How to make an grapichal adventure available for blind people?

[Peder 🚀]

This is meant to be a point and click grapichal game.
But there is many blind people that are fans of the "series" and that would like to play it.

I still like macons idea the best, radiowaves also got some good points though they are in the area of what macon said (I believe). (no the main characterS aint blind.)

But I see how this can be alot of EXTRA work to get it playable for blind people, thinking about the dialog specially. As it would have to be a completely different way of dialog for the blind and also the voice acting would be alot more work caused by that.

Though I will take the ideas into thinking and see if I can come up with a really good solution in the end.


Peder Johnsen.

[Babar]

I don't see why dialogues should be so much of a problem. Many games (Sam 'n Max, The Dig, etc) just have a word in the options instead of the whole of what the player would actually say. One word options can easily be said out loud, and perhaps their order can be consistent (Compliment, Sarcastic Comment, Question, Exit), so that after a while, the player just presses a number or something to say what is required, and only the additional options that would pop up would be said out loud.

Lots of people are mentioning voice recognition, and I'm not sure if the game is made in AGS, but I'd think it would be difficult to implement nonetheless.

[FSi++]

I'm thinking of something among the lines of...
this
though I may be wrong.

Upd: This is a demonstration of what i think could be done (and, more important, how) with all these games for sight-impaired.
There's a sample open-source game and a script module. Controls are: E, T, U, I for selecting cursor mode, Space for selecting hotspot, Enter to click.

[Stupot]

Perhaps you should omit the word "graphical" from the title of this thread.

[mouthuvmine]

I think HE'S still wanting to figure out how adapt his graphical adventure for the blind. Everyone else is working around the graphical part. But "graphical" part of the challenge is still relevant since the OP still wants it. Hosnestly, without making the whole thing ground up voice activated, or using only a couple keystrokes for the included "only a couple options", I can't see how to just adapt your game. But, how expienced am I?

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

[qoute]This is meant to be a point and click grapichal game.
But there is many blind people that are fans of the "series" and that would like to play it.[/quote]

If you've only got one leg, you can't compete in the olympic's marathon.

But you CAN compete in the paralympics.

With the above two sentences, I think I've summed up my point better than I have done before, and will leave it at that.

[Ishmael]

Has no-one thought of text-to-speech programs or other screen readers? All you need to do is to have all the text in the game accessible to these programs and add in some sort of markers about what is what for them, and leave those non-visual so they won't be in the way of the people who can see.

The mouse bit then... Pointing something towards a point on two axises shouldn't be that impossible. There's a thing called an eco-gun which relies on this. The closer you're aming to bullseye the higher and faster the beeping sound it makes is. The problem, though, is that not all blind people are ever taught to use a mouse, so said group would still have some difficulties.

One of your options for input would be a parser. Blind people can still type, remember. You wouldn't need voice recignition.

[Fyntax]

My mom works with blind people and I actually got an adventure game designed for just kids wich has either bad eyesight or are completely blind.

It's an old text based game which as Ishmael says can be read by screen-readers or can be read on one of these : http://www3.goteborg.se/ekonomi/arsbok03/pics/vohandikapp_1.jpg

[FSi++]

I think one can use text-to-speech software with Inform interpreter. Look command would feel strange though.

[Ishmael]

Blind people can look just aswell. Just not with their eyes.

[tube]

Blind people can look just aswell. Just not with their eyes.

Not really, but they can instruct the game character to look, unless (s)he's supposed to be blind as well.

All in all, I have to agree with those who say that this is all a bit pointless. It would probably be easier to simply develop a text adventure / IF game with the same story and basic puzzle structure as the graphical one on the side, and the result would surely be more enjoyable. Most of the proposed interfaces (based on echolocation or whatever) sound like they would make the game very hard to play, let alone enjoy. Not that they wouldn't be interesting as scientific experiments.

[lo_res_man]

Also the descriptions would have to be keyed to blind people because, "Yous see a small white house in the middle of a field" ain't gonna help you if your blind. If the game was 3-d you could program in some system where you tap the ground and the computer figures out the reflections.

[Neil Dnuma]

Also the descriptions would have to be keyed to blind people because, "Yous see a small white house in the middle of a field" ain't gonna help you if your blind.

I don't understand this, am probably missing something. How is this information not helping a blind person?

[Candall]

Imagine that there's a constant tone.  As you move the mouse around, the tone lowers and rises based on line-of-sight distance from objects based on the player's perspective.  So you figure out there's an object in the room.  You click where the tone is high, since that means there's a surface close to you.  Now you're zoomed in and you can explore the object's geometry in a similar fashion.  Now maybe you can tell that what you're looking at is a shelf?

Would such a tone at least partially compensate for the lack of a cane or the ability to lay hands upon the surroundings?

Now, I know that this would not be especially helpful for adapting existing games (or would it?), but it might be a way to implement entire games for the blind, maybe even challenge sighted players to use their ears as the primary sense.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

As you move the mouse around, the tone lowers and rises based on line-of-sight distance from objects based on the player's perspective.

Talking about line-of-sight is tricky - how do blind people understand line-of-sight? As far as they can easily sense, their world ends a few feet around them, in a circle created by their cane. Maybe line-of-hearing?

Bottom line remains the same - we're not blind, so we're trying to find solutions that are grounded firmly in what we think would help, but with all these little basic assumptions we don't really think about anymore.

You'd need an actual blind person to design this sort of game, or at least converse with one at length to understand how he senses the world. And even then there's a very big difference between blind-at-birth and blindness later on. The former has never seen. The latter has, and it's easier for us to communicate with.

Also the descriptions would have to be keyed to blind people because, "Yous see a small white house in the middle of a field" ain't gonna help you if your blind.

I don't understand this, am probably missing something. How is this information not helping a blind person?

Do they know what white is? Apart from that, though, all the other information seems available for a blind person.

EDIT -Candall, your example is interesting, but it makes "recognizing a shelf" a hard task. Imagine playing a whole game like that.

One very important thing - in computer games we (player, not the PC) only have two senses - we SEE and we HEAR. In real life, we have three others. Texture alone would help us recognize a shelf in real life - trying to reproduce it in a computer is impossible or too hard to be worth the effort.

EDIT2 - I hope I'm not coming across as the "doomsayer" of this idea. I just want to make perfectly clear that there are tons of problems with this idea, which keep being overlook by the simple fact that the suggestions are made by people who can actually see. But, if asked, I would have said the "Invincible Island Remake" game would have been a waste of time, the interface would have been too cumbersome, etc... but I ended up playing it to the end, loving it.

[Ishmael]

Being blind doesn't make you stupid. If you tell a blind person there's a house in the middle of a field they know what you mean. But if you want to have the game to be percievable to a blind person as a blind person in the game you'll need to have the descriptions in the format of "You feel a round, cold, smooth object" instead of "You see a metal ball". And this, in my opinion would be the correct way to go. You have eyelids, you can close them. You have a brain, you can exclude purely visual detail from the descriptions.

Bottom line remains the same - we're not blind

I am bureaucrately 88% blind, mind you.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I am bureaucrately 88% blind, mind you.

That helps. But you still know what "white" is. You still have visual references.

It seems more and more obvious to me, the more I think about it, that we really do need to distinguish "blind at birth" and, well, not blind at birth. With people who did get some eyesight, there's a lot of things you can do - it's much easier because you can close your eyes and go, "ok, so this is how it feels, this is what it's like". Blind-at-birth, though, it's a whole new world.

[Ishmael]

I am bureaucrately 88% blind, mind you.

That helps. But you still know what "white" is. You still have visual references.

Blind at birth people are taught to ignore such detail, I suppose. No-one's ever snapped when being told what colour something is that I've seen or heard of.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Colour is an example.

Look, all our cues are visual cues. Shape. Colour. Distance (very important), and depth. Immediate recognization of objects.

People who don't have those cues still get all those things (except for colour, I suppose), but in a different way. And we're trying to reproduce these cues we know *nothing* about in a *visual* medium.

[Ishmael]

As I said, smooth, cold, round, heavy object instead of metal ball.