It really is sad.
What I'm not clear on is this: is Stern blind or does is have a visual processing impairment? Often functionally they're about the same but are seen as different technically because with the latter you might have good acuity but are not able to understand any of it.
MMOs aren't easy even for a mid-high partial like me. I've never tried EQ2 so I can't talk about it specifically.
I really wanted to be able to play WoW and CoH to play with my sighted partner. There are great games for blind people out there but he's a very visually oriented Aspie so I gave it a shot. I document some of experiences and what I've learned over at http://wow4partials.wordpress.com/.
I'd hate to think that Blizzard or NCSoft might be looking at that worrying if I'm going to sue. I just want to make the most of what's there. It won't always work and it will probably be hard. However, I wouldn't feel right about making everyone play games that I'm able to play. Even if it were possible to program a game that worked for everyone and that everyone would find enjoyable and challenging I can't imagine that I'd ever be able to afford it because it would take so many different options that in some cases would conflict.

Is he a lawyer? I thought I remembered the name of his legal representation being slightly different in the original filed petition, so I always assumed it was a relative.

The most telling part of this for me, and it was my original thought while reading the article and I found suggestions of it in reading the order, is that this constitutes a significant departure of the definition of a "place of public accommodation." If you read the order, you can see how far it goes in trying to connect the game to ANY actual, PHYSICAL place that would be covered under the ADA, best illustrated by "Plaintiff [has not] progressed as far or as successfully in the video games to provide him with sufficient knowledge of the games to meaningfully interact with fellow video game enthusiasts at the conventions and other events Sony organizes to promote the video games." It doesn't allege that the plaintiff can't access the convention facilities, which would be actionable under the ADA, but that he can't TALK to people at the conventions, which is a BIG stretch in defining a place of public accommodation. I suspect people who can't speak or require a voicebox or a text-to-speech device might get annoyed by that one.

Believe me, I understand how important social interaction is and how isolating a disability can be - however, as someone who played SOE games some years ago, I never went to one of those conventions because who in their right mind wants to go hang out with a bunch of dudes living with their moms who go to Vegas once per year to dress up like Princess Leia in Jabba's Palace?

While I agree in principle and in practice that it is in game developers' best financial, stake/shareholder and business interests to try to make games accessible to as many people as possible, making an MMO accessible for, as one example, the blind would likely be a prohibitively MASSIVE engineering effort which would likely prevent the game from being made.

As such, it seems to me that third-party apps are effectively the way to go. They can be created by teams / companies with significantly reduced operational costs and hopefully offer an application that would allow users to play multiple MMOs via a single app.

Furthermore, without reading the original filing, I'm utterly confused as to the nature of the plaintiff's disability or disabilities - this filing only describes them as "multiple learning disabilities" that "impair ... visual processing abilities." Now, that doesn't sound like blindness to me. I'm pretty sure that even lawyers, who are often given to using FAR more words than necessary, would have said blind in there SOMEWHERE, so this order makes the disability in question sound more like dyslexia, ADD, ADHD or something similar.

In short? The judge made the right call. The order to dismiss makes this seem like a frivolous lawsuit which could have a chilling effect on developers; frankly, I think the plaintiff should have to pay the defense's reasonable legal expenses, normally time, filing fees and court costs. While I think everything should be accessible to as many people as possible within reason, this wasn't reasonable.

And the saddest part of all is that I've dealt with some developers for Sony and worked with them on ideas that actually came to fruition; true, they weren't accessibility issues, but I pointed out to one developer that a new innovation depended exclusively on violence and it had upset my little girl. I didn't ask them to remove the content (I don't think the entire world should be kid-friendly content; that's what parents are for), but I did ask if they could create content which DIDN'T rely on violence and it spawned an entirely new set of ideas for them which, to the best of my knowledge, are still yielding content that every single person who can play the game can participate in, regardless of whether the character has a combat profession.

Obviously, I can't say that my experience extends to everyone there, but the handful of people I dealt with in the engineering and customer service organizations were always top notch and willing to listen. I don't know how this issue was approached initially, but in my personal experience, SOE always welcomed suggestions (even if that didn't change the outcomes of the CU / NGE / etc.).

Btw, from the plaintiff's response to motion to dismiss:

"D‘s Motion to Dismiss (?Mot.?), served on P on Christmas Eve, asserts none of the following in 1) - 5) constitute ?all business establishments of every kind whatsoever? or ?places of public accommodation? as defined by Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 12101, et seq. (?ADA?) and the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, California Civil Code §§ 51, et seq. (?Unruh?) respectively: 1) D, 2) D‘s web site ?sony.com? (where D sells the Products); 3) the many and various brick-and-mortar stores which are licensed by D to sell the Products (?Stores?); 4) The public events operated by D based exclusively on the Products (?Events?); and 5) the Products in their own right as persistent virtual game worlds. On the contrary, D, sony.com, the Products, the Events, and the Stores reside within the broad scope of Unruh. The animating theory of plaintiff‘s ADA claim is that the Products are goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations connected to places of public accommodation (i.e. D, the Stores, and the Events) which are inaccessible to P."

The crux of the argument is that because the items are created and sold and discussed in public places subject to ADA compliance, the things created, sold and discussed in those places must also be subject to ADA compliance. Both the attorney and plaintiff have the same last name; the attorney of record is Andrew Stern, the plaintiff is Alexander Stern. Still looking for the actual filing to try to figure out what the actual disability / diagnosis of disability is.

Furthermore, there's a fascinating claim in this filing:

"P was and is deterred from using the Products he already owns or visiting Stores or otherwise to buy Products."

In short, the difficulty the plaintiff encounter discouraged him from going to, say, Best Buy, to buy more stuff for something he had difficulty encountering. There's no claim that he had difficulty getting into the store (which is an actual place of public accommodation covered by the ADA), but that he didn't want to to go to the store because he wanted to throw more money at a game that he already had problems playing.

I don't mean the above comment to be disrespectful in any way, but my understanding of the ADA is that it legally mandates access - in my time as a consultant, I focused on accessibility in, among other areas, home builder Web sites because it is essential information and this was back in the days when most people weren't aware of sight readers and ALT tags and what an image-based Web site looked like in Lynx. All it took to raise consciousness was showing people their Web site in a browser and then showing them what their Web site "looked" like to the blind and explaining how easy it was to make it accessible. Every person I talked to was shocked and they seemed more than a little embarrassed, and every last one of them fixed that IMMEDIATELY, even while site redevelopment was occurring.

That, as one example, is clearly an accessibility issue related to basic living - everyone needs shelter and excluding any ability level from any type of access to that is clearly problematic for ADA compliance.

However, this? This sounds like the sort of thing that makes people dislike attorneys; it's telling that I've found all sorts of allegations about the plaintiff's disability and assertions that the plaintiff received ADA accommodations for every scholastic level up to and including college at the time of the filing, but - despite the filing noting extensive medical tests documenting the disability as recently as a year ago - not one medical diagnosis or direct explanation of what the plaintiff's disability is.

If someone has a link to a court filing that clearly defines what the disability is, please let me know.

And, above all else, I'm not trying to say that the plaintiff isn't disabled or shouldn't want access to games; my point is that, first and foremost, the filings use a substantially overly broad definition of place of public accommodation which, to the best of my knowledge, is not supported by any precedent or law currently in force anywhere in the United States, and that would set a dangerous precedent that would establish a chilling effect on development efforts not just for game developers. Yes, people should try to make things more accessible - this? This would shut down a LOT of efforts ... and not just in computer gaming.