blind
There are actually quite a few games out there that the blind can play. Most of them are specially designed for us. For more information, I'd dirrect you to some of the manufacturers. For something that's a little closer to what the original poster was looking for, check out this, this is the closest to a virtual world we have. The majority of these games are actually pretty good considering the size of the development staff for them.
- open source software
Unfortunately, accessibility is not high on the priority lists of many of the open source projects out there. Even if it were, I am not sure a huge number of blind people would switch. I'm sure us blind techies would look at the software just like anyone else, but you'd have a much bigger problem getting your blind grandmother to switch than your sighted grandmother. The reasons for this are extreemly complicated, and get into basic issues of how blind people look at technology in general. Most, however, beleive that Microsoft solutions work for them, and unless an open source solution can offer them something really compelling, and I mean to them specifically, they won't see a need to switch. As a result, most of the adaptive technology vendors do not see it worth their time to provide support for open source software at this point. Adaptive software vendors are concentrating on software a blind person would use in an employment situation, and for most work environments, Microsoft is it. Remember most blind people are not in IT related jobs, and those that are many times role their own solution. Also from my experience, your average IT person is really scared of putting adaptive software on their network. All of that said, there are some small efforts. The biggest example is the Window-Eyes screen reader, which as of 5.0 will offer support for the Mozilla Suite (NOT FIRE FOX)
- MP3 players
For all the wonderful things I've heard about the IPOD, unfortunately its useless for the blind. There are some MP3 players out there that would work, however. One interesting product is a device called the Book Courier, which not only plays MP3 files, but also reads text and Microsoft Word files. The Book Courier will also play content from Audible, a service which sells audio books online, much like the many music download services. Unfortunately, only a limited number of MP3 players support this service. I do not know if the IPOD is one of them.
Honestly, from my perspective, the adaptive technology world is several years behind the mainstream world. The reasons are rather obvious, but still I consider the situation pretty sad. Adaptive Technology is a pretty small, but in my view largely untapped, nitch that has a lot of room for improvement.