Please boost for reach if this kind of stuff interests you. Will post more on this later.
Once upon a time, there was a cool emulator frontend called Retroarch. This emulator wasn't accessible until I and a few other gamers went to them and asked about adding accessibility. An amazing person known as BarryR made it happen. Now, if you turn on accessibility mode in settings, or pass the "--accessibility" (or something like that) flag on the command line, you get spoken menus, including the emulator's pause menu, good for saving states and such. Then, using PIL and other image processing Python utilities, running a server and hooking into Retroarch, the script allowed players to move around the map, battle, talk to NPC's, ETC. The only problem was, no one wanted to test it. The blind gaming community pretty much spoke, saying that we want new games. We want cool new, easy accessibility. So that's what we have no, follow the beacon or get sighted help in the case of diablo and such. It's sad, but meh. It's what we wanted I guess. No Zelda for us. So, this is about as far as he got:
To expand on what devinprater was saying: I am working on an accessibility pack/service for Final Fantasy 1 for the NES (this was what was shown in the latest RetroArch update). The idea is similar to how Pokemon Crystal access works, but it's using the RetroArch AI Service interface to do so.
Right now, the FF1 access service is mostly done, but I need more testers to try it out and give me feedback on how it's working. Right now, you can get up to the point where you get the ship, but there's no code to deal with how the ship moves, so that still needs to be done. Likewise with the airship later on.
The service works the latest version of RetroArch, on linux and mac, but not windows. This is due to how nvda reads out the text and until the next major update to nvda (which will have a feature to fix this), it'll have to wait. If you have those, I (or maybe devinprater) can help you set it up on mac/linux to test out. The package itself is available at: https://ztranslate.net/download/ff1_pac … zip?owner=
So, I get that old games are, well, old. I get that new games are really cool. And I know, I'm the biggest hypocrit of them all because I can't code and should be spending 24/7 learning to code so I can be the change I want to see in the world and all that FossShit. And honestly, I don't know how hard it was to make that project, I really don't. But if that can be done, I kinda have the feeling that modders that make Super Mario hacked ROMs, or decompile Super Mario 64, maybe could spend a bit of time on accessibility of these old games.
And here we come to a sad truth. Just because a community is small, does not mean accessibility will be prioritized. Just because a game studeo is huge, like Netherrealm Studeos, doesn't mean accessibility will be forgotten, either. I've gone to several different emulation communities. I asked for audio cues to be added into PPSSPP, and that's why they're in there now. Since the GUI can't be made accessible, I can still navigate it on mobile with a controller. I'm currently trying to get Provinence and Ignited made more accessible. I've kinda given up on Delta because that team has all the hype so is less likely to listen, at least that's kinda how I feel.
But seriously though, there aren't many activists among us. And there's just not much the few of us can do. But my dream, and I know how pathetic dreams are in this age of everyone looking down on everyone else, is that a blind person can enjoy and preserve in our own culture, what sighted people have been able to access for the last 20 years or so. Thousands of games, just sitting there ready to play. And I mean, this was like 4 years ago, with less blind programmers out there, less resources for ROM hacking and emulator scripting, and less devs. Now that emulation is on iOS, I seriously hope that this improves. I mean, imagine a blind person that uses their iPhone as their only computing device, being able to just download an emulator, already having scripts pre-installed and ready for a ROM, being able to just plop in Chrono Trigger and playing it like anyone else. That's my dream. Stupid, yes. But equal access has probably always seemed stupid before it's a thing.
And honestly, I wouldn't even start with the huge projects, like Zelda. I'd start with Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Soul Calibur, all that. Make the menus talk, read tutorials, move lists, pause screens, all that. I mean, I don't know how easy that would be, since their graphics are going to be different than Mario or Final Fantasy, but surely if we can do cheat codes that mess with memory ingame, we should be able to track the cursor in menus.
@pixelate I posted about this in general a while back and got no replies, so maybe I can ask you the same question:
What is the best way to provide the option for a blind-accessible mode in a game?
In the settings menu seems problematic (how do you get to settings without the accessibility mode already enabled?).
And command line arguments are better, but generally a bit too technical for the average consumer.
So, what is your preferred way for games to offer to enable that option?
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