Hi. So I wounder if this game is accessible for blind people.
Is it compatetible to screen reader/window narrator? (You can hear all the in-game textes, dialogues and menus)
Are there sound cues to help navigate the overworld? For example, you could hear a sound when you bump into a wall.
I’m afraid not. The sound file used for bumping into walls was found to cause several people’s games to stop responding and was therefore removed to circumvent these issues.
Also, I am not familiar with screen reading applications outside of JAWS so I am not sure of how compatible others would be with reading/interpreting text. The game does not feature any cues in its menus which I believe would otherwise be used by JAWS, for example, to interpret and relay audio information back to its user regarding the option selected. Based on this, my assumption would be that it doesn’t work for these purposes.
The closest efforts that thesuzerain had made into making accommodations for people who are blind or visually impaired was when he had originally created a separate display mode for people with low acuity after receiving a feature request from a user who was legally blind. However, he had gotten distracted in the midst of this by other problems during development and efforts towards successfully implementing this feature were largely forgotten. In the next future update, which has no foreseen release date yet, we are planning to revisit the acuity setting and ensure that it is implemented properly.
Beyond this I still cannot say if we will be successful in making the game accessible for people who are blind and not low vision. I will look into resolving the issues with the bump sound effect but I will not be able to give an answer about text compatibility without having a better understanding of screen reading software.
Wow. Thanks for answering so fast. Thank you for doing your best to help the visually impaired and blind people.
Your idea of sound cues in menus is interresing, but I am not sure to understand. Is it a sound that you hear everytime you change your location in the menu? If so, its level of usefulness depend if the screen reader read the whole list of menu/option or only the one you are on.
Sound effects in the overworld, like hearing a specific sound only when you stand/walk in tall grass, would help to navigate. Others ideas are hearing a different sound when you are next to a door and another sound getting louder the closer an item is. I have no clue how hard it would be to make it though.
However, hearing the walls is the most important sound cue. I understand you can’t put the “bumping sound” if it does harm/bugs to others. An other option would be to hear a sound when you are next to a wall.
I have never made a video game so I can’t help you much with screen reading. Maybe you could download an audio-only game and check its files? You can learn more about audio games on this website :
Oh this is all great information to have!
So for menus, there is a sound effect which plays when the menu first opens from the overworld and another sound cue plays every time the cursor moves to a new selection in the main menu and most other parts of other menus as well. This leaves the question of how well screen readers will be able to read off the menu headers to the player, with the idea of reading off only the header designated by the cursor being the most ideal. If we were to apply a similar scenario to a webpage, I know that certain screen readers would handle this by pulling out tags from within the webpage’s code which indicate the beginnings of new sections, headers, etc. and are also used to filter out less important information from the webpage so that they do not receive higher priority as the screen reader reads text from the page. So in order for the ideal scenario to be possible, the game would need to supply the same type of tag to the screen reader, which I’m having a hard time conceptualizing mainly due to the limitations of RPG Maker.
Having a grass rustling sound effect shouldn’t be difficult to implement and I’m actually surprised that sound effect wasn’t present already. The other overworld and wall sound effect ideas that you have proposed would absolutely be something that I would attempt in creating this feature but my biggest concern with them would be the amount of lag that they would generate because RPG Maker is very, very inefficient when it comes to handling multiple events on the same map There have been anti-lag scripts which have been created to address some of these issues but unfortunately because Insurgence has also been made with Pokemon Essentials added onto RPG Maker, most of these scripts cause severe problems with game play. I will do my best to investigate how possible this is because these are fantastic features to have but I still want to make sure that I convey that the outlook for them is grim.
I will definitely check out this website for more ideas and for a better understanding of designing games with audio in mind. Thank you very much for all of your feedback so far!
I am happy my ideas could help you. I can feel you truly care for your community. Thanks, I wish you the very best.