Aliasalpha: Or communicate electronically over long distances...

ZamFear: If we were meant to do that we would have been born with on-board modems!

akwater: My statement was to point out the fact that ONE person is never going to be able to do the SAME exact things that another person is able to do.

Wraith: I, personally, think that blind people need to accept that there are certain things they cannot do.

Aliasalpha: So what, you're playing guitar hero metallica and rocking out to... say One and you hear a tonal beep before the button you have to press which overrides the music? Wouldn't that kind of defeat the point?

DarrkPhoenix: However, it's important to realize that as the blind constitute only a small portion of the videogame market this niche market is probably going to be about the extent of what is economically sensible for companies to do.

chaotix: Now that wasn't so hard was it? Blizzard added options for color blind players to show item rarity in text instead of color. Little things can go a long way.

einexile: But none of us has to accept that this must render them unable to participate, or otherwise separate them from their culture. There is certainly a way to do it. What's lacking is enthusiasm, and that no doubt stems in part from the commonly accepted notion that the problem can never be addressed.
Sound games don't have to be visual. In Parappa the Rapper, for instance, you couldn't really excel solely by following the visual cues. You also had to respond to the actual song. I very much doubt a deaf person ever got U Rappin' Cool in that game. And think of all the games you've played where the sound cues aren't accurate. Most explosion sounds in games wouldn't scare someone walking down the street. That tearing sound you hear when some rogue sneaks up on you would normally send you running for help on the assumption you would bleed to death even after defeating him. A rhythm game *can* be just about what you're hearing in the song. You also seem to be forgetting about controller vibration and other force feedback.
It doesn't have to be a niche market. The trick is to make it something sighted players can also enjoy. The best way to do this is probably by adding blind gameplay into cooperative multiplayer as a class or other specialized role. For example, if your character in an MMO could be bound to another player like an NPC henchman, I see no reason the role of a healer couldn't be undertaken without the benefit of visuals. The information can be delivered to the player, and the player can respond to it. It's all a matter of how, and then balancing it for reasonable challenge and experimenting with new ways to integrate someone with a disability into the culture of a game. Of course the best way would probably be to start from scratch.
I suspect it will be Blizzard that finally makes the big step which will welcome sight-impaired people en masse into gaming culture. Lord knows they'll take it from some smaller developer who will never get the credit they deserve, but the end result will still be a good thing.

einexile: It doesn't have to be a niche market. The trick is to make it something sighted players can also enjoy. The best way to do this is probably by adding blind gameplay into cooperative multiplayer as a class or other specialized role. For example, if your character in an MMO could be bound to another player like an NPC henchman, I see no reason the role of a healer couldn't be undertaken without the benefit of visuals. The information can be delivered to the player, and the player can respond to it. It's all a matter of how, and then balancing it for reasonable challenge and experimenting with new ways to integrate someone with a disability into the culture of a game.

Gundato: I'll admit, I don't play too many MMOs. But I think it might help if the healer can, I don't know, see who they are healing AND see the health bar of those people.

Gundato: Your suggestion is, if anything, insanely boring (and possibly offensive). Your solution is that they don't move around (just auto-follow) and would essentially be a glorified voice-comm macro ("Heal player 4!").

DarrkPhoenix: But would the increased revenue brought in by blind people playing the game offset the cost of implementing this feature? Unless it does it simply isn't sensible for a company to implement such a feature in their games.

akwater: Like I said before until people express their desires all a company can do is take a stab at it and maybe appease some people.....

einexile: You are talking about games as they are currently set up. By this logic a deaf person would not be able to heal because they can't hear how hard other players are hit, how much pain they are in, or what types of wounds have been inflicted on them.
Of course a blind person would benefit from being able to see other players and what's happening to them. That's the whole reason this thread exists. The question is can games be set up for that not always to matter so much? Of course they can, and it doesn't boil down to somebody barking orders. The gameplay would have to be based around sound and touch.
For example, if you used a gamepad, teammates could be represented by tones or bound to specific buttons depending on how aggravating the player finds cycling through these tones, with conditions represented by more textured sounds, chords, maybe even drumbeats. Gamepad vibration isn't going to be quite as useful, but that's because the gamepad is designed mainly to rumble when the screen shakes. A more complex controller could provide better information, but in the meantime it can still indicate something. At a minimum it can alert you to conditions affecting the selected teammate, or to which teammate not selected requires your attention. (I'm sure that's not thrilling to some, but the reason so many multiplayer games get away with looking like ass is many of us enjoy them mainly for the interaction with other people.)
This can all happen very quickly, but there's no reason such encounters can't be paced with the limitations of a disabled player in mind. Other factors can keep the tension up for everyone else, and MMOs are already designed so that players desiring different levels of excitement or challenge can be part of the same event.
By comparison to what we're talking about, people's sensibilities aren't important. They are not relevant to a serious discussion about disabilities and multiplayer gaming. If carrying my blind friend around in a backpack causes you some sort of bugaboo, and you find yourself lamenting their lost dignity, that will be just fine.
Yes, of course it's offensive. But who's going to notice? Not anyone who enjoys it, and not anyone who isn't interested in the game. Certainly it will make someone - somewhere - uncomfortable who isn't in the position of being excluded from an activity because of a disability. Heaven forbid our conscience be plagued by subtext while observing somebody else enjoying themselves.
One of the joys of multiplayer gaming is having another person drive you around while you operate from a stationary position. If having to do this all the time makes somebody sad, that's easily countered. The first thing that comes to mind is permitting the riding player to switch between drivers at will. The reason I mentioned the healer specifically is that the role is often accused of not being mobile, and putting the player physically outside the action. I imagine there are dozens of other solutions I haven't thought of, but you're probably not going to solve the mobility problem without some kind of a tingling body suit. It is simply going to be much more difficult to give a blind person a sense of his surroundings in a 2D medium than it will be to give him a sense of more abstract factors like hit points, buffs management, aggro, and that sort of thing.
Until stockholders are in a position to shut down individual features of specific games before they can be implemented, developers will continue to occasionally put things in their games simply because they want to. Case in point, Anarchy Online *yesterday* implemented a mail system. Was that really necessary? Of course not. Is the game making any money at all? Shadowbane wasn't. Not for the year or so after it lost its last advertiser. As near as anyone can tell, it just kept going because somebody up there liked it. Or sure, there's a customer goodwill element to all this, and you can fairly look at it as a way to keep customers happy and then somewhere down the road lies a bit of money, but that's not so different from what we're discussing here.

Gundato: To be fair, fighting games are actually VERY accessible. If you actually watch one of the many blind people who play those, they essentially do something along the lines of the following
Punch the air (maybe advancing a few steps) until you hear a hit sound. Then just pop up a crapload of combos that involve juggling.
Obviously this goes out the window for any fighting games with 3d arenas (since you can flank) and hinges upon combos allowing for juggling.

Aliasalpha: What, wheelchair football isn't an option? Sure you might not be able to do those cool sliding tackle things but you know for a fact if a guy goes down and can't get up that he actually MEANS it and isn't wasting time trying to cheat out a penalty

Aliasalpha: Doesn't alter the fact that major publishers releasing a blind-friendly game has less of a probability than kylie minogue turning up on my doorstep with nothing on but lingerie and a cheeky smile