Grrrr it won't let me do anything, "you are not authorised to create this post". Can you post the following reply on the forum for me please?
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CDPR has great past form for accessibility, the speed and frequency and range of accessibility patches in Witcher 3 was quite something to see.
First a disclaimer in that I haven't played Gwent. However that aside...
Generally games like Gwent are mechanically ideally suited to blind accessibility. Anything that is based on navigating an interface rather than an environment and isn't reliant on precise timing usually is,and there are hundreds of blind accessible mainstream games, even a couple of current big name AAA games that have devoted dev time to it.
Blind gamers often punch above their weight in terms of numbers playing and in app spend, because there's less competition from other games, so more loyalty. However for it to be a worthwhile exercise, implementation costs still need to be minimal.
There are a couple of sides to it:
1. Allow focus to be shifted around without using a mouse (already solved for console)
2. Provide sensible names for all interface elements, that can be exposed to text to speech
3. Announce anything that happens outside of receiving focus, e.g. other player playing a card
Outside of engine based development, text to speech is normally handled by external software on the player's machine. All you need to do is put in your labels and announcements and it just works.
However engines do not (currently) expose UI elements in a way that screenreader software can see, so other approaches are needed. One is to record proper human voice overs for everything. Which is fantastic, but expensive. Another is to implement speech synthesis within the game, which is pretty straightforward, lots of existing code to do that. The other is to use some kind of workaround to get the text out to screenreaders, which allows players to customise the speech speech, voice etc bars on the preferences in their own software. This API for PC is a workaround, SkullGirls used it to make its UI fully blind-accessible -
https://davykager.com/projects/tolk/
The XB1 now has a system level screenreader, with a number of third party apps compatible with it. I'd strongly recommend getting in touch with them, I expect they would be interested in finding ways for Gwent to work with it. @brycej on twitter is an excellent contact.
Most of the above are pretty straightforward and well suited to just spending a day tinkering with the possibilities of, particularly if you have things like internal game jams.
Feel free to drop me a line on [email protected] if you want to discuss any of this in more detail.
Ian Hamilton
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