Latest Street Fighter 5 patch is unplayable for blind gamers as a result of changing the sound from stereo to mono
Capcom's Street Fighter series is often praised by blind gamers for the sound design. Even in Street Fighter 5, blind gamers are able to have a good awareness of what's happening during a match by simply listening to the sound effects.
Unfortunately, Capcom's latest patch for the game has undone this as a result of the sound changing from stereo to mono. This has effectively made the game unplayable for blind gamers.
Stereo sound is played back to the listener using two audio channels whereas mono sound only uses a single audio channel. During gameplay, a blind gamer is able to locate where a sound in coming from based on whether it came from the left or right earphone. In other words, stereo sound can offer a perception of depth that mono cannot.
"Please, @streetfighter, @capcomfighters or anybody else at Capcom, I just installed the new patch on my pc, went to training mode and discovered that all character sound effects like attacks, hits, jumps, block, voices etc. are mono (centered)," said BlindWarriorSven on Twitter.
BlindWarriorSven is actually a competitive blind player that's managed to win some matches during Capcom Pro Tour tournaments.
"Half of the people I play Street Fighter with are blind. None of them are able to play the f---ing game because the update broke the game audio and made audio cue mono for some reason," said YawnieChan on Twitter. "Please retweet this post so I can get back to beating up my disabled friends."
"I play Street Fighter 5 with a lot of blind people and the new update has made all game sounds mono, which makes it impossible to tell the spacing through audio queues," said Torpedo Johnson. "If not fixed, this would hurt all sightless players greatly. Capcom needs to fix this ASAP. This is a huge step backwards for accessibility in videogames and makes it so countless great sightless players can’t play the game anymore. Make the game sounds stereo again!"
More than likely, something was done about the sound that had this unintentional effect. Here's hoping that Capcom is able to release an emergency patch that returns the game to a state where it can be played by blind gamers.
