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AudioGames.net Forum → Off-topic room → an open letter to blizzard: please make Hearthstone accessible to the
Hey folks,
I have written an open letter to Blizzard asking them to make hearthstone accessible.
For those who don't know what hearthstone is, it is a online cardgame, similar to magic the gathering I guess, which in my opinion, could be accessible.
In case you want to read it or to share it, here it is:
http://lucasradaelli.com/?p=353
Good luck. That said I'd rather have Magic Online or Duals of the Planeswalkers be made accessible, but that's personal preference.
Is this an online version of the World of Warcraft CCG?
I agree with cx2, it's good to write, but good luck on getting them to take any notice.
I am also not sure how you'd make an accessible ccg sinse a new set of cards comes out monthly, and annoyingly enough braille versions would probably cost more to produce than the hole monthly set. There are projects to braille standard fantasy card games that come with a single set of cards like dominian, but I don't know if they'll ever be able to do ccgs because of constant card production.
These are computerised versions of a CCG so braille isn't an issue. There's no technical reason that Duels of the Planeswalkers on the iPad, a single player version of magic the gathering, couldn't be made accessible with voice over for example though I doubt they'll put the work in.
Dark, have you heard of card sleeves? Just lately I've been toying with the idea of sticking braille labels onto card sleeves with the appropriate cards in. I don't know if it would work with CCG cards but I tried the iOS app tap tap see with a card from my XWing miniatures set, which is literally the same physical size though not necessarily the same print size as a magic the gathering card, and it came out with the card title though not the card text.
I've been playing with a fairly accessible app which lists MtG cards, though it hasn't yet got the 2015 cards which were released on this last Friday. If you know the name of the card you're looking for you can also use gatherer.wizards.com which is the official database listing all cards ever produced, and it is also reasonably accessible down to the graphics for mana symbols being fully labelled.
Of course the kinds of game where people get random cards from sealed packs would never be possible to label. Even if braille cards were viable the random nature of booster packs also makes the braille cards a non starter.
Apologies for drifting off topic there. If anyone wants to discuss it make a separate paper CCG topic and I'll be there.
Ah, didn't realize this was computerized. Well it might be accessified in the same way any game or ap might be, though as Cx2 said, whether the developer will bother is another story.
As to using sleeves, the problem I can see is firstly you'd need a hell of a lot of sleeves and it'd be a major problem, especially considdering new cards fequent releases, and secondly it wouldn't help you play a sighted opponent who didn't read the text of what cards he/she played out to you.
I did recently hear of a project doing static fantasy games with a set of cards such as dominian, which could be fun, and indeed I might get some myself to play with my brother who is a massive fan of ccgs and similar games, indeed he's been in the world chapmionships for several.
I am not sure how a database would work, though I can see it help in deck building, although it'd probably be quite time consuming.
to be honest for me, I always find the play of a ccg or other game much more interesting that the build phase, indeed I'd love to play sealed deck games sinse I really like the idea of just being given stuff and have to make the best of it, rather than sitting and going through several thousand connecting factors and trying to build the best defense, ---- one reason I so enjoy turn based combat in games that actually give you choices about what you do and throw random options at you like Smugglers 5, as opposed to ones where you just statically build your character minimaxing everything and then just wailing away repeatedly.
I would personally love to play talisman and some of the other fantasy board games. Perhaps not the most tactical, but lots of fun to explore and have random adventures with.
First take a look at 64ouncegames.com they're planning to accessify some mainstream games including Munchkin, starting out with braille printed sleeves.
As for card sleeves, it's standard practice to keep your cards sleeved or even double sleeved in most cases and they come in packs of 80. From what I've seen of MtG it doesn't quite have a new set of cards every month, they have one core set a year with six expansions grouped into two blocks of three. Commercial production of pre printed braille sleeves probably isn't practical for the size of the market but self labelling is possible, and you can always copy and paste the text from the database site to a word processing file on a phone or tablet if needed. The iOS app does actually have a collections function which I believe you could use to put all the cards from your deck in and then go through them as needed.
Opponents is something that's always going to be the case for us. I did a few google searches and found another VI person asking about MtG, they were told it's the tournament standard practice to clearly state out loud exactly what you're doing and opponents commonly ask them to read card text because the cards are at the other end of the table as well as being upside down from their perspective. They can apparently be disqualified if they fail to do so properly. In casual games where we'd be more likely to find ourselves it's just a matter of not playing with obnoxious idiots, it's like saying what if a D&D group refused to let you use either a computerised dice roller or tell you what your dice have rolled? What if a D&D group uses a grid map and they refuse to describe it to you? If they won't chances are they're not worth playing with.
If tap tap see works for this, something I'll report back on, it should be possible to tell which card is which for sealed or draft but it has a noticeable delay while it waits for a response from the other end. You'd need to take some sleeves and some kind of braille labelling equipment with you for such an event, with heavy reference to some kind of card database. I probably wouldn't risk it for draft where the pack gets passed around like pass the parcel and each player chooses one of the cards, you might have to scan up to 15 cards at times and that'll just take forever, but if you have the patience sealed or a blind draft may work.
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