[HN Gopher] Game Accessibility Guidelines
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Game Accessibility Guidelines
Author : robin_reala
Score : 68 points
Date : 2021-04-23 11:27 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gameaccessibilityguidelines.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gameaccessibilityguidelines.com)
| MrLeap wrote:
| I'm 200~ days into making a game/text editor hybrid (you're a
| tentacle monster with a magic mechanical typewriter). I've spent
| some effort making things accessible.
|
| Some fun unexpected things occurred during this process. When I
| added controller support, it also created a kind of accidental
| couch co-op mode, where one person can do the typing while
| another moves around and handles the exploration/combat bits.
|
| I'd love to support screen readers / do real-time text to speech
| transcription. Will have to research the meat and potatoes of
| what's involved there. Even if I can't accommodate every line
| item, this is a great resource!
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > I'd love to support screen readers / do real-time text to
| speech transcription. Will have to research the meat and
| potatoes of what's involved there.
|
| I'd be happy to guide you in the right direction with that.
| What engine or GUI toolkit are you using?
| MrLeap wrote:
| I'm using Unity3d. I appreciate the guidance!
| mwcampbell wrote:
| The best option I know of for Unity is this commercial
| plugin: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/ui-
| accessibi...
| teraflop wrote:
| Just curious, why do you describe that as a "commercial"
| plugin? The source code seems to be Apache-licensed.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| My mistake. Looks like it was open sourced sometime in
| the past year or so.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Strange that screen reader support for mobile devices is in the
| intermediate category, but screen reader support for other
| platforms is considered advanced. Maybe it's because mobile games
| tend to have simpler mechanics. But if your engine doesn't
| implement platform accessibility APIs, it's probably not much
| easier to remedy that on mobile than on desktop.
| tarboreus wrote:
| No, that's accurate. Often making your game accessible on
| mobile just means not going offroad and doing your own weird
| thing, apps are accessible by default and you often just have
| to make sure to use labels correctly. At least this is true in
| menu or text-based games, which is more games than you would
| think on mobile.
| W0lf wrote:
| sfsfdfxfwdscxvayvkolbjvvc. bla
|
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| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| There was a nice curated list of accessibility design resources
| called ay11resources[1] but it has now been acquired and the new
| list[2] seems to be cluttered with links to every other Internet
| content(not related to accessibility).
|
| I had ay11resources for accessibility design in my curated list
| of startup tools[3], I'm not confident to include the new list
| and so suggestions for accessibility design resources like OP
| would be appreciated.
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201108192310/https://a11yresou...
|
| [2] https://www.getstark.co/library
|
| [3] https://startuptoolchain.com
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Allow controls to be remapped / reconfigured
|
| As a left-handed gamer: yes please! I use the arrow-keys for
| movement with my right hand and have the mouse on the left.
| Nothing sucks more than to find out that a game has WASD hard-
| coded, or helpfully adds an AZERTY checkbox as if that covers all
| eventualities.
| dkersten wrote:
| In this day and age I expect every game to allow control
| remapping, certainly on PC but even on console I feel it's
| warranted, to the point where I get mildly annoyed when they're
| not remappable, even if I don't intend on actually doing it.
|
| I think a big part of that is I use colemak, so if a game uses
| layout-aware controls (rather that physical key location scan
| codes or whatever), then I can't play with a keyboard unless I
| can remap it. I won't change my layout just for a game, too
| much hassle (and I've always had weird issues about default
| layout when having multiple layouts setup for quick switching).
|
| Most PC games do allow remapping these days, thankfully.
| Browser game's usually don't but I don't tend to play them
| anyway.
| Aerroon wrote:
| You could use an autohotkey script to remap the keys. It's
| not elegant and is frustrating, but it can make a game
| playable. AHK by default suppresses the keystroke itself,
| which means that all you have to do is create a mapping of
| the keys to other keys in a script and run it.
|
| I use it to bind caps lock to a windows-wide microphone mute
| toggle and it works great.
| SilasX wrote:
| Also, pass that on to Mozilla, which still doesn't allow
| Firefox extensions to remap controls (until a given tab has
| loaded).
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Nothing is worse than hard-coded controls in general.
| Completely screws up my muscle memory. It's also disrespectful
| because the game designers think they know my preferences
| better than I do.
| gaucheph wrote:
| There's an annoying manifestation of this where some games only
| partially allow remapping controls. For example, when Cyberpunk
| 2077 was released, it was not possible to rebind to some keys
| or rebind some actions.
|
| Another pattern I've noticed is some games do not respect
| Windows' mouse button settings. If other left handed mousers
| are like me and swap the primary and secondary mouse buttons,
| they'll probably have noticed that some games ignore this
| setting and seemingly hard code primary and secondary mouse
| buttons to be left and right click respectively. The key
| bindings are understandable to me because nowhere in Windows
| does it let me set IJKL as my WASD. But I know it's possible to
| get the primary and secondary mouse button config from the OS
| but some games ignore or are ignorant of this fact.
|
| Wherever I rebind my keys, I usually start with movement from
| WASD to IJKL. For everything else, I basically mirror what the
| default setting is to the right side of the keyboard.
|
| F > H E > U R > Y Q > O C > N L Tab > any of P, Colon,
| Apostrophe, L square bracket L Shift> any of whatever I didn't
| use for L Tab X > Comma or M (though comma makes more sense
| because my right middle finger would type that so it matches
| developer intention for default setting)
|
| There's actually more keys to choose from on the right side of
| the keyboard that you can reach with your pinky. This is
| significant because in some games being able to press buttons
| while maintaining movement can be advantageous.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| > The key bindings are understandable to me because nowhere
| in Windows does it let me set IJKL as my WASD. But I know
| it's possible to get the primary and secondary mouse button
| config from the OS but some games ignore or are ignorant of
| this fact.
|
| I'll chip in. As a developer, Unity and Unreal don't really
| expose that information, and generally devs will not fetch it
| on their own because that requires dealing with linking to
| Windows libraries, rather than letting the platform deal with
| that. Using Windows specific libraries seems like an anti-
| pattern with Unity too, because now your game is no longer
| cross platform.
| kevingadd wrote:
| I genuinely was not aware that Windows lets you swap the left
| and right mouse buttons, and I've been building Windows games
| for nearly 20 years. Thanks for calling that out.
| simion314 wrote:
| Just want to mention something, I am not demanding so feel free
| to ignore me, if you make a game (and do it because you want to
| make the game and not to learn some language/framework/CV
| padding) then keep in mind that existing game engines are
| probably more accessible then something you try to re-
| invent(especially with text based games).
|
| I admit I am a bit upset that when I see some people asking what
| good game engine for say a text adventure or virtual novel should
| he use I see people promoting their incomplete, buggy,
| unsupported engine(and most of the time the single feature is
| that is using the CoolLanguage)
| jhare wrote:
| Do you have a couple accessibility experiences from engines you
| thought were good? Maybe not "compare" to avoid flame wars, but
| maybe some highlights.
| simion314 wrote:
| Yes, so I am happy when I see a game engine uses renpy
| https://www.renpy.org because this engine has a built-in TTS,
| some of the time the developers did not test their game with
| this feature but since it uses python the user can hijack the
| TTS and use regex to cleanup stuff and I also pipe the TTS
| through my own configured TTS. I see people re-implementing
| their own visual novel game using Unity, the result is an
| inferior experience in all possible ways(not only
| accessibility).
|
| Latest RPG Maker can export the game as html/JS , I think
| people created plugins for TTS but I personally wrote my own
| hack code that I inject in the game and pip[e the text again
| into my own configuration.
|
| There are other HTML based game engines for text based games,
| those are also good for accessibility because you can use
| your existing tools to speack the text or you can change the
| fonts if that helps.
|
| For DirectX/OpenGl games I tried using OCR , this is slow and
| it also has big problems if the game uses "fantastic" fonts =
| fonts that look like handwriting or other iregular fonts.
|
| Maybe when I will have more time I could learn how to inject
| code in Unity or Unreal games and attempt to detect when the
| code renders fonts and pipe the text out of the game.
| tarboreus wrote:
| One big gaming disappointment for me as a low vision gamer is
| Inkle. It's all mostly text based and yet they manage to make
| their games 100% inaccessible.
|
| I think Inform 7 is a good example of a very accessible text
| engine. Twine is pretty accessible in some contexts / exports,
| but not in others,unless things have changed recently. Chioce
| of Games is also notably accessible, kudos to them.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| How does a video game engine add support for accessibility? Is
| there some kind of interface they have to implement?
| gmueckl wrote:
| I love the push for more accessibility in games. Game Maker's
| Toolkit made a series of very good videos on the subject that
| illustrate what's actually possible:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NGe4dzlukc&list=PLc38fcMFcV...
|
| I am toying with ideas of games that put particular focus on
| certain senses as a key part of their gameplay. But these
| discussions of game accessibility always make me feel a bit like
| a bad person for wanting to make games that are exclusive by
| their very nature. So where is the line between cool ideas that
| don't translate well for people with disabilities and gratuitous
| exclusion that could be avoided?
| hn8788 wrote:
| I think you'd need to decide whether the game is the equivalent
| of art, or if it's a product designed to reach as many people
| as possible. That's the one thing I really disagree with GMTK
| about; not having a ton of accessibility features doesn't
| necessarily mean the developer doesn't care about disabled
| people, it could just be that the game wants to elicit a
| specific emotion that doesn't translate well if the game is
| made more accessible. He said in one of his videos that Doom
| Eternal being difficult makes it innaccessible to people who
| aren't good at video games or have other disabilities, and
| implied that it isn't fair that people with accessibility
| issues don't get to experience the same power fantasy that
| everyone else does.
|
| For example, FromSoft games (Dark Souls, Sekiro, etc.) don't
| have difficulty options because the developers want you to
| struggle and feel triumphant when you eventually succeed.
| People have complained for a long time about how the game is
| inaccessible, but FromSoft hasn't budged because that feeling
| of mastering the combat and beating overwhelming odds is the
| point of the game. If they had an easy mode where you could
| just run through without a care in the world, it would just be
| another crappy open world game.
| RootReducer wrote:
| To be far to GMTK, he has an entire video about whether Dark
| Souls should have an "easy" mode that discusses this exact
| point in great detail, and overall he makes the same
| concession you do for art and experience.
| msla wrote:
| > I think you'd need to decide whether the game is the
| equivalent of art, or if it's a product designed to reach as
| many people as possible.
|
| Is _Citizen Kane_ with subtitles not art?
| emsy wrote:
| That's not a good comparison in the context of games. It
| would be more akin to have a subtitle or commentator that
| explains the meaning of the movie or the purpose of certain
| shots. If you lack the intellectual acumen or knowledge to
| grasp these things you will miss out on them.
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