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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Do you play computer games? What are some good blind accessible ones?

Go to audio games.net. That's a whole website dedicated to accessible gaming.

From the more mainstream ones, The Last of Us 2 has famously implemented accessibility. I haven't played it, as it's one of the only games for the PS4 that is accessible, but people are saying that it almost plays itself when accessibility is enabled, taking away part of the enjoyment.

Other mainstream games are getting accessibility mods, Hearthstone has a really great one. Audio Quake, an accessibility mod for Quake, was also quite popular back in its day.

Text based games, from Infocom's interactive fiction to MUDS and MOOs are also pretty accessible, a significant portion of people still playing them are blind.

Can confirm! I run a company that has five MUDs, and we have quite a few blind players as well as at least a couple of blind employees. I'm not visually-impaired, but I like knowing that our players who are are "seeing" the same game world in their heads as fully sighted players, or at least seeing the world from an equal perspective.

> but people are saying that it almost plays itself when accessibility is enabled, taking away part of the enjoyment.

I don't envy anyone trying to solve this problem, seems next to impossible to do a live action game above a certain level of accessibility. Just the time you have to communicate what's on the screen (much less being able to quickly communicate what's on screen) is so tight on a shooter for example. Found a neat video [0] of TLoU2's accessibility features.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHN5v3NJ9ko

> Just the time you have to communicate what's on the screen (much less being able to quickly communicate what's on screen) is so tight on a shooter for example.

There's an episode of Person of Interest that provides at least a possibility here: "Let's try an ascending tone cue for right, descending for left.". The tone then switches to beeps when on target.

Feels odd sharing a youtube link in the context of this post, but if anyone wants to see/hear the scene I'm talking about it starts at 1:21 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70

(Just for a bit of context the character doing this isn't blind, but these cues are helping her shoot people through walls. The episode is the second season finale, titled "God Mode".)

At a certain point it sort of feels like you're creating a different, parallel game that hangs off of the "main" one. It's definitely worth trying, but I wonder when it makes sense to identify those elements that would make an action adventure/shooting game playable by a blind person and then use just those elements to make a new game that is natively playable by blind and sighted people alike.

I wouldn't presume to speak for others with a different experience from myself (and it does seem [1] like some blind users really like what TLOU2 had to offer), but as a fully-abled gamer with limited time, even I sometimes choose to watch a streamer or even a YouTube summary in cases where I'm interested in the story or whatever but don't feel up for playing a thing myself. I wonder how this option stacks up against what TLOU2 was able to deliver.

[1]: https://caniplaythat.com/2020/06/18/the-last-of-us-2-review-...

Card games like Hearthstone seem like they'd be great options, but the turn time limits sure would be challenging! It can be hard enough to keep up at times when you can take in game state at a glance and take actions in an instant with with mouse.

I would get very heavily into Inform / Interactive Fiction / Old School Text Adventures, for sure

The roguelike genre (on its purist form, text interface with turn-based action) seems would be appropriate for blind people. Roguelike Radio did an episode about that:

http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2012/10/episode-48-designing-f...

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