Hi, it's me! Again!
So, I'm always at the lookout for games for a blind person to play.
And I stumbled accross some blind people online who played this, so that had me thinking.. why not.
She will most likely play with me at all\most times, so let's assume I'm her guide and navigation should not be a huge problem.
The game is very easy to control using only the keyboard, huge plus.
You can use the /point gesture to find out which direction you are looking if needed.
Easy to make a macro for /follow and target enemies etc.
Someone on reddit pointed out that windower allows for the chatlog to be placed in a notepad-file, and with notepad++ in trial mode it can read the chat in realtime with a screenreader, so that solves a huge problem and enables knowing what you're targeting through a macro like /echo <t> since that shows the target in chat.
Have anyone here tried this?
If yes, does the screen reader pick up on stuff in the menu?
Does anyone have any tips that makes this seem even more viable?
I don't currently have FFXI installed so I can't test stuff myself right now.
I'm mostly thinking about bringing her through the world and the story etc, so no need to think about endgame content and how diffiult some fights would be.
FFXI With A Screenreader - Anyone With Experience?
FFXI with a screenreader - Anyone with experience?
No experience here, but just wanted to say I really hope you will succeed in setting this up. /cheer
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RadialArcana said: »
I saw this post and reached out to said person on Reddit, but no reply.
Gonna try to install the game and see what happens, but it's gonna be a slow process to try it out I think due to busy days.
She's using JAWS screen reader with a braille display, hoping it works as well as the other software for the user on reddit!
If anyone was curious about this:
Does this seem viable?
If you are a very techy person who REALLY wants to do this, yeah sure.
Will this be a fun chill game for a person who has only ever played text-based games?
No, probably not.
Text to speech does not work at all ingame, reading menus are reliant on "OCR", Optical Character Recognition. This is mostly used with a camera or some other external device you point at the screen, and if you are completely blind I expect this to be very very challenging to use for menu-navigation.
Even having notepad++ set to read out the chat log in real time is pretty rough, since you gotta alt-tab between the chat and the game, so the delay from reading to input ingame is gonna be brutal.
TLDR:
This could work with alot of practice, technology has come a long way and is very fun to play with.
But this would not be a chill low-effort game to play this way.
Does this seem viable?
If you are a very techy person who REALLY wants to do this, yeah sure.
Will this be a fun chill game for a person who has only ever played text-based games?
No, probably not.
Text to speech does not work at all ingame, reading menus are reliant on "OCR", Optical Character Recognition. This is mostly used with a camera or some other external device you point at the screen, and if you are completely blind I expect this to be very very challenging to use for menu-navigation.
Even having notepad++ set to read out the chat log in real time is pretty rough, since you gotta alt-tab between the chat and the game, so the delay from reading to input ingame is gonna be brutal.
TLDR:
This could work with alot of practice, technology has come a long way and is very fun to play with.
But this would not be a chill low-effort game to play this way.
This may sound ignorant but I dont get the point. I would think a game that has voice acting and more modern accommodations to be better for this.
Draylo said: »
This may sound ignorant but I dont get the point. I would think a game that has voice acting and more modern accommodations to be better for this.
FFXI has a rather slow tempo, and all the text is actually pretty inviting for a blind person.
Reading the text in braille is way faster than listening to someone talk, so as far as action goes it's very interesting :)
Modern 3d games are very rarely made playable for the blind, sadly.
The last of us 2, as far as I know, is the only game that has REALLY gone all the way.
Disclaimer: I haven't played FFXI in 4 years
There's a lot of stuff you can do with client-side information and commands that would make this entirely possible:
The real problem is finding someone who knows how to code, knows FFXI, is willing to work with you on this, and has the time to work on writing everything. I'd totally do it if I weren't so busy myself.
There's a lot of stuff you can do with client-side information and commands that would make this entirely possible:
Instead of using /point, you can see the exact angle your character is facing in radians. Also x,y,z coordinates on the map, distances to other characters, and a ton of other stuff I can't remember.
Instead of relying on a macro to type /echo <t>, you can have it print the name of any new target to the log automatically. Can also have it automatically target (or act on) specific characters/mobs on conditions or by specific commands.
Instead of going through menus, you could either use keyboard commands or injected packets to handle things like changing equipment or using the AH.
Using OCR wouldn't be necessary I don't think, but it'd ideally be set up to use screen captures and an algorithm tailored to the menu font, common menu layouts, locations, selection indicators, etc. You definitely do NOT want to try to rely on an external camera for this.
Shouldn't need NotePad++ for text-to-speech integration either; this can be automated. You could still have it for reading through log records though.
Can also add sound cues for various gameplay events to cut down on noise clutter, including adding music to places that don't normally have it. Can also add music changes for context (night/day, weather, mob spawns, etc.).
I know nothing about tactile displays but I'll bet they're designed to accept text streams from external programs.
The real problem is finding someone who knows how to code, knows FFXI, is willing to work with you on this, and has the time to work on writing everything. I'd totally do it if I weren't so busy myself.
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