Mark Barlet's motivation for founding AbleGamers.com came while watching his best friend (Stephanie Walker) of nearly 20 years suffer through incredible amounts of frustration. Stephanie had recently been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, and though she had been an avid gamer, her illness forced her to abandon the games that brought her joy. Mark set off to find answers for her, to get her back into the game, but the search yielded few answers, and a lot more questions. Seeing a void, Mark set out to fill it, and help others.
Disabled himself after sustaining a spinal cord injury, leaving him with some demised use of his left leg, while on active duty in the Air Force, Mark could relate to hitting limitations, and thus, AbleGamers was born.
Mark's day job is working as the Quality Assurance and Business Analyst Manager at SallieMae. In his years of working in the Washington DC area, Mark became a thought leader in compliance and 508 testing (law about how Disabled people interact with government's public information, like websites). Mark has a Masters in Information Systems with 15 years in software quality assurance. Mark has been lead on major development efforts for the United States government, major online retailers and international web operation.
Stephanie Walker became part of AbleGamers.com because she is a disabled gamer. She went to work on an ordinary day in December of 1999 and in the span of four hours, she became completely paralyzed along her right side. The doctors diagnosed her with the relapsing/remitting form of Multiple Sclerosis. Though most of the feeling and strength never returned, within about six months she recovered some use of her right side. Since then, she has lived in a fairly constant state of changing disability.
These days you will find Stephanie spending her time with a few different volunteer groups. An Air Force wife of 13 years, she has also spent the last several years raising a very loving and mischievous daughter. She is hoping to eventually finish college before her daughter does. She was only three classes short of her degree when she got sick. Her abilities and priorities have changed though. When she does finally get a chance to return to school, her goal is a masters in healthcare administration. It is Stephanie’s ultimate desire to run her own nursing home or hospice.
Stephanie's gaming predates her illness and she remembers all too well what it was like when she tried to get back into gaming after becoming disabled. Back then, there weren’t very many peripherals to help access games. The games themselves were not very flexible or accommodating to someone who needed to make modifications. There have been some improvements in gaming since then, but Stephanie knows better things can be done. She comes to Ablegamers with the hope that we can make a difference if we let ourselves be heard. Gaming is fun that should be accessible to everyone.
Steven Spohn is a 20-something disabled gamer. He is currently an Information Technology/Visual Communications major at the University of Phoenix. He has contributed to several local businesses and organizations such as Tech-Link with writing brochures and articles. Steven was a speaker to Pittsburgh based companies on the need for technology to aid the disabled workforce. He has been featured in local papers as a standout with a rare type of Muscular Dystrophy, SMA. Spinal Muscular Atrophy is a progressive disease, which weakens muscles impairing motor functions.
Steven has been playing computer games since age 6. He received an assistant engineer certification from Parkway-West Vocational Technical School for auto-CAD design. He interned for HERL, Human Engineering Research Laboratory, in Pittsburgh, PA. He was involved with Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. First Robotics competition for 3 years as co-lead blueprint designer, robot driver, and team member. He hopes to serve the disabled community with informative articles on games, technology, and accessibility.
Michelle is the Chair of the IGDA Game Accessibility Special Interest Group, a game industry advocacy group for creating mainstream games accessible to gamers with disabilities. She is involved with GameAccessibility.com, a game accessibility project funded by the Bartiméus Accessibility Foundation, and is the Vice-President of the Game Division of DonationCoder.com.
Hinn has a bachelor's degree in music performance, a bachelor's degree in psychology, a master of arts degree in multimedia design from Virginia Tech, and is completing her Ph.D. in human-computer interaction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Hinn's experience includes work at Microsoft Game Studios, where she focused on piloting usability tests for Xbox multiplayer games and ran playtests on Xbox games such as Halo: Combat Evolved, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, Fuzion Frenzy, and Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding. Additionally, she has worked for Computer Sciences Corporation, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the University of Nevada, Reno.
Tim Donaghy is a podcaster, gamer, and social critic with a passion or the absurdities of daily life. As a quadriplegic, he became aware of AbleGamers while searching for products he could use to expand his ability to play games. After many conversations with Mark he was brought onto the staff as the Hardware Writer.
Tim's strong personality shines through in everything he does, whether it's writing a hardware review or recording an episode of The Dead Air podcast, which he started in 2003 as a streaming radio show, and continued as a podcast with a group of close friends, gaining an international audience and failing to strike it rich.
Corey Krull is an avid gamer, web designer, tech junkie and all-around geek. He is an old school gamer and has many years of gaming experience. Corey was born with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and after losing the ability to use a conventional controller, He has had to find other ways to play the games that he loves. Corey has been researching different types of accessible devices to make gaming easier for him (Also, to help him stay competitive). Along the way he began to notice that there was a need for accessible gaming. Ever since then, Corey has devoted his time spreading the word about this very important issue.
Corey’s life revolves in and around games. His favorite type of game genres are First-Person Shooters, RPG’s and Racing but will try any game once. Corey enjoys playing mostly on the PC.
Barrie has a passion for accessible gaming that began in 1994 when working at a "Special Care Unit" day centre for adults. There he met some wonderful people some of whom were considered profoundly physically and mentally disabled. Here he learnt about assistive technology and of the benefits it can bring given the right support. Being able to offer people a way to better express themselves, make choices, take control and have fun became a mission.
In 1995 Barrie built his first accessibility switch interface for a Commodore 64 alongside some (slightly ropey) one-switch utilities. The next year he built a versatile accessible interface for the Playstation.
Years later, wishing to share these ideas and more with the world, Barrie launched OneSwitch.org.uk in 2003. To this day he promotes game accessibility and is a long term supporter of anyone doing the same. He remains ever hopeful that the games industry will one day recognise just how diverse their gaming public is and then do the right thing. Make their games much more accessible.
Annette is a gamer from The Windy City with a passion for writing. She came across AbleGamers while working with her video game design professor on accessibility projects at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During Annette's undergrad years at UIUC, she wrote video game reviews and previews for campus publications and interned for several Chicago-based magazines. These days she is a proposal writer for a major office products supplier as well as a freelance writer.
Beau is a gamer from Dallas, Texas where he lives with his two dogs, two cats and a bearded dragon named Ony. Him and his wife Leala host a podcast called Spouse Aggro which concentrates on the everyday happenings of a couple that happen to be nerds.
