Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It's not that I don't sympathize with your wife and all... but find it a bit hard to believe that any audio program can convey the staggering amount of visual information that even non-visually impaired people have trouble working through.

In PvP alone you have to be able to ID a target, know it's range, heading, speed in conjunction to your own heading and speed... glance over at D-scan... then correct your own heading and speed by double clicking into nothingness... all in the space of a few seconds.

If there is such a program that can do all that then I will admit to being impressed and support this thread.

The program is the easy part, people with visual impairments use software called screenreaders (such as NVDA and voiceover) to read out textual information on the screen. It's not very difficult to expose information to them, even rich interactions and live updating content.

So the trick is to abstract out a bit. Instead of thinking purely in termsof what the interface looks like, thnk again about whether it really is visual information, or whether it is in fact information that is being represented visually.

A subtle but very important difference.

Granted, for many game mechanics this isn't possible. But EVE is a bit of a special case. The information communicated through the API certainly isn't visual, even though it is represented visually in the EVE client. It's just textual data. You can see that clearly enough through the third party apps that have been developed, such as Aura and Neocom.

Neocom for example is completely accessible to players who are blind.

But the real reason why EVE is a special case is the overview scanner. Live updating textual information describing your environment, distances, types, and allowing the full range of interactions (the live text updates on combat, damage etc, are also ripe for exposing). Whatever it's possible for you to do in the overview panel it would also be relatively easy to do if you have little or no vision.

Back in the old days of MMOs (MUDs and MOOs) all information was conveyed by text, and therefore easily screereader accessible. This layer of data still exists, it just has a layer of visual interpretation over the top. If that data can be exposed then blind and strongly visually impaired players would have access to a large portion of the game.

Granted screenreader users aren't a large audience, but given the fact that a significant chunk of the work is already done thanks to the overview scanner it needn't be too huge an undertaking, would be something truly ground-breaking, and gain some very loyal & vocal new customers.

Being the only major MMO accessible to that audience, ie. a completely empty competitive landscape, would be a pretty enviable position to be in (and wouldn't exactly hurt in terms of press coverage either).

It would be interesting to see if a CCP Dev has any thoughts on this.

There could be probably text input and special client for game, commands clicked could be the commands writed. All text and descriptions could then be readed in artificial voice.

Bump. Because I know at least one blind person who would love to come in and rule the markets with an iron fist.

This sounds like a great idea. I hope CCP can make the changes required.

+1

Thank you! Hopefully this can spark some attention and interesting ideas from you guys!




Just like our UI, it is something that will be under constant improvement. Just having it created would be a huge step, then the visually impaired can give feedback on how to make it better using their experience with other accessible programs and so on and so forth. CCP has gotten much better at listening to the players and making adjustments accordingly, and when it comes to this crowd, it is something that they will benefit from.

I bet a fully blind person could mine, run missions and trade fairly easily once CCP could get Aura to read out data to a user.

Cautionary note: It would be better if it was an in-game solution because once you start sending real data out of the game, say to a 3rd party application, some botter will use it to his advantage.

The more people in eve the better ... +1.

The most successful bots - confidential ones - already read codes out of the client instead of OCR the interface. Eve is easy to bot because game mechanics is already "spreadsheet online," whether you show the spreadsheet on the surface is irrelevant.

Long overdue bump, don't let this get buried.