
How blind players succeed at sports video games they’ve never seen - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/03/how-blind-players-succeed-at-sports-video-games-theyve-never-seen/
======
miki123211
As a blind player myself, I've found mainstream games to be too much of an
annoyance for me. Yes, I know it can be done, I know people who were doing it
successfully, but it requires just too much time for me. I prefer games made
for the blind exclusively or with mostly text-based games with focus on
accessibility (like Dark Room on IOS).

Also what I've found very annoying were text games done in some fancy weird UI
framework screen readers can't make sense of, usually Unity. WHen a game is
written using the native UI toolkit or a toolkit that uses native controls
under the hood, screen-readers can, by using the system APIs, retrieve the
info the user wants to read. For those who don't know, screen-readers are
programs that allow the blind to use the computer, mostly by reading the
information on the screen with synthetic speech, putting it on special devices
called braille displays and providing audio cues. They don't work in some
magical way, describing the screen like a human would, usually they need good
APIs to communicate with the app (or underlying OS), get as much info as
possible about what's on the screen and what the user is doing, a bit like a
malware and then present that information to the user, either automatically or
upon request, after pressing some shortcut keys. If the app uses non-native UI
toolkits, draws the UI by drawing things on the screen directly and doesn't
expose the required information to screen-readers, absolutely nothing can be
done with that app. This is, unfortunately, the case with most (all?) Unity
games, as Unity's UI is not compatible with any native APIs. Plugins for
built-in Unity screen-readers have been built, but I honestly have no idea how
good they are (reinventing the wheel, when it comes to screen-readers, usually
doesn't end well so I'm sceptical).

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gojomo
I suspect the same sort of deep-learning/reinforcement-learning that manages
to play video games could be used to both _assess_ and _improve_ playability
for the sight-impaired.

For example, can a 'blind' agent, that's fed just the (stereo) soundtrack of a
game, become good at it? (While not, add more audio cues.)

Can another cooperative agent, which can see the screen but only emit audio,
learn to help the blind-agent do better? (Train up this helper-agent during
playtesting, then add its audio cues to the main game – either always, or in a
special 'audio assist' mode.)

(Parts of this could wind up like a rotated version of this "sound of pixels"
work:

[http://sound-of-pixels.csail.mit.edu/](http://sound-of-pixels.csail.mit.edu/)

But, instead of learning which pixel-regions are responsible for sounds, it'd
be _adding_ sounds to second-medium-communicate relevant visual information.)

~~~
gojomo
And of course, you'd want to ensure that the helper-agent'ss audio-cues remain
pleasant to human ears – and not just computer-to-computer screeches.

To achieve this, you'd add yet another adversarial agent, that's trying to
discriminate original audio from the helper-enhanced audio – without access to
the video.

Only audio-help that successfully fools this 3rd agent, and is thus
relatively-indistinguishable from the unassisted-audio, gets added to the
game.

------
yaseer
I guess not everything EA does is terribly immoral. Kudos for going the extra
mile.

~~~
Agentlien
As someone working for EA I am so terribly tired of hearing all the negativity
and hostility towards EA. Even the positive comments tend to be of the form
"well, at least they did _something_ good".

I'm not saying EA hasn't done things I don't agree with, but I do believe they
get more than their fair share of hatred on the internet. Actually, I should
say "we", not "they".

~~~
bsder
> I'm not saying EA hasn't done things I don't agree with, but I do believe
> they get more than their fair share of hatred on the internet.

Good will takes a year to earn but a second to lose.

I'm going to take issue with you and say that EA deserves every ounce of hate
that it gets.

EA gets hate because it buys and screws up beloved franchises. EA gets hate
because it has game properties that it is clearly milking that would be much
better if they weren't in its hands. EA gets hate because it yanks critical
content out of its games and makes it pay to download. EA gets hate because it
(used to?) make you install their buggy pile of crap online service to play
your single player mode game.

And their only defense is: "Well, everybody else does it _too_."

When your child makes that statement, you generally have a not terribly
sympathetic reply. Why should EA get any more sympathy?

~~~
Thaxll
"EA gets hate because it buys and screws up beloved franchises. EA gets hate
because it has game properties that it is clearly milking that would be much
better if they weren't in its hands. EA gets hate because it yanks critical
content out of its games and makes it pay to download. EA gets hate because it
(used to?) make you install their buggy pile of crap online service to play
your single player mode game."

Most of it is wrong on many levels unfortunately, I feel like reading someone
that has no idea of how the industry work. You think EA as company is screwing
franchises on purpose, never occurs to you that the studio that is developing
the game is doing the mistakes and EA as a whole has pretty much nothing to do
with it?

"EA gets hate because it yanks critical content out of its games and makes it
pay to download"

Please give an example of a game where the dev were done finishing the game
weeks / month in advance and chose to not include part of the game in the
release.

Read this: [https://kotaku.com/former-bioware-studio-head-talks-about-
li...](https://kotaku.com/former-bioware-studio-head-talks-about-life-under-
ea-1823969303)

~~~
gknoy
> Please give an example of a game where the dev were done finishing the game
> weeks / month in advance and chose to not include part of the game in the
> release.

Content gets cut because games release on a set schedule, rather than "when
it's done", so corners are cut. This problem is seen as normal in the game
industry, especially as they often want to target Christmas releases. The side
effect is that things that might be mostly done get cut out, or removed
because they couldn't test it, etc.

I get that things get cut. The problem is not that it's unfinished, it's that
remaining things are _added as DLC_, or things that masquerade as "free"
unlocks, but where buying it with real money is far more appealing than the
time they allocate to it (e.g. recent star wars battleground game). This is
not solely EA's fault, but it's endemic in the industry. I don't want to buy a
"season pass" for my game, I want to _buy the game_.

For an example game release, and pretty much started this thing. I'd be very
surprised if it were not developed pre-release. Gran Tourismo HD even had a
plan where buying the things you'd want to play was the big plan (though it
never made it to release).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Turismo_HD_Concept](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Turismo_HD_Concept)

------
Agentlien
This is great and I'm really quite impressed and pleased to hear about games
I've worked on (Need for Speed) being played this way.

Accessibility is something that can be really difficult to get enough focus on
during development even when a few people are aware and care.

For my own sake I'm just glad that some recent games (such as Battlefield)
have added colour blind modes.

~~~
simion314
Also would be great if games that use a lot of text could have an advanced
option where the game would call an external script(or have modding support)
with the text and some metadata. I was hacking at OpenMw (a Morowind open
source engine) and experimenting with having teh dialogs,books,tooltips read
using Text To Speech. I think it is important to allow the flexibility and not
built the TTS into the game,

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contentpls
content: [https://outline.com/YGL2tS](https://outline.com/YGL2tS)

~~~
dang
Please don't do single-purpose accounts on HN.

