Hi folks,
Some of you may be familiar with a game called Kerbal Space Program.
If not, you can find it at http://KerbalSpaceProgram.com
From the site:
KSP is a game where the players create and manage their own space program. Build spacecraft, fly them, and try to help the Kerbals to fulfill their ultimate mission of conquering space.
It's a pretty popular game in the nerdy sighted gaming community.
Of course, as with most games, it's inaccessible.
Recently, while doing a bit of research into other things, I stumbled across a mechanism for allowing both complete control of the game, as well as being able to read back the current state from external applications.
http://krpc.github.io/krpc/
After a bit of preliminary exploration, it seems as though this mechanism could be pretty easily repurposed to act as a sort of accessibility bridge, at which point a dedicated group could write a fully accessible skin to KSP.
As one of the developers of the crowdfunded NVDA Remote project, I'm interested in exploring taking on this project, if it is something the community might be interested in funding.
The goal would be the development of a fully free and accessible open source method for playing the game. It would probably look a lot like a standalone program which interfaced with both your screen reader and the game itself. The game, as well as the krpc bridge, both appear to be cross-platform, so this is something that everybody would be able to enjoy, regardless if you are a Windows or Mac user.
I've not yet dug in and built a prototype, but this does look like a pretty large project, similar in magnitude to NVDA Remote or DictationBridge.
If this is something you could see yourself putting money behind, please let me know here, so I can learn if there's sufficient interest to make building a prototype, setting up a website and mailing list, etc. worthwhile.
Thanks for your time. I'm hoping we can make this work and have another awesome game available to us!
Instead, 