Blind accessibility

Suggestions and Feedback
1

Hello all,

As a longtime gamer who loves fighting games I decided to jump in here and bring this to life! :slight_smile:

First of all, I never tested the game and I am hoping to get my hands on it soon. Sadly, most of the times, We, blind people are experiencing hard times when talking about game menus, tutorial messages, online lobbies or movelists as it’s not readable. What We are doing mostly? Just learning stuff and trying to memorise. Doable, possible but not accessible at all and this is why I am creating this topic here.

Maybe I’ll just introduce myself really quick firstly: I am Tom from Poland. I am totally blind drummer, singer, harmonica player and sound designer and voice actor. I am playing video games for over 20 years now (of course not all games but everything I can). I was growing up playing games like Street fighter, Mortal konbat or soul calibur. I’ve played things like my favourite scrolling beat em ups: ALien VS predator, TTMNT 4 for SNES (that one was amazing) but I’ve beaten games like Ninja gaiden 3 totally on my own without any sighted assistance.

I tested many titles in my life, worked with few developers on accessibility here and there and basically accessibility is something I am fighting for everyday. Sadly, most of the developers, especially huge companies are ignoring us (Capcom is a good example) even if games like SF could be fully accessible just with a little bit of effort.

Actually, there’s one fighting game fully accessible for blind gamers on Steam and it’s Skullgirls. I worked with Mike Z. Main developer to implement this feature and you know what? It sounds amazing! You can read more here:
http://shoryuken.com/2014/01/31/mike-mike-z-zaimont-updates-skullgirls-encore-to-enhance-accessibility-for-blind-players/
And here’s the game in action:

I have a question for the developers now: Are you interested in this area? Can you work on it in your project? No idea what you’re using to code the game but it would be a problem if it’s Unity. Actually there’s accessibility plugin for Unity which could use SAPI to read the game text. If you have custom engine that would be a lot easier to be honest.
For custom engine you can check this:
https://davykager.com/projects/tolk/
This thing is basically for implementing screen reading software in to the projects and this is what Skullgirls is using. Also in Skullgirls the game is detecting if you’re using screen reader at launch and if yes, it’s enabling few more stuff like extra audio cues in few places.

Well, I hope it wasn’t too boring for ya! :smiley:
L

5 Likes
2

I think the devs have mentioned that right now, basically the only priority is to make it to console release just for survival, but if the game is successful then, I’m sure they’d look into this stuff!

The game already has at least a few features for blind players: there are footstep sounds in-game, for example, and when a character’s super gauge fills, there’s a sound cue for that (and much of this stuff was recommended by a blind player, too!), so even if it isn’t perfect yet, the game is probably fairly playable compared to many others?

1 Like
3

Nice! I’ll try it out for sure when I’ll be able to get the game!
Well, sounds amazzing as there’s more and more happening in terms of accessibility even on consoles. On PC it’s really easy to make the game accessible (mostly talking menus)

4

Sorry for dragging up an old thread but I’m trying to find a playable fighting game for my blind friend on switch. This game has so much going for it in terms of gameplay and contrast.

Things that would be super helpful would be: sounds or spoken menu items, plain background, solid block colour characters, vibrating controller.

Lauren