8 ms·

For a legally blind player, Far Cry 6’s accessibility options are empowering

151 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

n8cpdx 5y ago
I first learned about this through Twenty Thousand Hertz, a great podcast about sound that I highly recommend. I don’t think about sound very often, so I find I learn a lot from every episode. https://www.20k.org/ https://www.20k.org/
izacus 5y ago
The Last of Us 2 also has some really great accessibility options - from high contrast mode, extra visibility markers, extra audio markers and more. https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/2/21310396/last-of-us-2-accessibility-vision-difficulty-gameplay-opinions https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/2/21310396/last-of-us-2-acces...
mbg721 5y ago
It's certainly not as severe as legal-blindness, but colorblind-friendliness is essentially standard now in board games. The yellow cards have a triangle, the red cards have a star, etc.
anthk 5y ago
I think blind people would like a text adventure or a good assisted Dungeon Crawl than Far Cry. There are really good IF stories out there. No, not Twine, that's just an enhanced gamebook. I meant the stories made against the Z-Machine (v5-8), and maybe the TADS ones.
- dharmab 5y ago
  Most legally blind people have partial sight and only need some assistance from the software to enjoy the same games their sighted friends enjoy.
- robin_reala 5y ago
  Why do you think that?
  - pawelmurias 5y ago
    It is reasonable that blind people will enjoy an experience that is based on hand eye coordination and visual spectacle less.
    - robin_reala 5y ago
      One of the first rules of decent accessibility is that assumptions will get you in hot water. Asking people what they’d like is usually the best option, then attempting to provide it.
      - anthk 5y ago
        Well, one of the best implementations for the blind it's the scripted Pokemon Crystal for VBA and JAWS, but not every game could be set like that.
    - robin_reala 5y ago
      Following up on this with a recent Tweet[1] @sightlessKombat: If the game's numbers are accurate, after 28 hours, 14 minutes and 20 seconds... I have completed #TheLastOfUsPartII on Grounded, earning 100% of the trophies... All without any sight whatsoever. Thanks to @Naughty_Dog for the #accessibility features that let me achieve this. https://twitter.com/sightlessKombat/status/1454920849035862018 https://twitter.com/sightlessKombat/status/14549208490358620...
junon 5y ago
If the author of the article is reading this, any chance of getting a stream or a video of you playing Far Cry? I'm sure a lot of developers, designers, etc. would love to see how you interact and overcome some of the obstacles that are typical of software and games alike, and would love to see (in action) how Far Cry goes about fixing them. Yes of course the article is rich with detail - thank you so much for writing this - but to be able to watch a video and hear in real-time "oh, that blood just popped on the screen as a visual effect, but it really makes it more difficult to perceive my environment" would be absolutely priceless commentary. I think a lot of the lack of accessibility isn't due to unwillingness but instead due to being unsure if what you're doing is actually helpful. I think it's way too easy to try to do something clever and instead making your app/game/whatever harder to use for both people with and without disabilities. Having that direct insight and the ability to observe firsthand how differently-abled individuals interact with software - both good and bad software - would be monumentally helpful. I would imagine this already exists to some degree but, at least for me, it's quite hard to find. If anyone has any good recs for this, please let me know.
- tekromancr 5y ago
  Hire disabled people to use your app, listen to what they say, integrate their feedback, iterate. That's really what it comes down to. There are AXE tools for testing obvious accessibility issues in websites; but that isn't a perfect replacement for hiring testers
  - junon 5y ago
    This is exactly my point though - hiring disabled people is simply not an option for most people. If information on meaningful accessibility was as readily available and consumable as learning how to code, I'd bet a lot of money people would be more inclined to make accessible software.
- simion314 5y ago
  I have an eye condition, I am not fully blind but I have a lot of trouble with text (I use the zoom feature,TTS, and big fonts in my desktop and apps. What would be super helpful for me would be things like: 1 allow changing fonts and font size, some games use some weird "fantasy" or hand-writing fonts , this are very hard to read so give us the option to use plain Arial font. 2 implement UI scaling so fonts and icons can be larger 3 don't make important ame objects hard to be found, maybe an option to outline things if you press a key, when you have disabilities is always a doubt in your mind that there is something on the screen but you can't see it. This is super annoying in point and click adventure games where you need to sport 1 pixel sized item or some very well hidden object. 4 for games with lot of text like lot of dialog that is not voiced , lot of books,computers or stuff to read I would love if more games support TTS (text to speech), I don't mean include a TTS engine in your game, just send the text to an application , or local port that the user specified and the user can't use it's own TTS program with his preferred settings to listen for the text. 5 For dialog boxes give us the option to set a full opacity background, set the text font family,color and size , for some games I used OCR(Optical Character Recognition ) to read the dialog windows but OCR can fail or take a long time if the font family is a weird gaming font or the dialog background has transparency. 6 If you make a game because you want to make the game (and not because you are learning some cool language or how game engines work - witch is very good you want to learn) try to use existing game engines, this engines will have already some accessibility support or there is enough experience on how to mod things in. So if you want to make a text adventure game use the best tool for the job and not create your own engine. I am sure some of this would help a lot of people that have smaller eye issues and those would appreciate some of thios options.
gitowiec 5y ago
What means legally blind? Can one be illegally blind?
- swixmix 5y ago
  Here's an example of legally blind... Higher Standard Deduction for Blindness ... 1. You can't see better than 20/200 in the better eye with glasses or contact lenses, or 2. Your field of vision is 20 degrees or less. See https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p501.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p501.pdf I believe 20/200 means you can read only the top letter, E, on vision charts.
  - lessthanseventy 5y ago
    20/200 means that a person with that level of vision is able to read something from a 20 foot distance that someone with 20/20 vision would be able to read from 200 feet away.
- bool3max 5y ago
  It probably means that the person's blindness is sufficient enough as to be recognized by the legal system. Just a guess.
- ramchip 5y ago
  It's a specific threshold e.g. 20/200 vision or worse. Some may be able to see to some extent, but it's still bad enough to be considered blind for disability purposes.
- WJW 5y ago
  Typically this phrase is used for someone who has very little eyesight remaining, but is not completely blind. Many countries have laws prescribing a minimum level of sight below which you are entitled to benefits accorded to blind people (for example, the right to do exams in Braille or orally, or financial compensation towards getting a guide dog in countries where that is part of social healthcare)
  - 5y ago
gundamdoubleO 5y ago
It's still insane to me that there are games being released that lack even the most basic of accessibility options like customisable control schemes. It's noticeably an issue for console games, even those made by big profile developers who don't really have any excuse.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  My pet peeves is games that require middle clicking and don't let you remap all of the functions of middle click. I have to plug a mouse into my gaming laptop to play them.
- maxmunzel 5y ago
  One thing that really improved quality of life for me as a southpaw, is the PS4(/5?) feature to remap button assignments system-wide.
- dmos62 5y ago
  I'll jump on the band wagon and echo the same sentiment for Web. Imagine using a screen reader.
- tsywke44 5y ago
  WHy? It's a entertaiment business not a governmental service. Developing features that 0.1% of users will ever use, same time can be used for bugfixes that help the 99.9%
  - jrootabega 5y ago
    The odds of anyone actually responding to you instead of just demonizing you, condescending to you, or talking past you are very slim, although a couple people have made good faith responses. Something they haven't said yet is that a lot of accessibility features are already a solved problem, or they're commonplace enough that they seem to be. So a big publisher (which is what your parent was referring to) would be able to get them in at low cost, relative to gigantic overall costs of publishing any AAA game. So it makes sense for them to do it to reach everyone they can. And they know people will write articles like this one and bring them publicity, and if not they'll just astroturf one anyway. The author of that article has had at least one other accessibility-related article published on the gaming web recently, so don't assume they're not just on a press junket. For all developers, your question is more of a question. Should every single game developed by every single type of developer be "accessible"? It would certainly be nice, but must they? Of course not.
magicalhippo 5y ago
There's a thread[1] over at Egosoft's forums about improving their X4 game for blind players. I admit I was quite surprised to find blind people playing this game, given the primary activity is flying around in space ships... but it does have trade/build elements and you don't have to fly a ship. Was very interesting to read about just how they achieved this, and the tweaks needed to make it viable. [1]: https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=440905 https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=440905
- prox 5y ago
  I wonder how accessible Elite Dangerous is together with hcs voice packs. The game should be mostly accessible with voice and still very atmospheric. Not sure about Combat, but trading and exploration would be possible I am guessing.
- notjustanymike 5y ago
  I'm told most of the Egosoft QA team is blind.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  After a recent playthrough of Privateer (1993) I realized I could almost play unsighted. Reading missions and commodities and dodging asteroids we're the only features truly requiring sight. And with tweaks even those could've been done unseen. Note, the flying and navigation unsighted would require some preparation though, as selections are not spoken out loud.
- treeman79 5y ago
  True blindness is very rare. More often it’s low vision on a scale between poor and true blindness. Or for some, focusing is painful. (Nerve damage) on a bad day I can see fine. But more then a few seconds can be horrifically painful. Extra large text helps a lot. Avoiding red / blue mixed colors is a big help.
  - speeder 5y ago
    Meanwhile mixing red and blue help a lot with certain eye conditions :(

151 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

I first learned about this through Twenty Thousand Hertz, a great podcast about sound that I highly recommend. I don’t think about sound very often, so I find I learn a lot from every episode. https://www.20k.org/ https://www.20k.org/

izacus 5y ago

The Last of Us 2 also has some really great accessibility options - from high contrast mode, extra visibility markers, extra audio markers and more. https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/2/21310396/last-of-us-2-accessibility-vision-difficulty-gameplay-opinions https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/2/21310396/last-of-us-2-acces...

mbg721 5y ago

It's certainly not as severe as legal-blindness, but colorblind-friendliness is essentially standard now in board games. The yellow cards have a triangle, the red cards have a star, etc.

anthk 5y ago

I think blind people would like a text adventure or a good assisted Dungeon Crawl than Far Cry. There are really good IF stories out there. No, not Twine, that's just an enhanced gamebook. I meant the stories made against the Z-Machine (v5-8), and maybe the TADS ones.

dharmab 5y ago
Most legally blind people have partial sight and only need some assistance from the software to enjoy the same games their sighted friends enjoy.
robin_reala 5y ago
Why do you think that?
- pawelmurias 5y ago
  It is reasonable that blind people will enjoy an experience that is based on hand eye coordination and visual spectacle less.
  - robin_reala 5y ago
    One of the first rules of decent accessibility is that assumptions will get you in hot water. Asking people what they’d like is usually the best option, then attempting to provide it.
    - anthk 5y ago
      Well, one of the best implementations for the blind it's the scripted Pokemon Crystal for VBA and JAWS, but not every game could be set like that.
  - robin_reala 5y ago
    Following up on this with a recent Tweet[1] @sightlessKombat: If the game's numbers are accurate, after 28 hours, 14 minutes and 20 seconds... I have completed #TheLastOfUsPartII on Grounded, earning 100% of the trophies... All without any sight whatsoever. Thanks to @Naughty_Dog for the #accessibility features that let me achieve this. https://twitter.com/sightlessKombat/status/1454920849035862018 https://twitter.com/sightlessKombat/status/14549208490358620...

junon 5y ago

If the author of the article is reading this, any chance of getting a stream or a video of you playing Far Cry? I'm sure a lot of developers, designers, etc. would love to see how you interact and overcome some of the obstacles that are typical of software and games alike, and would love to see (in action) how Far Cry goes about fixing them. Yes of course the article is rich with detail - thank you so much for writing this - but to be able to watch a video and hear in real-time "oh, that blood just popped on the screen as a visual effect, but it really makes it more difficult to perceive my environment" would be absolutely priceless commentary. I think a lot of the lack of accessibility isn't due to unwillingness but instead due to being unsure if what you're doing is actually helpful. I think it's way too easy to try to do something clever and instead making your app/game/whatever harder to use for both people with and without disabilities. Having that direct insight and the ability to observe firsthand how differently-abled individuals interact with software - both good and bad software - would be monumentally helpful. I would imagine this already exists to some degree but, at least for me, it's quite hard to find. If anyone has any good recs for this, please let me know.

tekromancr 5y ago
Hire disabled people to use your app, listen to what they say, integrate their feedback, iterate. That's really what it comes down to. There are AXE tools for testing obvious accessibility issues in websites; but that isn't a perfect replacement for hiring testers
- junon 5y ago
  This is exactly my point though - hiring disabled people is simply not an option for most people. If information on meaningful accessibility was as readily available and consumable as learning how to code, I'd bet a lot of money people would be more inclined to make accessible software.
simion314 5y ago
I have an eye condition, I am not fully blind but I have a lot of trouble with text (I use the zoom feature,TTS, and big fonts in my desktop and apps. What would be super helpful for me would be things like: 1 allow changing fonts and font size, some games use some weird "fantasy" or hand-writing fonts , this are very hard to read so give us the option to use plain Arial font. 2 implement UI scaling so fonts and icons can be larger 3 don't make important ame objects hard to be found, maybe an option to outline things if you press a key, when you have disabilities is always a doubt in your mind that there is something on the screen but you can't see it. This is super annoying in point and click adventure games where you need to sport 1 pixel sized item or some very well hidden object. 4 for games with lot of text like lot of dialog that is not voiced , lot of books,computers or stuff to read I would love if more games support TTS (text to speech), I don't mean include a TTS engine in your game, just send the text to an application , or local port that the user specified and the user can't use it's own TTS program with his preferred settings to listen for the text. 5 For dialog boxes give us the option to set a full opacity background, set the text font family,color and size , for some games I used OCR(Optical Character Recognition ) to read the dialog windows but OCR can fail or take a long time if the font family is a weird gaming font or the dialog background has transparency. 6 If you make a game because you want to make the game (and not because you are learning some cool language or how game engines work - witch is very good you want to learn) try to use existing game engines, this engines will have already some accessibility support or there is enough experience on how to mod things in. So if you want to make a text adventure game use the best tool for the job and not create your own engine. I am sure some of this would help a lot of people that have smaller eye issues and those would appreciate some of thios options.

gitowiec 5y ago

What means legally blind? Can one be illegally blind?

swixmix 5y ago
Here's an example of legally blind... Higher Standard Deduction for Blindness ... 1. You can't see better than 20/200 in the better eye with glasses or contact lenses, or 2. Your field of vision is 20 degrees or less. See https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p501.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p501.pdf I believe 20/200 means you can read only the top letter, E, on vision charts.
- lessthanseventy 5y ago
  20/200 means that a person with that level of vision is able to read something from a 20 foot distance that someone with 20/20 vision would be able to read from 200 feet away.
bool3max 5y ago
It probably means that the person's blindness is sufficient enough as to be recognized by the legal system. Just a guess.
ramchip 5y ago
It's a specific threshold e.g. 20/200 vision or worse. Some may be able to see to some extent, but it's still bad enough to be considered blind for disability purposes.
WJW 5y ago
Typically this phrase is used for someone who has very little eyesight remaining, but is not completely blind. Many countries have laws prescribing a minimum level of sight below which you are entitled to benefits accorded to blind people (for example, the right to do exams in Braille or orally, or financial compensation towards getting a guide dog in countries where that is part of social healthcare)
- 5y ago

gundamdoubleO 5y ago

It's still insane to me that there are games being released that lack even the most basic of accessibility options like customisable control schemes. It's noticeably an issue for console games, even those made by big profile developers who don't really have any excuse.

cwkoss 5y ago
My pet peeves is games that require middle clicking and don't let you remap all of the functions of middle click. I have to plug a mouse into my gaming laptop to play them.
maxmunzel 5y ago
One thing that really improved quality of life for me as a southpaw, is the PS4(/5?) feature to remap button assignments system-wide.
dmos62 5y ago
I'll jump on the band wagon and echo the same sentiment for Web. Imagine using a screen reader.
tsywke44 5y ago
WHy? It's a entertaiment business not a governmental service. Developing features that 0.1% of users will ever use, same time can be used for bugfixes that help the 99.9%
- jrootabega 5y ago
  The odds of anyone actually responding to you instead of just demonizing you, condescending to you, or talking past you are very slim, although a couple people have made good faith responses. Something they haven't said yet is that a lot of accessibility features are already a solved problem, or they're commonplace enough that they seem to be. So a big publisher (which is what your parent was referring to) would be able to get them in at low cost, relative to gigantic overall costs of publishing any AAA game. So it makes sense for them to do it to reach everyone they can. And they know people will write articles like this one and bring them publicity, and if not they'll just astroturf one anyway. The author of that article has had at least one other accessibility-related article published on the gaming web recently, so don't assume they're not just on a press junket. For all developers, your question is more of a question. Should every single game developed by every single type of developer be "accessible"? It would certainly be nice, but must they? Of course not.

magicalhippo 5y ago

There's a thread[1] over at Egosoft's forums about improving their X4 game for blind players. I admit I was quite surprised to find blind people playing this game, given the primary activity is flying around in space ships... but it does have trade/build elements and you don't have to fly a ship. Was very interesting to read about just how they achieved this, and the tweaks needed to make it viable. [1]: https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=440905 https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=440905

prox 5y ago
I wonder how accessible Elite Dangerous is together with hcs voice packs. The game should be mostly accessible with voice and still very atmospheric. Not sure about Combat, but trading and exploration would be possible I am guessing.
notjustanymike 5y ago
I'm told most of the Egosoft QA team is blind.
paulryanrogers 5y ago
After a recent playthrough of Privateer (1993) I realized I could almost play unsighted. Reading missions and commodities and dodging asteroids we're the only features truly requiring sight. And with tweaks even those could've been done unseen. Note, the flying and navigation unsighted would require some preparation though, as selections are not spoken out loud.
treeman79 5y ago
True blindness is very rare. More often it’s low vision on a scale between poor and true blindness. Or for some, focusing is painful. (Nerve damage) on a bad day I can see fine. But more then a few seconds can be horrifically painful. Extra large text helps a lot. Avoiding red / blue mixed colors is a big help.
- speeder 5y ago
  Meanwhile mixing red and blue help a lot with certain eye conditions :(