Games that support screen readers

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.

I think the menu sounds might be possible in RPGMaker XP (which is the only version of RPGMaker that I ever looked at) using Ruby scripting. It's not going to be easy, but it just might be possible.

The main alternative option would be to use a general-purpose game engine like Godot (or Unity or Unreal, but Godot is free and the others are not). This would make it easier to attach sounds to menu items, but would make everything else harder because there is less out-of-the-box functionality.

a light breeze said:
The main alternative option would be to use a general-purpose game engine like Godot (or Unity or Unreal, but Godot is free and the others are not).

Let me add mention of Panda3D (the engine that I use) as another free option.

It is worth noting, however, that it's not an editor-centric engine, but rather a code-centric one. That said, there are a few promising-looking editors being developed by the engine's community, I think.

@a light breeze@Thaumaturge Thank you both for your attention and advice. Next semester I will focus on learning about the subject in order to start a project involving games, I hope it works out.

Fair enough, and good luck in both your studies and your projects! ^_^

In my game, I had two players completely blind. They used special programs to read the text. For them, first of all, the biggest obstacle is usually navigation in games. While in my case the entire game is text-based, navigation does not work in text-reading programs. From myself, I will say that a blind person in the case of game production is very helpful.

You could glance at the MUD AlterAeon, they've been around quite a while and are explicitly designed to be screen reader compatible. Also names a few of the people that took on responsibilities for the client.

https://www.alteraeon.com/blind_support.html

It might not seem to be exactly what you wanted, though that client is also made to work very well with the partially blind and people who aren't blind. Has a better than average graphical hint system as well.

Also worth noting that their tools are actually used if you look at user graphs http://alteraeon.com:8080/graphs/17