EVE General Discussion

Having played with a couple deaf players in the past and being a slow typist myself I decided to find a solution to making communication relay a bit faster and easier.

I decided to make use of my G13 Gamepad which is great for FPS games and such, but useless in EVE.

I made a list of quick text blurbs on each hot key so i could just hit a key when im in the right window. Use this with marking targets with broadcasts and you can actually get alot of good info across really quickly.

Fleet Hold on Gate (regardless of verbage ;p ) Fleet engage target 1 Logi repair target 3 etc are all possible

With so many different keyboards with special hotkey for macros and such I could see a lot of folks trying to work with deaf players making use of what they already have.

Just a thought.

We have been bouncing around some ideas about how to make our fleets more friendly for people with hearing loss. Having at least a dedicated broadcaster seems like a good start, and getting a person volunteer to type the important verbal commands in fleet have been two ideas we are implementing.

To get some more ideas I sent a quick form letter to a few advocacy organizations for the hearing impaired:

"Hello I play game called Eve online, it is an online game with 500,000 subscribers that has been around for 10 years. Sound is not critical except for voice communications between players. And there is an easy to use broadcast system that allows most voice commands to be relayed and displayed visually.

It came up recently on our forums that Eve has a pretty significant deaf player base because it is one of the few MMO’s that is not sound dependant. We have been bouncing around some ideas about how to make the game more deaf friendly, and so I wanted to contact someone that might have some more insights.

Thank you for your time.

Sent to :
Baltimore association for the deaf
World federation of the deaf
NAD"

Be interesting to see what they send back.

Any ideas for how to encourage players to volunteer as a relayer? It does take some concentration and is something that should be rewarded. I was thinking maybe having a monthly or weekly loto for anyone that participated. I would like to get some more ideas and maybe work on implementing one or two of them. So any feedback is welcome.

Maybe we can get Eve to be certified "Deaf friendly" I think that would be the first time such a thing happened. =-)

TEST has a few deaf players. Most of them get by by haveing somebody relay commands in private convo. It's not optimal, but we do try to include them in fleets.

Is relaying standard for you guys or does it just come up when someone asks?

)) Also---> give back Republicof! ((

Corey, we touched on this topic in another thread, IIRC. I'm mostly deaf myself, but I get by well enough by muting out everyone but important people on comms.

I'd really like the idea of a relay service, but, it'd be difficult to implement due to ~metagame~ in EVE.

Now, if you want to make something work...I recommend looking for court stenographers who play EVE. They have the specific training (and sometimes equipment), to do real-time audio to text transcription.

There are several deaf players in my alliance. One of whom, who has been deaf since birth, is actually an FC and a pretty decent one at that. We also have a dedicated channel for fleet relays so that anybody who is hard of hearing or simply wants relayed commands for other reasons can join. It's also come in handy for other things like if our Teamspeak server goes on the fritz in the middle of a fight. There's always someone in fleet willing to volunteer to serve as relay.

Yeah I used to be the guy to do the closed captioning convo for him. I felt bad for the guy because every 3rd word was misspelled and I would mess with him and tell him they said he wears panties and shiit to get him to start talkin trash to the other guys unprovoked. Good yuks with that guy I wish he still played.

With enough motivation, it probably wouldn't be too hard to jury rig this software to take mumble / ventrilo / whatever's output as an input, and have it transcribe text onto an alternate monitor.

You'd probably have to train it with the FC's voice and use a no chatter voice channel, but I can see this being somewhat feasible.

Hmm... I stopped nearly-a-year streak of not posting on these forums just to post in this thread. It's caught my eye for a while now and I've wanted to reply for some time. Yes, there are tons of deaf players in this game but they like to stay quiet about things in general because hearing people are usually quite harsh towards them in another MMOs, and EVE does attract a ruthless crowd. I tried starting up a corporation once a long long time ago, didn't work out. Too few people. Even fewer people who have enough confidence to join a corporation that basically tells everyone you're deaf.

I must say that this game has the potential to be the most deaf-friendly MMO to hit the markets as combat is usually quite slow. You could make do with short text commands such as:

Movement:
wt [System] --> warp to [System]
wt [System] @ [Distance] --> warp to [System] at [Distance]
jump --> Jump
hold/sb/standby/wait --> Standby for further directions
...etc

Context:
enemies ns --> Enemies on the next side
waiting os --> Waiting on scout to relay info
...etc

Combat:
pri [Name] --> primary [Name]
sec [Name] --> secondary [Name]
ter [Name] --> tertiary [Name]
fire --> Fire
fire aw --> Fire at whatever/will
...etc

I mean, I dunno. That was the plan for my deaf corporation so we could be a good pvp unit but because like no one joined, it never came to fruition. I hope other FCs pick up this idea and use it though... being deaf myself, believe me when I say that we thrive on visual cues and textual commands. Most of the time we get by in a fleet by following what people do instead of listening to the FC. But this can be a problem as we usually just don't know what the hell is going on... basically there is no context for us to work with. If people just took the time to clarify why we're doing X thing, we'd be able to piece the rest of the dots together!



Out with the names! I'm pretty sure you're talking of Rochester Institute of Technology due to their famous (at least in the deaf community) National Technical Institute for the Deaf. There are tons of deaf people here due to the federal funding of services rendered (such as interpreting, notetaking, Cprint relaying...). Personally I go there for the tuition benefits "just for being deaf" and learn at RIT. I'm graduating in two weeks anyway and will be working, so please believe me when I say that all deaf / HoH (hard of hearing) students should come here. It is an amazing place and a lot of hearing people are eager to learn sign language. Hell, even the town itself -- Rochester -- has been dubbed the "deaf capital" throughout the deaf community due to the sheer amount of deaf / HoH residents here.

Could voice-recognition software like 'Dragon Naturally Speaking' be used to relay orders/communications to other players in a realtime typed format?



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