- [Voiceover] Welcome to TPGi's "Real People, Real Stories" podcast, where you'll find interesting and diverse stories from folks working to make the world a more inclusive place. - Hey, welcome to "Real People, Real Stories" podcast, brought to you by TPGi. I'm your host, Mark Miller, thank you for helping us keep it accessible. Do us a favor, if you're enjoying "Real People, Real Stories" podcast, share it and tell someone about it. Hey, even link to it from your accessible website. So I am here with a very interesting and exciting guest, and I'm really excited to talk to you about one particular thing, which you'll find out in a minute, but my guest today is Brandon Cole, and Brandon Cole does quite a few interesting things and uses assistive technology and alternative access and all that in some super interesting ways. But I'm gonna dive right into what... Well, before I do that, Brandon, tell us a little bit, in your words, about who you are and then I'm gonna save this thing I wanna talk to you about for a few minutes. - Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. So I am Brandon Cole, I am a creature of many hats, as Mark said. I do a lot of things. I'm primarily a professional accessibility consultant, I work in the video game industry. Which is a pretty cool job, let me tell ya. But I'm also a podcaster, a blogger, a streamer of video game content, and even a voice actor on the side, along with the occasional dabble into other things, including audio description narration and more. I do a lot. - That's a list. - It's a list. - That's a heck of a list. - And I love it. I love every minute of it. - I bet you do, I bet you do. So here's what I wanted to dive into, because, I mean, you've led right into it, right? Video game consultant. - Yup. - And it's interesting, let me just go off on a quick tangent here, because I don't know, have you ever been to CSUN, Brandon? - I have not been to CSUN. It's one of the conferences that I think I should go to someday, but I still have not gone to that one yet. - So, for the audience, what CSUN is, and the reason why Brandon knew what it was off the top of his head even though he hasn't been there, is it's the largest assistive technology conference... assistive technology conference in the world, that happens in Anaheim currently every year. And why I brought it up, Brandon, is because I was doing a session or listening to a session at CSUN and I met somebody in that session, it was a woman who was low vision, and we started chatting kind of in the hallway afterwards, and our whole conversation turned to the accessibility of video games. - Ah-hah. - And to what's possible and what's not possible and all that kind of stuff. And this was probably, I'm gonna say over five years ago at this point. But the reason why I bring that up is to illustrate how important it is that we think about accessibility in video games. - Yeah. - And how glad I am that there's a market for somebody like you to consult on video games and that that's being looked at. And I know since I've had that conversation with her, other people were thinking about it too. We thought we were brilliant, right? Like, "They should do all that stuff," we're coming up with ideas. And it turns out, other people were already on it. So there's that. There's been awards given to video games and stuff like that but you put something here, because my son came home for Christmas and he brought with him his video game console that he had had in a closet until God of War Ragnarök came out. He pulled it out of the closet, he plugged it into one of our TVs here, he had the whole week off and I believe came close to completing the campaign, I think he had to finish it a little bit afterwards. But can you talk to me about God of War Ragnarök and the accessibility of it, and just indulge me in my full-on geekness and talk about how just cool the game is, period? - Yeah, 100%. First of all though, I want to say it's funny that you say that conversation with that woman happened about five years ago, because five years ago I probably was working at that time on one of my biggest projects of all time, which was Last of Us Part II. - Like I said, we found out we weren't unique in our thoughts pretty quickly. - Yeah, yeah. - But you know, I'm dealing with web accessibility and the accessibility of applications and all that kind of stuff, so this conversation about gaming was sort of a unique one for me. - It was a different one, yeah. - You know? - Yeah, I totally get that, I totally get that. But God of War. God of War Ragnarök has a ton of accessibility features, and I'm actually really honored to say this, but the majority of the blind accessibility features in that game, are based on my preexisting work for The Last of Us Part II. I did not directly work on the game, but weirdly I also kind of did, because my DNA is all over it. The features I helped design exist in that game as well. So the primary feature that helps the blind complete the game is navigational assist. And what that does is, pressing one button sends out a little ping, that basically does two things. It turns the camera towards your objective, which then also turns the character towards your objective. And then if you just move forward after pressing that button, it's R3 on a PS5 controller. If you just move forward, you'll be walking towards the objective you're supposed to reach to progress the story. That system is not just basic, it turns you towards walls and then you walk into the wall; no, it's actually a smart system, where if you have to complete a puzzle or do a couple of grapples to get to where you need to go to, it will lead you to those so you can get to the actual spot you need to reach. So that's kind of the primary thing, but there's other things too, including screen narration of most menus. I will say that Ragnarök is a little incomplete in this area. Ragnarök does not narrate all of its menus. It does narrate most of them, but doesn't narrate the character menus, like choosing your skills and setting up your gear, and equipping new gear, and things like that. Those things do not narrate. It is a pain point that I have expressed to Sony Santa Monica multiple times, and I'm hoping that they fix it in a future patch, because there is a pretty big patch coming in the spring, and I'm hoping they include some more accessibility fixes in that. But... - Can you talk to me a little bit about, like, just in detail, not having that feature there, how does that kind of disrupt your gameplay? - The problem with not having it, is it puts the blind at a tremendous disadvantage that I do not like. As a consultant myself, I'm trying to create spaces for the blind to be as close to, equal to the sighted as possible in a game. My whole philosophy is I'm not trying to necessarily make an easy mode. I'm actually not saying, "Just make the game easy so we can complete it." I'm okay with a really hard game. But I'm trying to make it so we have the same information and we can play on the same level as a sighted person. - I think that's a great point, if I can just interrupt you. - Sure, sure. - And one of the reasons why, is in the work that we do in talking about accessibility all the time, the concept of equivalency, an equivalent experience, is something that we... Brandon, it's a hard concept, right? For somebody who hasn't - It is - got there and thought about it. And I've been in talks for a business related type website, where they've said, "Oh, that feature's terrible, and nobody uses it anyway, that's why we didn't bother to make it accessible." - Yeah, I get it. - It's like, okay, well then remove it. Or allow people with disabilities to experience how horrible it is too, because the idea, the drive is equivalency, and not making judgments about what we think other people should and should not see- - Or use. - Or use, or have access to or whatever. Anyways, I just wanted to say that's a really good point, and it's something that we see across the board. And I completely got you with the video games. I mean, my video game playing is almost exclusively around first person shooters, and equivalency in that case would be probably hard, it's probably hard. - Yeah, it'd be very difficult. - But even more necessary. - But yeah, I'm one of those people too, when I talk about working on this stuff, and people tell me things like that. Like, "Well man, a first person shooter would be hard." I'd be like, "Still wanna do it, I'd still work on one." - Yeah, still, it's gotta be done. - Like, I still wanna make that happen for people. I set my goals, my career goals are genre-based. So that's how I've been thinking. I started adopting this pretty early on. So when I worked on The Last of Us 2 I said okay, I did it, I gave people an action adventure that's fully accessible. Now I wanna give people a first person shooter. Now I wanna give people a giant 300 hour role playing game. Now I wanna give people an MMO. You know, these are the things that I wanna do. - So what about first person shooter online? Like where they're playing against other people. Have you dug into that one at all? - It is a conversation I've had many times but I haven't worked on one just yet. But again, I want to, because the challenge of making that work is something that I wanna overcome, and I want to find a way. It is a very difficult concept, because you have to figure out how you can make something accessible that is incredibly fast-paced and incredibly reactive, but also not make it unfair to the sighted or vice versa, you know? - Because you're essentially, I mean I think a lot of the salt of that is essentially what sighted people would consider to be cheats, right? Like, oh here's an aim bot, this is gonna aim for you. You know? Obviously if you're blind you can't visually aim like a sighted person can. So you've gotta have some method to do that. - I have ideas, I have ideas to kind of get around that idea, but it kind of doesn't matter. The internet is the internet, unfortunately, and there are people who look at what I did with The Last of Us 2, a single player game where you're not competing against anybody, and they make fun of it because they call it cheating. - Yeah. - There are entire videos- - Do you feel comfortable sharing some of your thoughts on, like, how you would solve the first person online? - Yeah, so one of the ideas I had is kind of based loosely on the concepts that audio games created. So there's a lot of games out there that are only audio. Games that are made just for the blind, by the blind usually. - Great, yeah. - And some of them have come up with some pretty cool concepts for things like this. Like aiming, for instance. What I would come up with is a system where the player would have to be facing in kind of a 360 degree general direction. They would have to generally be facing their opponent. And when they pressed aim, it would not necessarily auto-aim, but it would provide them a sound that would orient them towards their opponent if their opponent wasn't already making sound. Like, because, in games these days, every enemy makes a significant amount of noise, you know? So if their opponent wasn't making any particular sound, they would be oriented by this sound that would play for them. It could potentially be positional. So like if the enemy was to their left, the sound would be coming from your left, so you'd turn in that direction. You could also use pitch to kind of ensure they get a real lock right on the center of them. And then once they've centered on that enemy, once they've found the center position where they're facing their correct direction, only then does the game actually help them with the vertical aspect. Because right now, where we are right now with audio technology, some developers are trying to use 3D audio to indicate verticality, but it's just not quite there yet. So the way that I would handle it with today's technology, would just be that you use a sound to locate the center, to center an enemy, and only then would the game help you aim by helping with the vertical part. As long as you were locked on to the center. - Gotcha. So I'm just gonna restate this to make sure I'm understanding it right. Because what I find interesting is the capabilities of sound. Basically what you're saying is today what we're working with is a stereo sound, which by nature can orient you horizontally, left to right, you can hear something to be like, "Oh, that's further to my left or further to my right." But, there's no sound dimension that goes up and down, the stereo, no matter how you slice it up it's limited. - Like I said, there are attempts at that. Like, the PS5 does have a 3D audio engine that does attempt to do that, it just doesn't do a super great job of it. You can tell with the PS5 if something is above or below you, but it's kind of binary. Like if it's above you, no matter how far above you it is, it just sounds like it's above you generally. - Gotcha. - You don't know if maybe the enemy that's shooting down at you is up on a high roof, and you don't know that they're on that high a perch, you just know they're above you somewhere. - They're above you, yeah. You could be shooting at the ceiling. - Right. - Or shooting, just- - You could be shooting at the ceiling of the room that you're in, right. But I will say this, I will say that it's not only stereo these days. We have reached a point where I do think 360 virtual surround is pretty good. Excluding up and down, the virtual surround sound that can indicate things all around you in a 360 degree field, that's pretty good these days. - Yeah, I agree with that. Well, and when I said with stereo, I was actually thinking physically, you've got a speaker. I mean, you and I are both wearing headsets right now and we've got a speaker in our left ear, a speaker in our right ear. So by nature of just the physical orientation of those two speakers, you've gotta become real creative if you're gonna make something sound like it's up or down. And then to your point it sounds like they're struggling with how do you make it sound like it's slightly up or slightly down or whatever, you know. - Yeah, right, right. Like I said, it seems to just be one above you position, and one below you position. So yeah, it's difficult. But I think that would be the system I would use for now. It would definitely be an experiment, but it's something that I wanna try with a developer one day. - Oh, I hope you get it. That's sounds really good. And I like your ideas about aiming. I think that, to me in my limited knowledge, it seems to be on track. I would imagine you would have to build a system and then just stress test it until you ended up with, you know, a blind person successfully competing against a bunch of other people on a map. - Yeah, I think that the way it might have to be approached is very early in development when the game itself is very basic and it's just a functional multiplayer shooter. Even if a lot of stuff is still missing from it and they just play test the heck out of the basic version just to see if this works, you know? - For sure. And guess who would get to play test that, Brandon? - I would. - You, you. - That's part of what I do, yeah. - Do you know what I can't do all day long at work? Play video games. So you've, like, beat me out. - I've perfected work. - What's that? - I have perfected the idea of work. - You've perfected the idea, I like where your head's at with that. So heading back to God of War Ragnarök, like we missed a big piece of this. You don't just play this game, and as you said, it's not just that your DNA is on it from previous work, but you actually have a Twitch channel. - Yes, yes. - So talk to me a little bit about... Like, start with like, why the heck would you want a Twitch? Like, why would you want a Twitch channel, why would you share? What is your motivation for being involved in all of that and kind of, what does it do for you? - Well, actually, that's a great way to word that question because the way that I view Twitch and the way that I view my channel is that it feeds into everything else that I do. So I have that channel to share gameplay of games with other blind people, to show them what games they can play, even if they're not aware of it. Because you'd be surprised, you'd be surprised at how many people come to my channel, that are blind, but haven't been following me before and haven't been following the gaming media that talks about it, or haven't been following audiogames.net looking at forum posts and things like that. Just have kind of been out of the loop. And they witnessed me playing a video game and they go, "Oh, wait, you can play this? How can you play this?" It happens a lot. - That's amazing. - But even more than that, there's two other purposes too. I also wanna show sighted people what the blind are capable of. I consider myself an advocate for accessibility as well as a consultant, so I do try to kind of get the message out there. And I'm one of those people that will do it one person at a time. I'm one of those people where, if a sighted person comes in and asks me a question about how this works, how that works, how I'm playing this, how I'm doing that, and I answer it, which I will, and then five minutes later another sighted person comes in and asks the same question. Guess what? I will answer it. And if I don't answer it- - You don't get annoyed at all. You're never like, "Okay, enough guys." - No, because it's a different person, and it's another chance to open someone's eyes, pun absolutely intended, to the world of accessibility and how blind people are just trying to play games the same way that they are. So I don't get annoyed with that. And honestly, sometimes I am super into the game, but the good news about that is, I've developed a community that gets my philosophy, that understands what I'm trying to do. So for some reason if I forget to or if I can't answer a question, usually the rest of my chat will do it for me. - Somebody else, somebody will come up with- - Yeah, they'll be like, "Yeah, this is how he does it. Look at the VOD, look at the video on demand archive, you'll see exactly his explanation was earlier." And then a lot of times I have a guy that will take my explanations of things and make highlights out of them so people can watch them later. - Oh, that's really cool. - But that's not it, there's one more, there's one more purpose, though. - Okay, go for it. - In my opinion, this is the coolest one, because this is the one that really ties it all together. Because of my work, because of the work I've done on video games themselves, that has created for me a bunch of contacts, it's opened up the gaming industry to me. I'm basically considered a respected figure in the game industry, which is a really cool thing to say. But anyway, because of that, some of my audience are game developers from these different companies. Some of these big AAA companies, people from those companies come into my channel to watch me play games. - Oh, fantastic. - So it's for them too. Even if it's not their game that they're watching, the point is, if they get ideas from seeing the things that I'm doing and seeing the things that I'm playing, great. Because ultimately, every win is a win for accessibility. It doesn't matter where they got the ideas from. If they get inspired by seeing me play some other game that isn't theirs and they go, "Oh, this is how we could do that," that's perfect. That's exactly what we want. - And I bet they get excited, I bet it's better than reading a spec or something, they see it and see you do it and see your emotion and excitement and your followers, and they probably do it with a little more enthusiasm, yeah? - Yeah, that's the whole idea. It's happened multiple times. People will watch me play their games, people watch me play other people's games, and it will get them thinking, it will get them talking about it too. I get questions from them too. Like, "How is this working?" Like, "What kind of system is this? How are you doing this?" I'll answer those just as eagerly, just so they can understand how this all works and what is possible. Because that tends to be the biggest selling point when I talk to new developers that haven't experienced blind accessibility in a game. Just convincing them of what is actually possible, and what we actually need versus what they thought we would need. They're often two different things, so. - Yeah, and I think one, in my experience, if you show a developer or somebody in UX how people are using their stuff, they always get really excited. I mean, you know, ability aside, if they just look at how somebody's interacting, how somebody's enjoying, how somebody's struggling with or whatever, it always fires up their mind to improve the experience, enhance the experience, you know? - Yeah. That's one of the reasons I do it. - So I think that's brilliant, that that channel's there and available for them to do just that for how somebody who's blind is experiencing their game. - Yeah, exactly. - It's incredible. The other thing that I wanted to just say is that your earlier point when you were talking about the reason why you have the Twitch channel, and that you were willing to talk to people. Like, I think that that's such a fantastic quality, and I think actually putting a forum out there that encourages that, encourages people to come to you and say, "Jeez, this is something I don't understand and I haven't seen before but I'd like to understand it." And from a personal standpoint, when I was in college, I took a series of classes around theater and acting. I'm sure you can relate a little bit to that one. - I did, I can. - We'll get into that in a minute too, right? But in one of my theater classes, the first one that I took, the professor, there was two professors running the class, and one of them was blind. And one of the best things that he ever did, is he had one-on-one meetings with the students right in the beginning of the class, and one of the things or one of the purposes in that meeting amongst the sort of standard academic stuff was, "Hey, now is your chance, ask me anything you want about me being blind." And I can remember sitting there and being like, "How'd you get here today?" - Right, yeah. - And he explained to me that, "Well, obviously I don't drive, but I live in..." This was at University of New Hampshire, so he lived in a town nearby called Dover, New Hampshire, and he took the bus in and explained kind of how that worked for him. So I had questions like that all the way down to, like, "Do you have a concept, like if somebody says triangle, like I imagine a triangle, what happens in your brain?" And he explained that as a child he had a little bit of very low vision sight, so he actually has the mental image of basic things like that. - I do too, actually. - What's that? - I do too, actually. Even though I've never actually had sight, it is- - Yeah, go ahead, answer that question, that's a good one. - Yeah, like even though if you have never had sight, it's still possible to form mental images based on things you've experienced in some way. So I have felt a triangle, so if asked what a triangle is, I can picture a triangle. Now, of course it's colorless, you're only getting the shape in my mind, because I don't have a concept of color. It just is what it is. You can try to explain color to me all day long, it doesn't matter. There's no way, if you haven't seen it, that you can conceptualize color properly. It's just, you can't. But I can get the shape. And that goes for anything that I've experienced in some form. - Yeah, and what's interesting to me is that, and I think this is across the board, right? Even amongst people who are sighted to a degree, but you say, "I can picture a triangle in my mind." - Yeah. - Is that the same thing as when I say I can picture a triangle in my mind? Are you actually... And as sighted people, we have something to relate to, because I can look at a triangle, and when I close my eyes I'm looking at a triangle in my brain. And so that's what I would be... There's no way to answer the question, Brandon, but that's where my young mind was going. - I get it. I do get it. - Yeah. How do I do that? And to the same point, two sighted people saying, "That is blue." We can recognize the color is blue and both agree if shown something blue that it's blue and communicate that it's blue. What we can't do is we can't say that the way we see that in our brain is the same. They may be actually seeing in their head what I see as red. - It's possible, yeah. It's absolutely possible. - It's possible. So it's not even just a sighted/blind kind of question, it goes deeper than that. - Yeah. - We're getting a little tangential here. So to bring us back, talking about this acting stuff, you do a lot of... In your list at the top of the podcast, one of the things you said you do is voice acting. - I do, yeah. - Can you talk to me a little bit about that, how you got into it, what kind of stuff you do? How does that all work? - Well, how I got into it goes all the way back to my very, very young childhood years. I was a huge Disney fan growing up as a kid, and one of my favorite movies of all time is the Disney version of Aladdin, the old one, the 1995 one. - Gotcha, yup. - And I just loved Robin Williams as the Genie, and that was my inspiration right there. He was the first one. He wasn't the only one that inspired me to wanna do that, but he was the first one that made me go, "Wow, I wanna do this." - That's great. - For a long time, that is all I wanted to be, was an actor. And I memorized the entirety of Aladdin, the whole movie. There was a point in my life where I could probably just do the movie. Like, the entire thing. - Unbelievable. - I can't do it anymore, I've lost some of that, but I still remember quotes and stuff. That was who I wanted to be for a long time. And that never completely went away. So I was really, really honored in 2014 when I got the opportunity. I did some voice acting for a volunteer group earlier than this, probably about 2006, 2007, 2008, around there. Volunteer audio drama group called Darker Projects, who, we made no money, it was a nonprofit, it was just we loved making audio drama, so we just did it together. And I think the content is still online, Darker Projects content is still online. So if you wanna hear really, really- - Darker Projects, is that what it's called? - Yeah, Darker Projects. - Do me a favor, if you can find that and send it to the producer, Dara. - Yeah. - Because we'll put that in the show notes so people can find it. - Yeah, if I can find it I will. If you wanna hear my really old stuff. I even took a crack at audio production. - Of course we do. We wanna see what you were like before you perfected your craft. - Yeah, I mean it's okay, but it's not, like, it's not gonna blow your mind. - Yeah. - But I even took a crack at audio production in one episode. I not only acted in it but I produced it, so that was pretty cool. - That's awesome. - But then, I kept kind of... I was still into it a lot. So in 2014, let me step into 2014 for a second. - Okay. - I was really, really honored- - We need, like, a Wayback Machine sound effect or something. - A Wayback Machine, right. - Okay, we're there. - I was really honored to be... I was already going to GDC, I went to the Game Developers Conference that year to be on a panel about accessibility in games, and mobile games specifically. That year I was not in this career. This was before I started with the career that I'm on right now. Actually, on this panel, I was just the gamer perspective. That's all I was. I was just someone that they knew about because of my blog, they found out about me from my blog. And they invited me just to speak as a blind gamer about the accessibility of mobile games. And that's all it was. But while I was there, I met the audio director of a game called Pillars of Eternity. It's from Obsidian Entertainment, and it is a really, really big, really, really awesome RPG. I love it. I can't play it, unfortunately. - That's a role playing game, for you non-extreme geeks out there. - It is a role playing game. So I met the audio director over lunch, just kind of coincidentally. And I talked to him about why I was there, you know, my panel and all that stuff. And then I just got into just general discussion and I happened to mention that I've always wanted to voice act in a video game. And he's like, "Well, actually, you've got a pretty good voice, and we need actors, so you wanna?" And I was like- - There it is, serendipity. - Yeah. - That's unbelievable. - Yeah, so I can now proudly announce that in Pillars of Eternity I am several, several voices. Including a voice you can choose for your character when you create your character. If you choose the voice labeled "Benevolent Male" that is me. - That's you? - Yes. - Benevolent Male. - Benevolent Male. - That's like straight up Bob's Burger stuff, where you're just like, "I'm gonna do half the characters here." - I was not even close to half the characters, but I was several voices. I was an ogre. I was a demon at one point. I was a civilian that was in a house fire at one point. - So let's entertain people a little bit here. Can we hear your ogre? - Yes. You can. - Okay. - Okay, so keep in mind, before I do this, keep in mind that after I did this, this was put through some voice processing to make me sound even larger. - I got you. This is called Unprocessed Ogre. - This is Unprocessed Ogre. - Unprocessed Ogre. - Crush them! - Excellent. - That's the Unprocessed Ogre. - That's the Unprocessed Ogre. And then now, I was a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, so I've gotta hear your demon. - I have several different demon types. - Oh. Several demons is even better. - Several demons. The first one is kind of basically like... Again, without any voice processing, it's something like- - Cold. Cold demon right out of the freezer. - I shall rule this world. - Ooh. I like that one. - Things like that. That's the idea. - That's great. - Yeah, it's a lot of fun. - Well, first of all, before I continue to make you do things like that. The one thing I want to say is you mentioned Robin Williams, and I think it's very interesting that he was your inspiration, because, I mean, I was a huge Robin William fan, like I picked him up at Mork & Mindy, and I followed his standup, and I think a lot of people of my generation were. And he just had an... You know, his wit and the way he was able to, to almost battle with comedy. That was really what he could do. He could spit back and forth, and it was like a rap battle or something like that, but from a comedic standpoint was absolutely unbelievable. - But he could do it with a serious person on the other side. Like, he didn't care, the other person didn't have to be funny because he would just- - No. But he could do it with somebody funny as well. Like, he could go back. It was unbelievable. But anyways, I just wanted to make the point of like, the number of people, he inspired you from a voice acting standpoint, the number of people that he inspired from a comedic standpoint, and the number of people he probably inspired from just the standpoint of wanting to be in acting or whatever. Like, what an amazing person and just incredible. He's been so much to all of us. So it was just really interesting for me to hear that that was who inspired you. - He will be forever missed. - And he will be forever missed. I mean, what is that story, actually speaking of Buffy, I think he was working with Sarah Michelle Gellar at the time that he... - Oh wow. - ... he passed away. I can't remember what the show was they were working on, but it was something together that they were- - I think it was coming back to TV. - It was something for TV. And I almost wanna say it was a drama but I could be wrong about that. - Yeah, I'm not 100%. - Yeah, I'm not 100%, but anyways. Neither here nor there. So what I was gonna ask you, that was your break so that you could take- - That was the break. - That was your break so that you could take a rest between ogre and demon. So you clearly have voices. Are there any impressions, like famous voices that you are able to do that we just can't end this podcast without hearing? - I mean, I can do impressions. I don't know if any of them are good enough to say that you can't end the podcast without hearing them. - I'm gonna declare that there is one like that and then- - I have imagined for a long time that I could be the next Goofy for Disney if I was hired to be Goofy for Disney. - All right, let's hear your Goofy. - Hi guys, ah-hyuck! - That's perfect. So do you listen to these things and then just sit there and practice? - Not in the way that you think. - Or is it more, is it quicker or more natural? - It's more... I mean, I do technically practice, but I don't do it in the way that you might be thinking that I do it. Like, I don't spend an hour in front of a mirror or anywhere. I don't spend time exclusively practicing. The way that I do it is I just keep doing it over time. I'm always practicing. Like, I'm generally- - It's just part of your goofy day that you just- - Yeah, I'm generally a silly person, I just do voices at random sometimes, and, you know, that's me practicing. - We talked about that before the mics heated up about how silly you are. Haven't disappointed, this has been great. - If you watch any of my archived footage, any of my streams, I will just get weird sometimes. I mean, I actually have, on my Twitch channel, there is a point redemption reward. So if you watch my Twitch channel for long enough, you get these things called Breakpoints. Just for watching you get these. And if you get 10,000 of them, you have the ability to make me do a voice for the rest of the stream. - Oh, that's fantastic. - That was once used against me to turn me into Jar Jar Binks for the remainder of a stream. And it was a memorable experience. My own fiance did that to me. - That had to be a friend of yours, because- - My own fiance did that to me. My fiance did that to me. - Okay, that tracks, that tracks 100%. - He redeemed the reward just to see what that would be like. - So it's a Breakpoint, right. Also a great movie. Does that mean that you can do a Keanu Reeves impression? - It's not based on the movie. - I just tied it to the movie. I just six degrees to Kevin Bacon your Break Point reference. - No, it's actually a wordplay. So my fiance and I started a movement called Break Down Walls. - Mm-hmm. - And right around that time... The movement, by the way, is the idea is to break down the barriers between blind and sighted gamers and just people in general, just break down all the barriers and be humans to each other. And right around the same time, Twitch developed a channel point system. When Twitch released that, they allowed people to name the points whatever they wanted to name them. So what I did was I built a whole theme around this. So like, for instance, the reward where you can change my voice is called Voicebreaker. The reward where you choose the next person that we raid, thus creating new connections, is called Wallbreaker. - Got it. - You know, it's different things along that theme. It's all about breaking down walls. So we just kept with the theme for the channel points. - Yeah. I really like that concept. And one of the reasons why I actually dove into your voice work the way that I did here is because I think an important point or important concept here, because we're talking about how you, as a blind individual, are consulting and helping video games become more accessible and usable by other people who are blind. But just because you're blind doesn't mean that you're not doing work that somebody who's not blind might be doing, right? - Sure, sure. - Like that voice work, like it leads to those other things. And I know that because of the industry I'm in, you know that because it's your life, but I just think it's an important concept to kind of have that out there in the world, that everybody has things that they can specialize in and talents and things that they're good at, and conditions that maybe they should be doing something. But at the end of the day, it's all just human beings doing all sorts of different things. - Yeah, just like with me and audio description narration. That's a field that is very much open to blind people because it is for them, but at the same time, a lot of audio description narrators are also sighted. The concept of blind people doing professional audio description narration is kind of relatively new. It's not completely new, I'm not the first one, but, you know, I'm doing that too, and I daresay doing a pretty good job of it, and it's good. It's good. I've done a lot of... And also, that ties together with the rest of my work too, because a lot of what I've done for audio description has been video game trailers. So a lot of companies nowadays have started releasing trailers for their games with audio described versions, and when they get professional audio description companies to do those trailers, they need narrators for those of course, and I've been picked to be more than one of those narrators. - Was God of War Ragnarök, doesn't that have audio description in it as well? - It does have audio described trailers, but the audio description was done by text-to-speech, which typically I don't like, but at least it was there. - At least it was there. But I think, as my son was playing it, because I've gotta tell you, my son is a developer and a big gamer and all that, and he's playing God of War Ragnarök upstairs while I'm downstairs and he's yelling, "Dad, you've gotta come see this, gave all the accessibility features." And he's got the audio description on and all of this kind of stuff. And by the way, he develops an app and he sends me his personal testing results from accessibility, and he's like, "Look at how good this was." - That's awesome. - Like, oh, go, yes. But anyways, he was very excited, being... My son is somewhat of an evangelist for accessibility and he was very excited to hear. I'm thinking back to when I did this, but it was the audio description, I think he called me up to say, "Look, they've audio described this." - Yeah. To be clear, though, the audio description is not in the game. God of War Ragnarök does not have any in-game audio description. - It's the trailers, yeah. I think it was the opening trailer. He's like, "I'm starting this game, you've gotta hear this." - Yeah, the launch trailer has it, and a few trailers before that had it too. But yeah, it is TTS but it's actually, it's fairly well-written, it's just described by text-to-speech, which I don't typically prefer, but there you go. - Yeah. Like you said, the effort's there, and that's where we need to start, is by, you know- - Yeah, at least they did it at all. - Yeah, I know. A lot of people think about perfect. And it's like eh, don't think about perfect. Think about let's get it started, let's do it. - Well, I do think people have a right to proclaim their dislike of something if it doesn't meet the standard that they think that should be met. - Of course. - But, you know, I'm also an advocate for that. I can't say a whole bunch about this, but some of my career has come from the fact that I spoke out about something not being the way it should be. - I agree with that. I think it's just more the concept of like it's at least occurring. Like let's start with do nothing is not an option. - Right, right. - Start it, do a bad job at it, and then be willing to improve based on feedback and so on and so forth. - Exactly, exactly. - But it's a journey. It's an absolute journey. So I think you're right on all accounts there, for sure. So tell me this, right. I could sit here and talk to you all day long, but we need to kind of- - I mean, that makes me feel good. - We will do that at some point. - That does make me feel good. - But I would be curious, like I'm really impressed with how the work that you're talking about and that you've done and how far video games actually have gotten. Back in five years ago at CSUN when I was having that conversation, I was almost worried that there wouldn't be attention on it, and like I said, quickly learned that it was different, and then subsequently became sort of impressed with the attention that's been put on it. And then also recognize how long we have to go before we're anywhere close to there, whatever that is. - Every game being accessible. Yeah. - So what do you see... Two part question here, what do you see as your next big hurdle, the next big thing that you wanna get past, solve and accomplish? And then the same question for just sort of accessible video gaming in general. - That's an interesting question. Honestly, I can't really answer the second part of that question because, let me put it this way, I do have work currently. I am working with a couple of clients right now, and because of that I have these wonderful little things called NDAs. - Gotta be careful. - Which is basically my life these days. My life is comprised of NDAs and occasional bits of fun. So I can't talk about that stuff, because one of those things I think would be the answer to one of your questions, because, you know, like I said, I'm trying to bring people new experiences. So what I would say is- - I'm happy to wait until that video game comes out and I hear about it. - What I will say is I'm working on a new experience that does not exist in the blind AAA gaming space currently. My own personal hurdle, I want to find a way to grow, I want to expand my platform, I want to reach more people, I want to reach more game developers, and I want to ensure that I continue to have as much work as I do right now. I'm lucky to have it, because the problem is I am currently freelance. So if this work goes away and I reach a point where some developer somewhere isn't reaching out to me, which luckily hasn't happened in a while, but if it does, I have to consider the fact that it might, then I'm just not making any income. - Right. - So... - If you're not growing, you're shrinking philosophy. - Yeah, exactly. - Yeah. So to that point, then if somebody's listening to this podcast and they're like, "I'm so inspired, I love what Brandon's doing, I would love to be a part of it, I'd love to help him, I'd love to make sure... I'd love to help him achieve his goals and continue his mission." What would be the one thing that somebody could do for you? Would it be follow you on Twitch or would it be... - I mean, follows are great. I mean, if you wanna follow, if you wanna watch the content, do that. I'm perfectly happy with that. Twitch, YouTube, all those things. Check out hundreds of hours of me playing video games if you want to. - Got it. - That'd be great. I still haven't hit 1000 YouTube subscribers, so if I could hit that. - 1000 YouTube subscribers. - That would be amazing. That is kind of my- - You guys heard that, go subscribe. - Go subscribe. - I'm talking to the audience. Hang on a second, Brandon, I'm gonna talk directly to the... - Do it. - Go subscribe to his YouTube channel, let's get that... 1000 is doable, right? What number are you at right now? - We're at about 660, I think. So we're about 340 left. Yeah. - Yeah. All right. - 1000 YouTube subscribers means that I can monetize the videos that I make. And that would prompt me to put a little more emphasis on the YouTube channel. Right now I use it, but I use it as primarily an archive of my streams. Which is fine, people do like that, but I'm thinking that when I hit 1000 subscribers, there may be incentive for me to maybe start making other types of contents for those subscribers if there's... You know, the thing is, and this is one of the hard truths that I have to... That it's true. And maybe I'm too honest for my own good. But this is the hard truth of things right now. I am a busy enough person that I can't put a lot of time into anything unless I can profit from it. - Oh, that totally makes sense. Yeah. - It might sound like, I'm not trying to be selfish, I'm not trying to be greedy, it's just that I've reached a point where I am trying to make something of this business that I've formed, and I'm actually officially a business now. And I'm trying to make something of this and so I have to focus on the things that help me do that. - Yeah. I always explain that as sustainability. If you want this person to continue this behavior, they've gotta be able to sustain it, which means they've gotta be able to pay the bills with it. - Yeah. - It's that simple. - So the follows are good. Just getting the word out is good. Like, just let people know who I am. If you are a game developer, if you know a game developer, hey, I'll help them too. Like, you know, whatever you like. You can check out my website, brandoncole.net, my blog is there, my consultancy page is there, so I can be hired directly from my website, so that's a thing. You know, all of it, all of it is important to me. I'm typically never the type to just directly say, "Give to me monies. You give dollar, I do thing for you." No, I'm typically not the person to ask for that. I mean, there are ways to do that, because of course I've set up ways to do it if you wanted to donate directly to me, but when asked how people can help me out, I'm never gonna really bring those up. Because the primary thing that I wanna do is continue to be an advocate for people and accessibility and continue to talk to people and about the things that I'm doing as far as I can, and let people know what's going on and just keep helping people. Just, yeah, just do all of that stuff. - I got it. Well, I'm happy for that to become sustainable for you. - Yes, that's the idea, that's the goal. - So that you can continue doing all that and you're not worrying about how to separately pay bills and put food on the table and all that kind of stuff. - I will say that things right now are fairly good. So I'm not in any kind of desperation situation right now. I have a lot of work right now, things are going very well. So, if we don't hit - That's wonderful. - the 1000 subscribers immediately, that's fine. - Things are going well. I think the message is things are going well, I'd still take 1000 subscribers. - I'll still take them. - Not lose sight of that. - If they'd like to subscribe, I'll definitely take them. - Wonderful. Well, listen, like I said I can keep going here. Maybe you and I should talk again at some point. - Sure. - Maybe contact us when some of these games that you can't talk about right now, some of these new things come out that you can't talk about right now, when that happens ping us because I'd love to hear about some of those things, because it's incredibly fascinating to me and I think other people, how these things get solved. I and a bunch of others are appreciative that you're around to solve them. - Whenever we can announce, which I don't even know when yet, but whenever we can announce I'll be happy to let you know. - That'd be great. And please make sure, you mentioned a bunch of websites and your YouTube channel and all that kind of stuff. Please make sure that Dara has that so that we can make it easier for people just to go to our show notes and grab that. Very, very great talking to you, Brandon. Very, very cool. I was a hardcore '90s gamer when games first went competitive on the internet. I had a problem, I had to back off of it quite a bit, but if I do go back to it, it's first person shooter, so work on that please. - I want to. - Yeah. Listen, you and I have a goal now. - Yeah. Oh, I've had it- - The goal is for you and I to either compete to play side-by-side, if it's team based like death match or- - Or shoot each other in the head. - ... against each other or both, D, all of the above in a first person shooter. That's the goal, I want you to make it happen for you and I. - That's a good goal, I like that goal. I'm gonna do my best to make that happen. - It's nice to have somebody else in your goal, right? - Yeah, yeah. - All right, man, well thank you so much. Anything last minute you wanna say before we sign off here? - I think just that you never know... Yeah, this is what I'll say. When you do something in life, that even if you know what reasons you have for doing it, you never know how that thing will affect other people. The fact that I get to say, that I get every couple of weeks or so, I get a thank you for the work that I did years ago on The Last of Us 2, that I still get those today, that I have affected people's lives in this major way is an incredible reward. So when you're thinking about doing something that is huge, when you're thinking about taking a risk, I took a risk, I left a full-time job to start doing this full-time, this career that I'm doing now, I left a full-time job. Think of not only how something might affect you, not only how something might affect your friends, but think of how it might affect people all over the world. And maybe that will inspire you to take that leap if that's what you need, and follow your dreams. You know, it might sound corny, but the thing is, it really can work. And I'm living proof. That sounds corny too, but it's true. It's 100% true. I get those stories, I get those talks from people, and it humbles me and I'm honored to do this work because I'm doing it for people all over the world. It's hard to accept that that's the power that your name has at any given point, but it can be real. And if you think that you can do that for someone or do that for a whole bunch of people, if you have ideas, get them out there and start making that thing happen. Because you never know. You never know. - Well, that's great words to end the podcast on. So I am not going to dive in there other than to say thank you so much for being here. What an inspiration, what a great conversation, and I appreciate you indulging the geek within me during the conversation. - No problem at all. Any time. Any time. That's what I'm here for. - All right, well this is Mark Miller thanking Brandon and reminding you to keep it accessible. - [Voiceover] This podcast has been brought to you by TPGi, the experts in digital accessibility. Stay tuned for more "Real People, Real Stories" podcasts coming soon.