2019-07-24 15:24:26 (edited by ianhamilton_ 2019-07-24 15:25:15)

I posted here a little while ago about a team at a Unity hackathon putting together a prototype of native screenreader support.

Turns out Unreal are further along, they've released screenreader functionality as an experimental feature in their current preview build. So while that's not a proper release, release shouldn't be too far away.

Unity is the most popular game development tool, Unreal is the second most..  if both of them manage to pull of it it will have profound and lasting impact on blind accessibility of games. Not of gameplay (unless it's a UI based game, like football manager or hearthstone), but getting UI at least partially blind accessible out of the box would obviously make a huge difference.

Here's what the changelog has to say about it -

"Slate Screen Reader Support (Experimental). Screen readers narrate an application’s UI to a user. Some examples of screen readers are: NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) and JAWS (Job Access With Speech) on Windows; and VoiceOver on IOS. UE4 now automatically sets up basic support in any application that enables the feature, and now developers can customize that basic support by modifying UMG properties. In this release, experimental implementations are in place for Windows and IOS."

https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal- … 23-preview

2019-07-24 15:33:09

Oh fantastic. Unreal tends to be used by a lot of larger studios Nether realm for example, so this is super cool.

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2019-07-24 15:50:45 (edited by Rastislav Kish 2019-07-24 15:52:54)

Hi there,
what does this apply for? I mean, does it mean, that there is support for screenreaders in their development environment, or just in apps developed with it?
It would be fantastic if UnrealEngine became accessible, it's as far as I know the most popular choice for 3D games development, especially for its 3D rendering abilities. However when I tried the editor some time ago, it was completely unaccessible, and I wasn't able to get the VisualStudio plugin running, so I would see if at least this option is usable for us.
If this was changed, it would be a news of the year. big_smile

Best regards

Rastislav

2019-07-24 17:54:41

I'm so excited about this - thank you for posting.

It sounds like this is basic screen reader support to UI elements for anything on the Unreal Engine (the games, I'm guessing, not jsut the Dev tools?)

I had to not try to get too excited after looking over the Wikipedia article on the list of games using the Unreal Engine. Tropico 6 is on the list as an upcoming game using Unreal Engine V4 and Tropico was one of my favorite games to play when I could still see.

The biggest takeaway, though, will be that this just makes the UI readable. As to whether the gameplay will be blind-friendly? That's another story. I am not going to hold my breath on any of the FPS games or something complex like Kingdom Hearts 3 (which is also on the list as using Unreal), as they'd probably have to add in audio targeting/auto-targeting or something else other than just the UI being readable.

Questions I have now, though:
- Would it be relatively easy, once this is out, for games to upgrade to the newer engine version and use these features?
- Is this something we are going to have to just assume will only work with the newer games using the most recent version of the engine? (I have no idea how often games may upgrade these kinds of things or if they just stay with the same engine forever with no way to work on older versions.)
- Will these be "out of the box"/default features once it is no longer experimental? (IE, if someone puts a UI element in ... will it basically work with a screen reader and allow access to name/type, etc., or will the developer need to know to add these features? For an example, a screen reader usually knows that an HTML5 button element is a button without any extra work from a developer to tell a screen reader it is a button. I figure it may be more difficult if the developers have to actively know to add these things, rather than some portions of the UI being "accidentally" accessible based on default settings.)

Either way, I am excited for this, as well as Unity hopefully releasing accessibility, too.

2019-07-24 18:40:25

Oh yeah. This is cruel when you think about it. The developer should allow accessibility for the blind people to take place in their games. What the actual mess! Other people are able to access ui elements and everything by just looking at them because the engine adds visuals and texts itself to the buttons the developers make. For that reason, I think these engines all should force accessibility for the blind support for everyone who is going to use them. We are also human beings, the same being as the sighted people. We have the writes to play games that we currently can't. But if accessibility be forced to the developers, things eventually change.

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2019-07-24 23:53:36

@4: Didn't the first Kingdom Hearts have target-locking? Like, "press button, attacks will try to hit this target until line-of-sight is lost"? Or did I misunderstand that?

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2019-07-25 00:01:49

probably the games and not the IDE / tools.

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2019-07-25 20:19:15

@7 Yep, it's for games rather than the editor. I've heard good things from a AAA dev about how easy it is to work with.

@4 It isn't something that would apply to older games, and -currently- it has to be turned on by developers who know about it. I'd hope that won't always be the case though, certainly I'll be taking any chance I can get to harass both Unity and Unreal about having it on by default. As far as gameplay accessibility goes; unless it is a purely interface based game, this won't make gameplay accessible. But there is more interest in blind accessibility amongst mainstream game developers than there has been before, and UI accessibility would bring in the gamers I've seen posting on the forums here about how UI inaccessibility is a hard no for them... and that just means a wider pool of gamers who would benefit from gameplay accessibility, which in turn is more reason for devs to consider it.

2019-07-26 14:59:54

@6 It's been over a decade or more since I played Kingdom Hearts (probably would have been in 2004/2005), so I can't recall. But it definitely may have had an auto-targeting system. However, navigating a completely 3D world like that to find enemies/where to go seems very difficult to adapt. True, they could input 3D sound targeting beacons like in some of the audio games we've had come out, but I'm not sure they'd have a reason to attempt that when the world is so vast and would require siginificant gameplay considerations/changes.

I mean, who knows what may happen in the future when the tools are available and devs get used to them/experiment. But KH3 is noted in the "upcoming"/announced games, so it's likely already heavily in development and probably can't easily be even updated to take advantage.

Right now devs do not have easy access to accessibility tools for these platforms, so it is only the more devoted devs that know/want to add accessibility or need to that add them by using a hack/workaround (the accsesibility plugin for Unity used by Crafting Kingdom on IOS) or basically self-voice the entire game from scratch. A lot of mainstream devs do not want to use a third party plugin as a dependency for their game, either, so the lack of an "official" solution is a hard "no" for them.

I, for one, am just excited on what creativity might start to come out of the games market when there are actual official ways to add accessibility. With games made in Unity and Unreal, we may no longer get silence or "sorry, it can't be done" from developers that we reach out to to ask about adding accessibility, as they will actually have a way to add it that is easy and official to the platform. Exciting times!

@8, I do hope Unity and Unreal opt to have the accessibility on by default. I mean, technically it shouldn't make any difference to a sighted user unless they turn on TTS on their system of choice if I'm understanding things correctly. It should just let a screen reader know there are, for example, some buttons and a menu or something they can interact with. Having it off by default may just increase the "out of sight, out of mind" thing.

As far as I know, other programming languages/platforms, if you use the platform-specific elements and not custom ones, the accessibility meta data is automatically visible to a screen reader. You only run into issues if someone makes a custom tool/element and doesn't manually add in the accessibility hooks.

2019-07-27 00:50:59

um, @5... um...