Hello! Good night everybody.

I am part of an institution that helps the blind and people who have low vision. These people use the computer with the help of screen readers that narrate everything that appears on the computer screen.

I would really like to create games for people in this condition, and for that, I turned to RPG Maker. It would be nice to create some games in this style, and to help the blind to locate themselves in the game environment, I would put sounds that indicate when the character is going in the wrong direction, when he is trying to go in a direction where there is nothing else to walk, when stops in front of a character who can start a dialogue and so on. But, when testing a game created in RPG Maker, I saw that the screen reader does not recognize the texts or the dialogues that occur within the game, probably the software works only with graphics and not texts in fact (I don't know the technical name for that).

My question is: is there any software similar to RPG Maker, but that the text content of your games is compatible with screen readers?

I know that there is a service that helps in creating games exclusively in text, and in this case, that would be compatible, but I would like one that is capable of producing an environment in which it is possible to control a character and move it, which only dialogues and battles are in text. It's possible?

Thanks for everyone's attention.

You may want to broaden your goal to interactive fiction, and do a search for authoring software there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_game_creation_software​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction#Software​

https://iftechfoundation.org/​

My (admittedly uninformed) opinion is that supporting screen readers is not a good way to support seeing impaired users in games.

For vision-impaired players who can still make out the graphics of the game but can't read, my recommendation would be to use actual voice acting for all on-screen text, which would be a lot more immersive and all-around pleasant than having the text read out by a generic screen reader. Even amateurish or outright bad voice acting beats screen readers.

For actually 100% blind players who can't see the screen at all, you will need to rethink your whole approach, because something like 90% of an RPGMaker game is driven by graphics, not text, and screen readers are no help at all there. You will want to write the game in an interactive fiction format, which naturally supports screen readers, and then you will want to add full voice acting for all text anyway, because voice acting still beats screen readers.

@a light breeze Hi, thanks for answering me.

Using screen readers would be for dialogs only. Maybe I can produce the dubbing for these games, in this institution that I participate, there is a studio where they record audiobooks, maybe I can organize people for these dubbings.

But beyond that, I wanted blind people to be able to move the character around in a scenario, and as I said, I would use sounds to help the player get to the right place. I would put some kind of sound for when he bumped into a "wall", another sound for when he entered the "against the road", another for when he stopped in front of a character that he could start a dialogue, and so on. That's why I wanted to use RPG Maker, because I have a little experience with the platform, but I confess that I don't know how to trigger a sound with each dialog (I would need to do that for the dubbing to activate along with each dialog box).

Do you have any game engines that you could recommend me for this purpose? I have very little experience with creating games, but I have a lot of experience with web programming and software, so any kind of technical migration wouldn't be a problem.

I would suspect that it can be done, in one way or another, with most general-purpose engines. I'd suggest looking around for those that seem likely to be comfortable for you to develop in, and then look into what features they offer (including via any asset stores or community code-snippet collections they might have).

But I'd also suggest first looking into whether it's possible to trigger audio with dialogue in RPG-maker--or, perhaps, to trigger audio instead of dialogue. (i.e. To have the player approach an NPC, press the “action” button, and to have that prompt an audio clip rather than a text-box.) After all, you don't really need the text itself if you're going to provide audio and intend the game for an audience who won't be in a position to read.

By the way, I've seen at least one game designed to be played blind, and indeed using audio-cues to orient the player, I believe. I don't know how successful it was in that, offhand, but the goal seems possible, to me!

Thaumaturge said:

But I'd also suggest first looking into whether it's possible to trigger audio with dialogue in RPG-maker--or, perhaps, to trigger audio instead of dialogue. (i.e. To have the player approach an NPC, press the “action” button, and to have that prompt an audio clip rather than a text-box.) After all, you don't really need the text itself if you're going to provide audio and intend the game for an audience who won't be in a position to read.

On the other hand, if you want to support an audience that includes people who are not vision-impaired, then text + audio beats audio-only. I understand that vision-impaired people are your primary audience, but it would be a shame to unnecessarily exclude hearing-impaired people from your audience. (Keyword being “unnecessarily”. If you want to write a game based entirely around audio, with no visuals at all, go for it!)

Personally I'd be more worried about interactive UI elements than about dialogue. Doing voice acting for dialogue requires a lot of work but is otherwise well understood. Creating an interactive UI that can be used by completely blind users is trickier.

@a light breeze Reading our friend's comment above, I was reminded of another problem I identified in RPG Maker and it goes against this. One of the needs of having text compatible with screen readers was the need for the player to know which options he is accessing, and in RPG Maker it would not be possible for me to trigger an audio every time the user navigates through the menu (this would be necessary for him to be able to know what options he has available, which he has accessed, the powers that the character has and etc).

I need to do a better research on which engines exist for this type of game, and in which I could create these audios along with the menus, without that, it would be an unfeasible project.

@Thaumaturge Hello, Thanks for replying.

After reading the comments here, it seems to me that the issue of dialogues is quite simple to solve, but I remembered about the problem of the user navigating through the menus, something that could not be accompanied by audio for each option in RPG Maker. So, I'm really going to need to find another engine to make a game viable, do you have one to recommend me?

The point regarding the playing of sound-cues for menu-actions is a good one, I do think.

As to a recommendation towards a specific game-engine… not really. I imagine that most game-engines can do it in one way or another, which means that--aside from checking for the presence of such a feature--the main question is that of which engine is best-suited to you. And that I don't know--it might be worth your looking into and trying out various engines, and seeing which you feel most comfortable with, both in terms of being a good fit for you and in terms of features.