2018-01-03 07:14:23

Hi everyone. Just wanted to introduce myself - I'm a game developer that's looking to add accessibility features to my games, and the games I port to mobile devices for other companies. I mostly work in the adventure and RPG genres.

Right now I'm in the research phase, looking at adapting games built with Adventure Game Studio to improve their accessibility. I'd love to hear back from anyone interested in playing "point n click" graphical adventures, after they've been made more accessible-friendly.

Glad to see such a dedicated community of developers congregating here.

2018-01-03 09:17:30 (edited by magurp244 2018-01-03 09:31:42)

There's a few scripts i've developed that could probably help with point and click adventure games. A good place to start would be TTS for dialog, descriptions, etc., maybe audio cue's with mouse based proximity in stereo/HRTF, or you could just use keyboard shortcuts to snap between points of interest.

You could also take a look at some of the [Sonifier] filtering and mouse scripts i've written in python based on [Peter Meijers Image to Sound] algorithms (CC 4.0 attribution). They could potentially be useful for navigating inverted depthmap renders of 2D scenes and such.

Also welcome to the community, heh.

-BrushTone v1.3.3: Accessible Paint Tool
-AudiMesh3D v1.0.0: Accessible 3D Model Viewer

2018-01-03 13:58:11

Hi,
I know there's some info somewhere, but not too sure where, about how to add accessibility for mobile devices as well, with VoiceOVer on iOS and Talkback on android although I unfortunately don't know where to find this sort of documentation for developers.

2018-01-03 19:29:06

magurp244 wrote:

There's a few scripts i've developed that could probably help with point and click adventure games. A good place to start would be TTS for dialog, descriptions, etc., maybe audio cue's with mouse based proximity in stereo/HRTF, or you could just use keyboard shortcuts to snap between points of interest.

That's pretty much the exact approach I was going to take. AGS is good at exposing the item textual descriptions/names as mouseover events, which could be triggered by a keyboard press to toggle between points of interest. I was hoping screenreading software would play friendly with AGS so I wouldn't have to create my own TTS solution, but I haven't had a chance of trying it out yet.

magurp244 wrote:

You could also take a look at some of the [Sonifier] filtering and mouse scripts i've written in python based on [Peter Meijers Image to Sound] algorithms (CC 4.0 attribution). They could potentially be useful for navigating inverted depthmap renders of 2D scenes and such.
Also welcome to the community, heh.

fantastic! Exactly the kind of resources I need to get started with. Thanks again - and for the warm welcome smile

2018-01-03 19:30:08

aaron wrote:

Hi,
I know there's some info somewhere, but not too sure where, about how to add accessibility for mobile devices as well, with VoiceOVer on iOS and Talkback on android although I unfortunately don't know where to find this sort of documentation for developers.

Pretty sure I've come across this. We've been porting AGS adventures to iOS and Android for a few years now, and I suspect that adding VoiceOver/Talkback support won't be a huge commitment. Thanks again.

2018-01-05 02:07:55

I can't say whether or not AGS would work well with existing screen readers, it depends on how its implemented but if similar platforms are any indication it likely won't.

I did do some additional digging on AGS in regards to voice output though, it seems there was a C# plugin with a primitive Microsoft Speech API wrapper built awhile ago [here], although the links may be dead.

A different approach according to the AGS manual [here] would be pre-recorded audio-files, depending on the compression and level of dialog it could get pretty big, but you could take TTS output from say, [Espeak] dumped directly into a wav file off the command line and hook it into the text dialog.

-BrushTone v1.3.3: Accessible Paint Tool
-AudiMesh3D v1.0.0: Accessible 3D Model Viewer

2018-01-06 16:23:57

Excellent! As you said, chances are low it would work with a screenreader since it renders in-game text to the screen buffer as an image anyway. Your approach sounds sensible.

The one advantage most/all commercial AGS games have is that they've been professionally voiceovered by actors. So 98% of the text in the game is already in audio anyway. It's that 2% that I need to work out.