SightlessKombat: Audio Innovations in Game Accessibility

Please note this transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

Sound Without Sight, connect, collaborate and create.

Hello and welcome to the Sound Without Sight podcast. In this episode, we welcome gaming accessibility consultant SightlessKombat, who shares examples of some of the audio innovations that are improving access to video games.

He shares clips that show how sound cues, narration and audio description are used to enable blind players to navigate and interact within game worlds and menus, as well as to support combat and driving. SK also answers questions from our community.

This podcast was recorded live as part of the Sound Without Sight monthly meetup for August 2025. If you’re listening to the audio only podcast, there’s also a video version on YouTube.

Hello, everybody. I’m SightlessKombat, and welcome to Gaming Without Sight, Auditory Innovations. Now, once again, I want to thank Jay for inviting me to be a part of this.

Really, really appreciate that. And the opportunity to share my knowledge, such as it is, with all of you. Now, I’ll go into what we’re going to cover today in a minute.

But first, by way of a little introduction, who am I? There’s a picture of me, for those of you that can’t see, there’s a picture of me smiling with an RNIB cap and shirt on.

And what we call the wall of stuff behind me, which is a load of various merchandise, pop vinyls, figures, various pieces of merch and things that I’ve accumulated over the years.

But as for me, I am SightlessKombat’s award-winning, multi-credited accessibility consultant and gamer without sight.

I use the term gamer without sight as legal blindness, often just shortened to being blind, and can and often does include usable and or residual vision, which I’ve never had. So it’s basically a way for people to know, oh, how much can you see?

I’ve just told you, I can’t see anything at all, and I’ve never been able to. Of course, acknowledging that sight loss is a spectrum as well. So I try and make that distinction.

I am also RNIB, that is Royal National Institute of Blind People’s accessible gaming officer as of July 2022. I’ve consulted with various studios. So I said I’m multi-credited.

I’ve worked on games like God of War, Ragnarok, Sea of Thieves, Killer Instinct, Horizon of Bitten West, The Veil, Shadow of the Crown, Stories of Blossom and Star Wars Outlaws, just to name a few.

And I’ve also done presentations, much like the one you’re watching now at events like AxeCon. So the big digital accessibility conference that happens every year.

EGX, I’ve done ones and of course, the Game Accessibility Conference as well, which included moderating a panel, which was a lot of fun. One year, that was very cool to be able to do.

I also write accessibility reviews, which some of you may have read over the years. I’ve been doing that for over 10 years now.

I’ve been writing reviews from my firsthand perspective, and I’ve also been streaming on Twitch and other platforms for a number of years as well, showing how accessibility works firsthand, either with or without sighted assistance.

Now, today’s presentation is going to be discussing audio innovations in accessibility in gaming over the past few years, covering a few sort of key elements that we’ve seen sort of come to prominence.

And there have been innovations, of course, since The Last of Us Part 2 brought accessibility arguably into the mainstream.

But of course, you know, there are other innovations that have led us to where we are now from then, and even before then as well, before Last of Us Part 2.

And I will give a disclaimer, not all of the games shown here are going to be 100% playable without sighted assistance. That is just an unfortunate caveat. But the importance of these titles is not to be understated, of course.

3:57

Accessibility Foundations

Now, what makes a game accessible? So we have key components here as a slide. Key of course being a pun because there is a massive key in the middle of the screen with various components, pun intended, going around from clockwise from top left.

We have a sports car.

The audio description symbol, so AED are the letters in a speech bubble, a sniper rifle, a man talking into a microphone with headphones on, a historical reenactment scene going on with a bunch of people mid battle, and a compass.

You will see how all of these are relevant as we go along. Now, the components to make a game accessible are of course numerous and varied, with each game trying to cater to various different disabilities with its numerous features.

And of course, as a gamer without sight or a gamer with sight loss, you’ve likely seen advancements over the past several years, but you will probably still have needed assistance at one time or another for something.

But of course, accessibility has been attempted to various fashions, and those attempts have been successful to varying degrees, including in fields, but not limited to, of course, things like menu narration or well menu and UI narration.

We have the picture of the man with the microphone and the headphones as the backing image here. So with games new and old, it doesn’t matter.

The point being, if you’re trying to set up a game, you want independence, that is to be able to set up the game to your needs.

And whether that’s adjusting things like turning on high contrast elements for certain things, should you need that adjusting sound levels or even just enabling straightforward things like auto pickup that pretty much everybody probably has turned on

because it means that you’re mashing triangle less when you’re running around in most games. But when menus aren’t narrated or the user interface or the UI isn’t narrated, you have to rely on things like optical character recognition or OCR.

And for those of you that aren’t familiar, OCR is essentially you take a picture via software or things like a phone app, and it will then the app or software will attempt to recognize what’s on the screen and present you with text that is readable

to your screen reader or just in general. And unfortunately, that method, though it can be useful and has been known to be useful at points, can be kind of usable at best and outright garbled at worst.

So having menus that actually speak, which is the whole idea of menu and UI narration, the menus are automatically read and the UI is read as well. You know, having that be available is crucial to having games be accessible.

Now, it isn’t just games that are natively supporting it that we’re going to be covering, because we’re going to start with Hearthstone Access. Some of you may be familiar with this already. This is a modded piece of accessibility.

So a modification introduced external to the game’s standard development, mostly by community, mostly by the community members. And Hearthstone Access is no exception.

With Hearthstone, that is a popular card game, digital collectible card game from Blizzard. And we’re not going to discuss the pay to win elements of the game here.

But the fact of the matter is, the community stepped up and modded this a good few years ago now and made it so that as a screen reader user, you can actually play this. And that includes, you know, online as well against other people.

Now, Blizzard did say several years ago that they would look into this in terms of adding native accessibility into Hearthstone. Though thus far, as far as I’ve seen anyway, nothing has actually happened on this front, and we are still waiting.

But if it does ever actually come to light, then rest assured, I will be yelling about it from various places as well. But what you’re about to see is a very brief clip of the game in action. And you’re going to hear my screen reader as well.

So if you’re wondering what the strange voice is, that’s my screen reader. So let’s roll the clip. Here’s footage of Hearthstone Access.

So as you can hear, there is a lot of information there.

You know, reading things like your hand, the field as well, your opponent’s elements as well, when those would come into play, turns ending, you know, where to summon things, all sorts of intricacies that are all covered in what is also an accessible

tutorial as well. There is an accessible tutorial available. We will come on to screen readers later briefly, in terms of a certain setting, which I’m not going to spoil.

But if you’re wondering what any of that was, because you can understand it, then do for free to let me know and I will endeavor to do what I can. But moving from a PC game with a mod, yeah, Half-Life Access is only compatible with a PC version.

Sadly, at this point in time, we are going to go to a console game, which is As Dusk Falls. So some of you might already be familiar with this as well.

Now, this released in 2022 and was much liked by myself and others because it was a choice based narrative that was actually fully playable if missing a few things, which were added by the PS5 port and updates to other versions as well.

This game is available on Xbox, PC, PS5 and other places as well. But enabling narration is actually one of the first things that this game lets you do, if not the first.

And that, of course, satisfies all the haters who believe their consoles and PCs and devices are possessed, which is very interesting indeed when you get people saying, oh, why is it talking to me?

And you’re just like, okay, well, it’s just the narration. It is totally fine. And it gets you, it allows you to adjust related settings without having to worry too much in this particular game’s case.

And I’ll just roll the clip and you’ll see what I mean as well. So let’s have footage from as Duskfalls.

When using audio description, we recommend adjusting music volume to 60 and SFX volume to 40 for an optimal experience. Would you like to do this now? Yes.

You are turning on in-game accessibility narration. Would you also like to disable the choice timer for assistance? Yes.

No. It’s highly recommended to enable the extended QTE timer if you’re using audio description at standard speed. Would you like to enable the exten-

Yes. No. Narration speed.

Value 1, minimum 1, maximum 10. Narration volume, narration speed. Value 7, minimum 1, maximum 10.

So that is, as Duskfall is showing, that auto-adjusting kind of workflow, whereby it realizes you’re putting on accessibility features and lets you tweak other things as well, which is very handy, particularly as it saves you time scrolling through

myriad menus. Now, speech speed was seen there very briefly, and you can, of course, hear the contrast between the default speeds that most people might think that I’m looking through the menus at.

Let’s say, and the speed that I actually set it to in the end, which was a lot faster.

There’s actually a YouTube short that I put together a good while ago on a similar subject, showing the speeds people think I read at and the speed I actually read at or around that, which is very much interesting to people who are unaware.

12:26

Audio Description

Now, from menu narration, of course, to audio description, which was actually mentioned in As Dusk Falls. Ironically, we have the photo of the AD symbol here. We have the image here, just the letters AD in a speech bubble.

So AD, audio description, is actually a very recent trend in gaming, starting really with trailers, things like Watch Dogs Legion. I’m actually a certified audio describer, as well as being a musician, but that latter part isn’t related to this.

But I actually described Watch Dogs Legion’s tipping point cinematic when that released. So if you go back and watch the AD version of that video, then you will hear my voice on that. So that’s pretty cool.

And I’ve also AD’d the Accessibility Summer Showcase over the past few years, a great event showcasing games, including ones that are playable without sighted assistance as well. But what is AD?

AD is essentially a secondary track that is also massively popular in film, TV and theatre. All sorts of other industries are getting into it as well. Several adverts as well have recently started doing it.

And essentially it describes what is going on in terms of the visuals on screen.

So things like, you know, characters coming in and out of scenes, what characters even look like as well, which is good to keep track of who’s who, particularly when characters haven’t been named yet, for instance.

Gestures, costumes, things that aren’t basically covered by the dialogue, you know, to elaborate on what all those sound effects mean, which is very, very useful.

And one such example of AD in games actually comes from the first example, at least comes from a small game called Sequence Storm.

Now, if you’ve not heard of this one, it is a brutal rhythm racing game, brutally hard in places in the gameplay, but fully accessible without assistance.

I’ve actually beaten the main game and it is very challenging, but good fun and many narration is present as well. It’s one of the first things you get to enable.

And audio cues are of course available to get you through the various gameplay elements. But here, of course, the key thing is audio description for the story. Now, Sequence Storm does have a full on story mode.

I’m only going to show you a clip from the very opening of the game, but this is using text to speech. So here is footage of the very opening mission of Sequence Storm.

Story screen.

Press enter to continue through dialogues.

Press escape to skip the story.

Inside Elijah Gale’s apartment building. Elijah Gale is a young computer engineer sitting at his computer terminal in his apartment.

The apartment is a bit of a mess, with tools and equipment strewn around.

The computer terminal is a nest of wires and cables.

Outside of the small, round window, we see a dismal cityscape of identical apartment buildings.

Elijah says computer, connect me to Midori Raceway.

The terminal displays neural link activated. Connecting.

By authentication for user, Elijah Gale.

Complete. Connected to Midori Raceway.

An animated avatar appears on the screen.

He is a small pink cartoon of a man wearing a racing suit and helmet.

Jelly says welcome to Midori Raceway.

I’m Jelly, your personal concierge.

Elijah says hi Jelly.

Jelly says yeah, hi, are you going to place a bet or not?

So on that slightly ominous sounding note, we end that clip. And the thing with that is you would not know what Jelly looks like, for instance, on that screen. You would have no sense of that without that AD.

And it’s actually the same voice that’s used for many narrations. So it all runs through your standard Windows text to speech setup, at least on my side. Now, this is from a very small, if not solo, team, which is absolutely wonderful to see.

Proving that accessibility, of course, isn’t just happening in the AAA space. But speaking of AAA, or, you know, large scale mainstream games, we have Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. I wonder how many of you have played or watched playthroughs of this.

And there will be an opportunity to have questions at the end as well, if you’ve thought of anything so far that you might want to ask. So please hold your questions until the end. But Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 released in March 2023.

In March of 2024, there was a retrofit patch that added not just audio description for cinematics and that includes QTEs or quick time events where you’re basically pressing buttons for things to happen.

That’s a massive simplification, but I hope that makes sense. But it also added TTS, which the game, or text to speech, which the game calls screen reader, which allows you to read all the menus and have those QTEs spoken.

And the two elements, AD and the screen reader, seamlessly merge together in a fantastic display of what is a very, very accessible action game in the, well, it’s the most accessible superhero action game we’ve seen yet.

But I’m just going to roll a clip from a sequence relatively mid-game, a pretty iconic sequence that those of you who’ve watched my streams for a while would have seen me play through live on stream as well.

So here’s this Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 sequence.

Peter scales the towers as it smashes through the track for the speed demon roller coaster. Cars full of people pull toward the gap.

Triangle button.

Peter helps civilians off the front row of the coaster. It’s gonna be okay. The coaster tips forward over the missing track.

Peter webs it up, barely holding it in place.

Hold.

Left stick down left.

Hold.

Right stick down left.

Peter attaches a web from the front of the coaster to the intact track, immobilizing it. He then leaps toward a second coaster. He lands on the coaster.

Don’t worry.

I’ve got you.

Peter catches a crossbow bolt.

Circle button.

He dodges shots from hunters. Peter flips toward them.

L1 button.

He redirects a rocket onto the hunters, then lands on the coaster. It barrels toward the first one.

Once again, we leave on a kind of ominous note there, but that is very well-delivered indeed.

Just like the movies, of course, that is taking influence from the ideas delivered by a human in comparison to the previous example where it was text-to-speech.

But the button prompts, of course, are text-to-speech, and those are giving the various movement instructions, even if they could have been improved by not necessarily needing the word button, for instance.

But those are things that can be worked on over time as things improve and are undertaken forward from things like feedback.

Now, if you wanted to play Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 yourself, unfortunately, there are sticking points in this game for accessibility without sight. But the majority of the game is playable without assistance.

There are a couple of guides online to specific missions, should you want to play those through yourself. Though they did add puzzle skips for those afterwards as well. If you really get stuck and you feel like that’s the only way to get through.

19:20

Navigation Assistance

Now, most of the assistance I needed for Spider-Man 2 came from our next topic. Navigation, and there’s the compass there that we saw earlier.

Now, even if, let’s say, you had a game that had all the setup and menus narrated, even with audio description, there are still of course key barriers that you might face.

Now, if you dropped into a new world in a video game, what is the first thing a sighted person would look for? A way to get out of the room they’re currently in, probably. At least that’s the way I’ve looked at this when I’ve worked with this before.

Now, as a gamer without sight or a gamer with sight loss, you would of course seek the same thing.

But without Navigation Assist of any kind, you’re probably going to struggle to get past the first area of pretty much any game in the last 40 or 50 years. Now, Navigation Assist examples go way back.

The earliest examples that I’m aware of are dating back to the original Gears of War in 2006, which is coincidentally getting a remaster releasing in a few days’ time as of this presentation’s original recording, Gears of War Reloaded, which will be

very interesting to see how that comes out. And then of course, you’ve got other Navigation examples like Dead Space, the original Dead Space in 2008, all the way up to relatively recently with The Last of Us Part II, God of War Ragnarok and the Dead

Space remake. Now, all of those examples utilize camera turning systems, but thankfully, we’ve seen a rise in systems that aren’t just automatic and not necessarily leaving you in an on-rails kind of scenario. Like Gears 5, Escaping.

This is actually a game that I worked on, full disclosure, or a feature that I worked on.

And there is a blog post, which if you’re interested to read it, I’m sure we can sort the link out for you to have a look at afterwards, put up by The Coalition to make Gears.

And put the feature together alongside consultancy from individuals like myself. Now, what is Navigation Ping Escape Mode, or Escape Ping as we shorten it down to in Gears 5?

So Escape is a mode where three people go in to a level, they plant an explosive and seal it away as the enemies are taken out inside, essentially. So it’s a sort of a team-based escape mode, hence the name.

Now, the Escape Ping feature which was added after launch allows you to navigate through kind of like a sonar system.

You have a pinging noise that you can follow, hence again the feature’s name, and that will be given to you based on the tile you are currently on because the maps are generated through tiles.

So you’ll go along one tile, you’ll hear the ping change in pan for direction, so panning left to right, and volume and frequency of the ping, so how rapidly it’s pinging, and the pitch of it as well based on the proximity to the next tile.

So they’re like small individual waypoints, if you will.

Now, as much as this system is flawed, as acknowledged again by the Coalition, as they put together information on behind the scenes for it, it doesn’t allow you to find supplies or your downed teammates to revive them, etc.

It does allow me to run with or even lead a squad in terms of, you know, in a multiplayer setting, bear in mind, and, you know, with no automatic camera turning required, being part of, as the sci-fi movie Oblivion once put it, an effective team.

So now I’m just going to show you this because my explanation might have been a little confusing. So I’m just going to show you this in action. So here is Gears 5 escape ping.

Leave it to Hoffman to think up some crazy sh** like this.

As a wise Gears said to me, let’s do it!

So, that might have looked a little hectic, but that was the very beginning of an escape match. And you might have heard an extra cue there, which was actually a vaultable element in the environment. That’s the great thing about this.

It may not be perfect, but it definitely shows how things can improve with just one feature.

And the fluidity and agency that’s provided in, again, a multiplayer setting, where historically accessibility is something that’s arguably less considered or seemingly harder to implement or have happened.

Now, speaking of accessibility in multiplayer, we have Diablo 4, another live service multiplayer game, where accessibility has been improved on over time and added in during patches. This game actually has a pretty simple premise.

You kill monsters to gain XP and loot, to then help you kill monsters better, I suppose. Oh, and yes, there’s a story, a very long, slightly frustrating story, for reasons we’ll come on to in a minute.

But this game is played from a top-down perspective, so no camera movement needed. You move in eight directions, so not four, as you might have necessarily expected, but the camera is one less obstacle to worry about.

But amongst the many other things that they’ve added and adjusted over the game’s life cycle up to now, there is Overworld Navigation as a series of audio cues that were added in a patch in late 2024.

Now, I’m just going to show you these, and then I’ll briefly try and explain how they work. But again, you are going to hear my screen reader, and this is basically set up as if I’m just going to leave town to go on a side quest.

Yep, so as that clip fades away, you might notice there are three audio cues there.

So there is one for when you are facing exactly the right way, one when you are basically facing the right way, and can keep going in that direction roughly, and one when you are facing completely the wrong way and need to turn around, which is very

useful indeed, particularly for people like me who get slightly lost and confused during the heat of battle. And what you just saw, unfortunately doesn’t apply to dungeons, which is a core part of Diablo’s story and gameplay loop.

Dungeons are essentially small, closed off areas that are not part of the overworld. But that is a feature, dungeon navigation, that is being worked on by the team.

We have no timeline as to when that’s going to be introduced, but I very much look forward to the day when it is.

Coincidentally, Drew from the Diablo team is going to be talking at the Game Accessibility Conference in the US at the end of September, and actually potentially discussing behind the scenes elements of that.

We don’t know whether that’s going to be covered, but here’s hoping we get a release date for that, because it is a feature that has been a long time coming. But at least we have overworld.

Now, moving from hitting things at all sorts of ranges in Diablo to gain experience to the experience of fighting up close.

27:10

Combat Accessibility

With melee combat, and we have our friendly reenactment people fighting each other here in this image in historical attire. Let’s say you have an open world game where all the objectives are narrated.

The map is a list, can be rendered as a list of icons that you can scroll through and just track what you want. No mouse pointer style free cursors needed.

And then let’s say further that stealth has gone horribly wrong in an encounter, even if it is accessible, and you have to engage with a combatant firsthand, pun intended. Now, how do you make these fights fair?

With innovations like you may have seen in Mortal Kombat 1, for example. Now MK1, as I’m going to call it from here on out, is arguably the gold standard within fully accessible fighting games now.

Even though Street Fighter VI does come close according to some, I personally am not of that opinion, but Mortal Kombat 1’s full menu narration plus audio description, very well written and by a human team as well, which is fantastic.

It also includes distance cues, hit types and ducking and blocking cues as well that have leveled the playing field in terms of my comprehension, at the very least, of understanding just what’s going on mid-battle.

Now I’m just going to play this clip and then I’ll explain a few things, but see if you can figure out what cue is what in terms of this. So let’s play some Mortal Kombat 1. And yep, there’s that.

And that was practice mode footage, if you were curious as to why my opponent wasn’t fighting back. And as a fun point of fact, all the footage you’re seeing throughout this presentation has actually been edited by me as well.

If you’re interested in learning about that, I’d be happy to discuss outside of this. But you’re probably wondering what that clicking noise was, because that’s the first question I normally get when I’ve shown footage of this game off before.

So the Geiger counter-like sound is actually your distance cue. So it indicates how far away you are from your opponent. And you’ll have heard the hit types for high, low and mid.

The various pitched tones there, which are very handy. And they all mean that if I’m getting hit, I understand how my opponent is hitting me in terms of where I need to block. And that’s also very useful indeed.

And if I was to duck or block, that’s all part of the strategy as to how to avoid some of the attacks or better counter things.

Now, speaking of strategy, there are other forms of fighting in video games that have had innovations over the past few years.

Specifically looking at a game in this case called God of War Ragnarok, which once again, I actually had the great opportunity to work on.

Now, whilst this game does have its issues in terms of some of the systems not being as complete as would be anywhere near ideal in certain cases, and also, of course, content that is locked off behind various elements of the game that aren’t

playable without assistance. The one thing the game does do well, most certainly, is combat cues.

Now, granted, elements of the combat are thanks to unintentional accessibility, as it were, so sound cues from enemies, rather than specific accessibility centric cues that you have to turn on.

But there are also accessibility centric ones in terms of audio cues that are for things like blockable attacks, unblockable attacks, parables.

Yeah, so you have for cues, attacks that you need to dodge, block, or, you know, sort of essentially get away from or work with from range.

So in terms of all of this, God of War Ragnarok is one of those games where there is a lot to look at and a lot to listen for.

But once you go through it and you understand how it works, partly thanks to an audio glossary that is available in game, then you will probably have a better handle on it than, you know, a lot of people just trying to dive in for the first time.

I’m going to show you footage of a 1v1 fight. So me versus a boss in this case from relatively early on in the game. See if you can figure out what all of these cues are and just how they fit together.

Now, what I didn’t tell you before I started that footage was that was being played on the hardest possible difficulty level, Give Me God of War, with a shield designed for parries. So, yeah, very, very fun indeed trying to challenge myself for that.

And you know, a lot of people underestimate how much processing you can do in terms of audio, but when I show people clips like that, it’s great to see the looks on their faces.

You’re like, you know, they’re saying, how can you understand all of this? And I just say, essentially, the way it ends up is that I process audio cues the way most people process graphics.

Once you understand how it works, and as long as there’s not too much overload, then you can work pretty well with that. And that is all just on, I’m mostly playing on a standard stereo set of headphones, but I have played on surround setups as well.

And these cues work very well on that too, including the cues for perfect parries, which are very satisfying when you hear those at full volume.

Now from, I briefly mentioned it earlier, but let’s move on to the next aspect of combat, which is ranged combat. Now we’ve got the photo of the sniper rifle here.

And of course, whilst up close combat is brutal and fun, sometimes it can be overwhelming in terms of the sheer number of opponents you have to deal with, and they are best removed from afar.

Now without knowing where your enemies are, which can happen by audio, but isn’t always reliable, particularly when enemies are behind walls and things, or just getting sighted assistance is usually more straightforward.

You still want to have the satisfaction and frustration of being able to try and hit shots in iconic games with a little help from accessibility innovations, such as you may have seen in The Last of Us Part 1 Remastered, for example.

Now this game, if you’ve not played it, has solid sound design and a load of the other features that we’ve seen so far. So things like menu narration, navigation to its own degree and audio description.

But here the key thing is, it’s a system where there’s actually two systems of play. One is auto-targeting, which is not necessarily ideal, but you’ll see why shortly.

But the type of auto-targeting that you have in The Last of Us, part one and two, because the systems are shared between entries in this franchise.

The key thing is that it allows you to aim for the head, the center of mass or the legs via this auto-targeting system, which are actually tied to audio cues.

Now, in the footage I’m about to show, you’re going to see me using a bow and arrow to take out an enemy, and you’ll hear these cues in action, because they are pretty distinct, and you’ll get to see just how this works in practice when I am in

relative stealth. You’ll see what I mean.

I was about to give up, and she started shooting at us. It’s stupid, she could have got away. I had two other guys keep her busy.

I took out my rifle, lined up a little head in the crosshairs, and…

You see anything over there? Hey, are you okay?

Comedic and arguably lethal timing aside for that individual, possibly thanks to the amount of practice I had to actually put that footage together. Yes, it took me a while to get it right.

The key thing is I was able to do that all because of those cues, and they are very, very useful indeed, as is the navigation assist, which even though it’s on rails, it does allow you to get through the game.

And so that’s actually in contrast to the auto-targeting and lock-on style of aiming, which you can change.

You can actually aim for enemies freely, but it is a lot of trouble because the game isn’t technically designed to directly support that without sight, arguably. The contrast is our next game, Sea of Thieves.

Again, a game that you may have heard me talk about over the years, partly because I had a hand in what I’m about to discuss.

Sea of Thieves is a contrast because not only is it a multiplayer pirate sandbox game, but it also had aim cues retrofitted after launch, and it’s had other features for various demographics fitted as well, put in to allow more people to play, and

the team are constantly working on stuff like that. So in 2023, Audio Aim Assist, as it was known and still is, as a feature was introduced.

Now, I personally call it Audio Aim, because Assist implies extra handholding that the game isn’t actually doing, i.e.

moving your gun for you automatically, let’s say, which the game doesn’t do, because the audio aim system that you’re about to see actually just gives you cues for the reticle.

Now, the reason I’m talking about this so passionately is because it is so much fun.

Bear in mind, Sea of Thieves has been out for about five years at that point when that feature released, and I was able to then use the hand held, various hand held weapons.

So things like the Eye of Reach, that game’s equivalent of a sniper rifle, various pistols, throwing knives and all sorts of other fun things to take out.

Not only human players, but also enemy skeletons as well, and other denizens of the Sea of Thieves. Now, in the footage you’re about to hear, you won’t hear my sighted crew. That’s the one caveat I’ll give about this game.

Sea of Thieves, much like Diablo, realistically requires a sighted crew to get through, at least in my personal opinion and experience, especially with Sea of Thieves, though that is true, because there is nothing in the way of navigational aids to

help you actually get through the game yourself, even finding your ship. In the footage you’re about to hear, though, you won’t hear my crew putting me into position to make the shots that I will then take.

But the reticle movement, which comes after that, is all me. So let’s roll the footage and listen and see if you can work out how this all fits together. And then I’ll give a little explanation.

I’m going to press the Ctrl or X button, set sail length.

There’s that fun, wait for it, moment right at the end there.

Yeah, so essentially the way that system works is you’ll hear the clicking noise, which is the reticle, and it pans based on the location of the target. So the game is basically saying there’s an enemy over there.

And you will point towards that via, you know, left and right, moving to the analog stick. And then it will be a higher pitch sound if you need to move down, or a lower pitch sound if you need to move up.

And then you’ll hear the noise is the best way I can describe it. And everything goes silent. That means you are on your target.

And if they haven’t moved behind a rock, you can take the shot and hopefully, it will connect with a very satisfying noise.

40:22

Vehicle Accessibility

Now, moving from aiming at long range, or aiming at long distance rather, to moving long distances in vehicles. And there’s a sports car there. There’s the sports car from earlier.

Now, with vehicles, you want to be able to navigate as easily as you would generally, of course. You know, seamlessly, ideally, with no extra buttons required.

Now, very few games have actually allowed for vehicle control without constant assistance of some kind. But here are two games over the last couple of years that have achieved such a goal. Starting with Forza Motorsport, of course.

When I said vehicles, most of you probably thought, oh, is Forza going to come up? Yes, it has. So this is very much an on-track system because it is a track racer, so there’s no open world stuff here, unfortunately.

But the ideas here are a brilliant beginning that we’ve seen as a sort of bar to set for the rest of the industry in terms of how to look at racing games. So the cues you’re going to hear are of various volumes and settings.

You can calibrate those yourself if you ever decide to play the game. The key one to focus on is the racing line, which is actually the car’s engine.

So the line that most sightseers people would follow to say where to go and when to brake and accelerate as well, that is cued by your car’s engine. And there are actually deceleration cues as well.

It’s a shame there aren’t actually cues for the reverse when you can speed up, but that might be a future development. That’d be cool. But there are also cues for upcoming turns and things as well, and narration for other elements of information.

So, I’m going to show you footage of a 33 second lap that I ran against a fellow gamer with Sight when around the time the game first came out, really. So, if the game looks or sounds a little different, that is why.

But here is me speeding around a track in Forza with no assistance.

Record segment plus 25CXP.

Left four long.

Segment score 8.3. Segment score 5.0.

Last lap, 0.00 minutes, 33.739 seconds. And you’ll have heard a small beeping noise to the left or right. Those are track limit cues as well.

And what I should have said earlier was no sighted assistance, because I did have a few assists on, and to be honest, I can’t really race well around anything other than an oval. That is my own admission, and I’m not afraid to say that.

But the fact of the matter is that makes those cues make the game really, really good fun with a bunch of friends and so many people on track that carnage will definitely ensue.

Speaking of carnage definitely ensuing, a game that came out earlier this year and took cues from Forza is F125, where I very much have trouble driving, because I’m not used to playing F1 games like this.

But with cues once again similar to Forza, sadly though with no menu narration, I’ve actually been able to somewhat figure it out. Now, as I said, there is no menu narration, so I had to use a guide to set that up.

Much like with God of War Ragnarok, where I co-wrote a guide alongside a fellow gamer with outside and somebody who works on the game directly, there has been a guide written for F125 by very, very helpful community members who’ve taken it upon

themselves to put it together. So you can actually navigate through, find the correct settings and put it all together with a controller as well. The footage you’re about to see is just a quick flavor of how the cues work.

You’ll notice they are very different in terms of tone to how Forza does it, including text to speech for the turns as well.

But it’s a good start for a series that hasn’t necessarily tried it before in terms of adding accessibility for gamers without sight. So here’s footage of me in time trial slightly edited for time. And for the record, that is the PC version.

Not that it necessarily matters, but I thought it was worth mentioning because I used obstacle character recognition to get through the menus. But it still took a while.

And even though I still have a long way to go in terms of learning this game, it’s a good start and an interesting experience driving around in a different type of car to what I’m normally used to in other games.

45:46

Future Initiatives

Now, this is a non-exhaustive list, of course, of innovations and interesting things that have happened over the past several years.

I haven’t been able to talk about things like smart wrapping menus that are outside the scope of this, whereby if you move up, if you hold up or down on the d-pad in a menu, it will stop at the top or bottom of the list, which is it might seem like

not very much, but it’s a very useful little accessibility adjustment that I’ve seen games try to make. Things like haptics for immersion or for useful information, so things like rain haptics in Last of Us, or features being available at all

difficulty levels, which is something that I’ve seen either used to great advantage or not in some cases. Alt text for character creators, something I would love to see improved and worked on more.

But if you want to know about these and other ideas, I’m happy to talk at length about these potential innovations and improvements, which will lead me on to my next slide in a second.

I’m sure, of course, we can all think of games that we would love to play or would love to have plays that could greatly benefit from including any or all of these various aspects where applicable, because of course, each game is different.

But it would be something great to see as part of the future of gaming. Speaking of the future, and there is a link up here, rnib.in slash design for every gamer. And of course, you can type rnibdfeg into your search bar of choice.

Now, I and rnib, of course, are working with various developers, studios, publishers. Essentially, anyone who’s willing to listen, we want to work with to help make their current and future projects accessible.

There is an element of hope in that because much like, as Star Wars once put it, much like Rebellion’s, accessibility is built on hope, to a point.

And rnib is working to help the process with a couple of different things as part of the Design for Every Gamer initiative, which is I alluded to just now.

Now, the Design for Every Gamer initiative encompasses multiple strands, but two of those are the DevKit, the Best Practice in Accessible Gaming DevKit, which is a living document that is available for the industry to contribute to as well,

showcasing best practice in accessibility and discussing how various types of games can be made accessible and the spectrum of sight loss elements of that that could be useful for any prospective developers, whether large scale or tiny indie teams

have won that kind of thing regardless of who wants to go and look at it. And the other side to that proverbial coin is the player panel, which all of you can actually go and join if you haven’t already. Now, the player panel was actually asked for

by the industry a few years ago at the Accessible Gaming Symposium that RNIB ran, and the industry essentially said, hey, look, we would love to test with gamers with sight loss, but we don’t know where to start. And the player panel is essentially

200 plus gamers with varying levels of sight from across all walks of life with varying levels of game experience. So if you want to be a part of any industry opportunities, then you can find the information on that Design for Every Gamer page.

There are actually two forms. There’s one for industry and one, of course, for players as well. So people who want to provide the feedback to the industry.

Now, you can’t spell accessibility without ability. And I want to thank Jay once again for the opportunity to be here and share these innovations as they’ve happened, such as they are.

And of course, I will put my links and things up on the next slide. And you will have the opportunity to ask any questions. I hope you found this useful.

And thank you very much for listening. And there are my links, which Jay has hopefully put into the chat.

So let’s jump in some Q&A. And I’ve selected some questions that were submitted in advance. And I think we’ll go through them generally in this order.

So there’s a few around kind of the gaming community and the gaming industry. And then there’s some about how to get started with accessible gaming. There’s a few about specific games and specific types of game.

And then there’s more kind of technical ones about specific audio cues and ways the audio is used or could be used.

50:17

Community Industry

Okay.

So I think if we look at the community and the industry first, we had a question from Adele who was asking, how could gaming be possible as a person without sight?

And you’ve showed many examples of how it can. So I think we’re going to reframe that slightly and say, how can we reframe gaming as an accessible hobby?

I mean, yeah, because there’s this misconception that gaming, you know, video games are visual, you know, this kind of whole idea. But then you’ve got games that thrive on their audio.

So stuff like The Veil Shadow of the Crown, where there are sort of abstract graphics, as I describe it, you know, where it’s designed to be that kind of immersive experience through audio.

But equally, gaming can be accessible with the right features. That’s the other thing. You know, I’ve played through Last of Us Parts 1 and 2 multiple times.

I’ve played through God of War Ragnarok multiple times. And those games, they may have their flaws, but they are accessible examples of what could be possible.

And they are bars to reach for in their respective genres, arguably, and surpass, of course. So being able to show that it can be done is half a battle, really.

Even if you need assistance from, say, a co-pilot, so using setups where you have, you know, I have control and somebody else has control, whether that’s locally in the same room via things like controller assist or assist controller on Xbox and PS5,

or through things like Parsec, which unfortunately had an accessibility-related element removed recently, but they’re planning to put it back in. So I’ve heard in the future at some point, potentially.

The fact of the matter is it doesn’t matter how you’re playing, as long as you’re enjoying it and having fun. If you’re playing the way you want to play, that’s half of it. But of course, encouraging accessibility is the big thing.

Making people aware of how much you want to play and how much of an impact the accessibility features are having. Of course, doing so constructively and being mindful of the humans on the other end as well. I think is a good way to look at it.

Brilliant.

And Tilly is asking, how do you think accessible game design is perceived within the industry at the moment? Do you think game developers are going out their way to make a conscious effort? Is there real momentum, you feel?

And how do you think that might develop in future?

That’s an interesting question. These are all good questions, of course. But in terms of that, I feel like there are people who really want to make games accessible, but unfortunately, there are barriers preventing it from happening.

So we’ve seen projects that could have potentially been accessible be canceled and have production issues, features be not quite as complete as they could be.

And I feel like accessibility needs to be normalized in terms of this needs to be a starting point for development. Without accessibility, we don’t go any further kind of thing.

You know, have it as a core piece of the puzzle that is game development and, you know, getting people involved from early on, you know, consultants being a part of it through the entire life cycle of the game, including post launch and things.

So I feel like there is, there has been a shift for the better over the past few years. But unfortunately, because of how long games take to make, it can be a while between releases that have enough accessibility to be playable as well.

I think the key thing as well with that is to try and keep as positive as you can, just finding the releases that you can play, yelling about those. And then sometimes that can get through to other people.

So they’re like, oh, you know, this is accessible now. What can we do to surpass it? So there’s a lot of moving parts there.

And I feel like we are getting towards a better sort of future with accessibility. But with engines not having native support for accessibility things, so menu narration is still hard to put together.

Navigation is still extremely hard to put together. You know, those are just two examples. The fact of the matter is, I think engines need to do more.

I feel like accessibility needs to be planned in more. But even though we have a really long way to go, we are still seeing things improve and that is still progress.

Yeah, I guess a lot of this stuff is happening for the first time. And it’s like just making sure that when a good development does happen, it just gets the biggest spotlight possible and shared widely so that people know that it’s there.

Because I think a lot of developers might look at usage statistics, who’s using these features. And it’s almost like a chicken and egg situation. Because if people don’t know they’re there, then they’re not going to use them.

And you won’t get people kind of jumping into the gaming world. So yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, very, very much so.

You know, and also as well, you know, having systems where people vote on ideas and having accessibility included in that, I am really not a big fan of that because accessibility ideas often don’t get voted up as high as they should.

And instead, it’s all like, oh, give us colors, give us visual skins or whatever. And I understand that’s the majority.

I completely appreciate that those ideas might be valid, but have a separate section for accessibility related ideas and go from that. Not saying treat accessibility as a completely different thing. I’m saying, treat it equally.

Give it the respect it deserves arguably, because everybody is going to need accessibility features one day. And if you don’t start including it now, then it’s going to make it worse later down the line potentially. Is the other way to look at it.

Yeah.

And somewhat related to that, Mary is asking, how can I get involved in the gaming consulting community? So Mary is saying she’s got a YouTube channel, but it’s quite small.

She’s written to game developers, but hasn’t heard much back apart from Blizzard. She just wants to be part of that community. How can she kind of get there?

That’s a very good question.

I mean, it’s kind of about finding your niche and going with it, finding the games you want to play. Sometimes, it’s about just being… It is a lot sometimes about luck as well.

When I first started out, I was writing unboxing, essentially unboxing instructions as a part of my reviews. That was how I started out. I was like, hey, could I have…

I’m interested in reviewing this product. I’ve got no sight at all. Would you be interested in helping me out with this?

And sometimes you’ll get no response, sometimes you’ll get a no, and other times you’ll get a yes. And even still other times, you’ll get a yes and then future collaborations with that client when you reach out again.

And that took a while to get right. So it’s mostly a matter of finding the kinds of games you want to play or the types of games you’re interested in. And just sometimes it’s being in and around the communities as well.

There’s all sorts of ways you can look into it. But I think part of it is just learning to sort of cope with the fact that sometimes you won’t hear back.

But just because you don’t hear back doesn’t mean the feedback you’re giving or whatever isn’t being looked into either. Look at, say, potentially user research stuff as a player. Player research, do things.

The Game Accessibility Conference might be a good place to look at in terms of networking. Of course, RNIB may be able to put you in contact with things as well, potentially. There’s all sorts of avenues to look at in terms of that.

But I’d be interested to see where you’ve got to at this point as well, because sometimes it’s good to then get feedback and think, oh, you know, what could be done differently? Because that’s what I’m always looking at as well.

I’m always interested to know what my community think I could do differently, or what content they would want to see.

Because sometimes it can just take one video or one piece of work that you’ve done, and people recognize that, and they’re like, oh, you did this video. I was really interested in that. And that can start conversations as well.

So there’s all sorts of elements to the puzzle, I guess. Lots of this is about puzzles, I don’t know why, but so.

No, no, really good feedback, though. And yeah, great suggestions there. Specific one from Karen, who is asking, have you had any experience with the Jingle Jam fund?

Can you share anything about that?

Yeah, I did actually, when RNIB was partnered with Jingle Jam a couple of years ago, it was one of the charity partners, I actually did fundraising for it. And that was a lot of fun, doing all the streams and things. That was great.

I can’t even think of how many times I streamed during that sort of month or a couple of weeks or a few weeks of time. But that was great fun to be able to be a part of that.

I actually followed a couple of creators from that, who I still drop into their streams from time to time. So it does happen. It’s quite a cool thing to be able to be a part of.

And new people were dropping in to donate and things as well.

And it was great being able to acknowledge those donations when they came in, thanks to accessible streaming software like Firebot, which is a chatbot that I use, where it essentially throws…

It can be set up to do audio alerts and text to speech and put messages in chat, all kinds of things. So it’s very useful to be able to have that. And let’s say you, Jay, dropped in and donated, you know, 100 pounds or whatever.

I’d be like, Oh my goodness me, Jay has dropped in and donated 100 pounds. Thank you so much. And then you’ve put a message saying, wait, you’ve put a message saying, play Last of Us Part 2 in mono?

What? What are you thinking? So it’s all about that kind of community, you know, fostering that community and being able to be a part of that, a bigger event like that was fantastic.

It was great fun.

Awesome. That’s great to hear. And yeah, probably a community is naturally formed around that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

1:00:29

Game Specifics

So in terms of getting started, got a question from Scarlett who’s asking, what games would you recommend for a totally blind beginner? Where would they go to get started?

I mean, that partly depends on your platform.

Scarlett has suggested PlayStation or laptop.

Okay. So I mean, yeah, because I was going to say with mobile, you’ve got stuff like Land of Livia, which is an interesting one to get started with.

But PlayStation or laptop wise, I would say as I begin, depends how familiar you are with, say, audio only games, if you’re not familiar with that as well, you might be interested in stuff like the Veil Shadow of the Crown.

So it’s kind of a mainstream flavored audio experience, I guess. So it’s a linear narrative RPG type thing. So you’re sort of fantasy RPG.

You play as a blind protagonist. It’s got controller support. It’s keyboard compatible as well.

I actually tested it. It was a lot of fun. And it does have its difficulty spikes in a couple of places.

But I would say that’s a fairly decent place to start if you’ve not necessarily played, you know, a mainstream game before.

But if you want to dive in at the deep end and you have a rig that can run it, so a PlayStation would run it or a PC as well, potentially. The Last of Us might be something you’re interested in. It is very heavy story wise.

I would suggest the first one. Personally, I prefer the pacing and the story of the first one, and it still holds up well, even after, did this make 12 years? Well, that seems like a very long time.

Yeah, 12 years of it being in existence. The Last of Us part one still holds up well. But if you’ve not played a mainstream game, that can be quite a lot because it kind of expects you to understand how mechanics work.

And if I’ve seen people try and go through it and they’re not necessarily familiar, and it’s interesting, it can have a learning curve much like, you know, Forza or things like that.

So you do have options, of course, you know, with fighting games as well. But it all depends on what kind of genre you want to go for.

And then, of course, there’s Hearthstone Access as well, which I mentioned before, but does have its pay to win elements to to an extent, much like any, you know, collectible card game.

So you have options, you know, that there is opportunity for further discussion there as well. But I hope that’s potentially useful insight. There’s stuff like the Family Gaming Database and Can I Play That as well?

The RNIB disseminates in terms of, you know, sites you can look at and able to play as well to figure out, you know, what kind of games you want to play and whether they have the accessibility features that meet your needs.

Yeah. And that actually leads on really well to our next question. You’ve shown clips from so many games that maybe some attendees didn’t realize were accessible or accessible to a certain degree anyway.

Nicole is asking, besides word of mouth, what are some ways one can find out which games have accessibility built in before purchasing them?

So, I mean, a lot of the time I end up getting my information through other people, which doesn’t necessarily help, but I do, you know, I will sometimes have heard about releases and I will investigate those myself.

So, you know, if I if I’ve had like a review code through, I will look at the release and then, you know, I will then be able to say to other people, oh, this is this is useful.

But sometimes developers will release stuff in terms of accessibility info. So things like Star Wars Outlaws, they released information a while before. I know various Ubisoft or Ubisoft titles have done it.

Various Sony ones have done it as well. I’m curious to see what happens with Naughty Dog’s upcoming title whenever that gets more information. Intergalactic, the heretic prophet.

I think I got the name right. Long title. But yeah, so keeping an eye out on channels of various companies, like Xbox, PlayStation, that kind of thing.

You might not find accessibility centric information, but you might find out about a game you are interested in, and then you may be able to glean information from press releases and things like that.

In terms of actual accessibility specific info, sometimes if you have a look at a game’s features, there are store tags now which do have their problems at the moment, their teething problems.

For instance, Elden Ring was labelled as a game with I believe it was no precise button inputs and you could pause it at any time, neither of which are true for Elden Ring. But granted that initiative is in its early stages.

And then of course you’ve got stuff like Able to Play and Can I Play that Family Gaming Database where you can potentially search through and find stuff without it being recommended to you directly necessarily.

So I know that’s not quite necessarily what you were asking, but I hope that’s useful anyway.

Yeah, and I just want to say thank you very much for this presentation. Like I said, I’m new to gaming and I’m really enjoying it. So I do have Twitch and I will be looking for you and possibly interacting in the future.

Oh, cool. Thank you very much.

That’s lovely. I’m glad this presentation has been helpful and useful. I’m looking forward to seeing what you end up playing in the future as well.

Thanks to some of the games you’ve mentioned.

I’ve actually started playing like The Last of Us and Sequence Storm and as Dusk Falls.

So brilliant.

Yeah. All right. Thank you.

Thanks, Nicole.

So you mentioned briefly the store tags there. So I think that came out of the Accessible Gaming Initiative. Yes.

There have been talks of doing stuff similar for music products. I’m quite interested. How successful do you feel like they’ve been in the gaming world?

I feel like the only time I’ve really heard about the store tags is when they are slightly broken.

Sure. I mean, then again, that’s with most things, isn’t it? Not to throw shade at Elden Ring, but I saw the only articles I’d seen about it on Switch 2 was Elden Ring is a disaster in handheld mode.

I think that’s the thing, though. Negative publicity for games often is the first thing you end up seeing. But with the store tags, I feel like there’s potential there.

But by the same token, when things are labeled differently to how you might expect, or there aren’t labels for certain features that I might necessarily use, for example, then that can cause problems.

But I feel like I haven’t seen any major backlash. I think people understand the importance of it, and they see the value in it, which is a great start.

It’ll be interesting to see how that evolves, particularly with various platforms having different needs or requirements or abilities or capabilities rather.

So there’s a lot to like there, but it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves, particularly with more games hopefully becoming accessible in the future.

Absolutely. Okay. So let’s move on to some specific questions about specific games or genres.

Ross Megan is asking about GTA 6. Obviously, that’s going to be a huge release.

It was only a matter of time.

Probably the biggest of the century so far. Have you heard anything about accessibility in GTA? Yeah, could lay down a real strong marker if there was some kind of accessibility.

Alas, I haven’t in terms of GTA 6.

And even if I had, I may not have been able to say anything. But by the same token, I know GTA 5 had an accessibility mod that was being looked at, that didn’t necessarily allow you to complete.

Well, I’d heard mixed things from people as to what they could do with it. But it could have been the basis for potential future investment, maybe from even a community standpoint. But with GTA 6, I know as much as everybody else does, i.e.

not very much in terms of that side of it. But I will be very interested to see what appears, given so much has happened between GTA 5 and 6, and particularly the industry’s shift towards accessibility.

It will be very, very interesting to see what happens. Maybe eye-opening, who knows as to how that game has been working accessibility and if it has.

Here’s hoping it has, because there was alt text on the images on, I think it was on the GTA 6, one of the sites for it had alt text on the images. I’m not saying that necessarily means anything, but you never know, we’ll take what we can get, right?

So, you know, who knows, alt text could mean other accessibility is at least being looked at. We live in hope.

Brilliant. A great answer. So question now from Chloe.

So Chloe’s asking, besides remasters, re-releases or new games in general, have you checked out any accessibility add-ons for retro games? Or might there be any older games that you’d really like accessibility to be added to?

Oh, okay. So it depends on what you’re defining as retro, because of course that can mean many things to many people. I know there’s of course the Pokemon Access mod that’s been around for a number of years.

I’ve tried to play it and personally never got on with it, partly because I found it a little finicky to get running. It never seemed to quite work right for me in certain situations, but that’s probably just due to my setup.

But equally, you know, there’s stuff like, you know what, I’ve heard of a project that’s trying to get Diablo 1 to be fully accessible, which is well, not fully accessible, but like screen reader accessible, which is a very interesting project.

And I’m following that with interest, because I’m a Diablo fan, as much as there are, you know, accessibility issues with the franchise in terms of dungeons and things in fall. So, you know, there’s that Diablo project.

There is also, of course, the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time project, which I’m keeping an eye on. But again, getting that to run can be kind of tricky, given what you have to do to get it to run. I’m not going to go into the details of that.

But again, keep my eye on that. There’s Fallout and Skyrim modding being looked into by a particularly interesting project, or sort of like a project and a fork of it, I guess. So there’s all sorts of fun games.

In terms of games, I would love to see be fully accessible. I mean, if Killer Instincts Reboot had menu narration, I would be trying to get through Shadowlords, the sort of RPG single player thing they added in.

I would be trying to get through that, because I’ve got a very few, a very small number of achievements left to get on that, to get the 100% and they are all in Shadowlords from what I remember, which is infuriating because that is basically mostly

menu driven. And if it just had menu narration, that would solve it. Oh, goodness me. I mean, if you were to name a game, a popular game from the last 40 or so years or 50 years, I would probably want to play it.

If you said to me, Fortnite is fully accessible without needing a mod, because there is a mod for it that apparently works. From what I’ve heard from some people, there’s been mixed results.

I’ve tried to get it to work and it’s been spotty, unfortunately. But if you said that or the next Call of Duty will have full accessibility, or they’re making Titanfall 3, that’s going to be fully playable. I would gladly play any and all of those.

Same goes for older games as well.

If you said, oh, there’s a way to hook in menu narration to PlayStation 2 games, and there was a menu based, turn based RPG thing, you would not see me for several weeks, or rather you would, but you would see me streaming it constantly.

That’s great.

There’s lots of answers there.

Thank you. Yeah, loads of old games that I also struggle with defining what retro is. I mean, usually if someone says something is retro and I can’t believe it’s so old that it’s retro, that must mean it’s retro.

But yeah, that’s awesome. I mean, I’d love to see the fours are like sound pings maybe applied to the first Super Mario or something. All right.

Yeah, so for navigational.

Yeah, that’d be cool. Yeah, going way back, seeing navigation cues added into ancient retro side scrollers, that’d be cool. That’d be great.

That was awesome.

But yeah, thank you. And great talk. Thank you.

That’s very kind of you.

Thank you.

1:13:49

Technical Outlook

So we’ve got time for a few of these technical ones.

So first one from Sam Kenyon. How useful do you find thematic and adaptive music to be when playing a game? Could this play a bigger role in audio description to limit the amount of speech overlaid in some situations?

I that oh yeah, adaptive music is a fun one.

I’m just I’ve just got doom music in my head now. It’s not quite adaptive in the in the sense of there are tons and tons and tons of layers.

Because normally doom, Dark Ages, Doom Eternal, Doom 2016, kind of goes into the level of there is combat music or there is ambient music. And that’s usually it.

But that in itself can be useful because then you know you’re in an area where there is going to be a fight happening at some point in the very near future.

But then you’ve got stuff like Killer Instincts, where in the reboot they actually did dynamic music and they did a whole presentation on elements of the audio designing KI that I watched. Actually, the other day I was rewatching it.

It’s fascinating to look at in terms of the level of detail they went into in terms of that.

But you’ve got stuff in there, like your Instincts meter, so the gauge where you get to do very cool special ability things for lack of a better description in brevity, that has a specific musical element tied to it as a part of it.

So if you know what to listen for, you could in theory know that’s there before a sighted person looks up at the bars and realizes, oh, it’s there.

So it could be useful for things like, let’s say you’re in one of these big RPGs and a boss comes in, and you know that’s the boss theme music or whatever. You could use it for that potentially.

But it’s not really been utilized to that level, not that I can think of off the top of my head. But it’s interesting to think about in terms of maybe certain motifs meaning certain things.

So like if you’re inside versus outside, if you’re in like a dungeon versus a, I don’t know, a tower or whatever, any number of things you could tie it to potentially.

But I don’t think it would necessarily need to interfere with audio description as well.

I don’t think those two need to be tied together because AD can give you the details that are just not there necessarily through just a piece of music in a set of ambience. So I feel like they need to co-exist if they’re going to do anything at all.

I don’t think it should take away from here’s all this detail.

If you’re going to give detailed descriptions, then give the user the ability to turn those down, I guess, in terms of the amount of stuff being thrown at you, speech-wise based on user preference. But that’s just me.

So, yeah, I hope that gives enough of an answer.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. So Ava, Ava is asking about the, I guess, the contrast between text-to-speech quite robotic narration and human sounding or human recorded voiceover instead. Are there situations where one is preferred to the other?

I think, well, I think the real situation where it’s preferable is when you’re trying to get speed out of things.

So menu narration is the real example there. So I mean, as you’ve heard throughout this presentation, my screen reader reads at a speed that most wouldn’t expect.

And if you try and get some sort of text-to-speech stuff to go up to that level, when it’s just the default system voice on the PS5, for instance, it won’t necessarily go to that level.

But having text-to-speech that can read that fast for massive long inventory screens like Diablo, for instance, is invaluable.

But if you try and get a human to read all of that, that’s going to be masses and masses of data that then has to all be read at one speed. It’s like if you were trying to sit down and have it be like, you know, this is 720 of 746, or whatever.

You could be there for days recording stuff, particularly when you’ve got dynamic content involved. So if you’re adding items each season, you don’t want to have to get a human voice actor in all the time.

And admittedly, yes, you could use AI, potentially. There is an element of that. But by the same token, you know, the AI versus, you know, even if the AI stuff sounds good, it usually doesn’t always sound great at higher speeds.

And pronunciation can be an issue. So if you’re using an actual sort of standard text to speech system, you can try and sculpt the pronunciation a little to make it work.

Of course, there have been times where issues have come up, where certain things have been misspoken to quite comedic effects. But that’s that’s a whole other story.

But I’d say human AED is preferable, very much so, because then if you’re and that includes scripting as well, because if you script it with a human, you know, rate it with a human, it’s all quality checked by humans, then you’re going to get a much

cleaner, clearer, more detailed experience out of it. So take like your Spider-Man 2 versus, say, God of War Ragnarok, where we’re not quite sure how the script was generated, but the end result was unusual, to say the least, because there were

articles missing in the wording. There was speed changes where they tried to fit the lines in, even if they weren’t necessarily needed to be sped up.

All sorts of unusual things with that set up, because it was all text to speech and very robotic, as was said in the question. But yeah, so I’d say for menus, use TTS, that’s fine, but for narration, for AD, get humans involved.

Brilliant. Thank you very much. In terms of playing games that might have some small accessibility hurdles, do you have an experience of using SharePlay on the PlayStation to have a kind of sighted partner to support you to get over those hurdles?

I do indeed.

And funnily enough, I worked on a feature. Well, I say I worked on a feature. I was involved in discussions that became Horizon Forbidden West’s co-pilot feature.

So that is native in-game co-pilot. This is before, you know, sort of assist controller on PS5 came into being to allow you to simultaneously control in any game. And that’s only local as well.

So the co-pilot feature in Horizon, you can actually use over the internet with SharePlay. So even last night, as of the time of this recording, I was playing with a person in the States, my co-pilot, DB, who some of you may have heard on streams.

And he and I were playing through more of Horizon Forbidden West together as a team. So with traditional SharePlay in most games, you would have to pass the controller from one person to the other.

Whereas I very much prefer being able to control it together. So if my co-pilot tells me, OK, we’re going to run forward and jump, when I say so, you know, he will say, OK, three, two, one, go.

And, you know, I will then head jump on his cue and hopefully we’ll land it, you know, that kind of thing. So I’ve used SharePlay, but not necessarily in the way you’d think. You know, I’d rather play stuff myself if I can.

And I’m not necessarily a fan of being told, OK, go five steps to your left and then now four forward. Sea of Thieves, I think, is the only game where I do that. And that’s because it’s full on multiplayer crew dynamic and it works quite well.

But a lot of traditional games, I wouldn’t do that in because it just makes things tedious. But there is a use there is a use case for, you know, sort of share play slash assist controller, those kinds of things under certain situations.

I think it can be very useful.

The unfortunate concept or the unfortunate caveat is that you need PlayStation Plus on both sides to be able to effectively use SharePlay, at least from my memory of it, which is a prohibitively expensive cost just to try and get through a part of a

game. Arguably, it shouldn’t have to be that way.

Yeah, yeah. Interesting, interesting. Well, it’s good to know that technically the solution is there.

Well, there’s parts of the solution that are there.

So SharePlay is one person has a controller or the other person has a controller, and they’ve got Assist Controller, which is both people can have a controller at once, but they both control the same character.

What needs to happen is that gap needs to be bridged, so that, say, you and I can just hook in via SharePlay and both have control of the same character, should we choose. That hasn’t happened yet, but here’s hoping it does.

Sure, sure. Okay, well, I’m going to take one more question from the chat, and then we’ll go to, we’ve got a raised hand from Marshall, but firstly, just a quick one in the chat from Damian.

What’s your favorite recent game audio accessibility feature?

Can you pick just one? No, you can’t pick just one. That’s not how this works.

No, I’ll be honest. I have a soft spot for Sea of Thieves, of course, because being able to aim and shoot skeletons in pirate costumes and stuff is very good fun.

Being able to do that without needing assistance to actually hit those targets is great.

But of course, you know, we have to give props to Diablo with its navigation, because without that, I would not have had the patience to brute force my way through the campaign. You know, I had assistance for Dungeons.

I worked with either a full party or even just a second person or, you know, however many people to get through the Dungeons side of it. But when I was in the open world, it was pretty much just all me. And that was amazing.

Being able to just sit there for a while. And I’m like, I’m going to go and grind for more loot and get levels or whatever. I could just do that on my own.

That was fantastic. So yeah, I feel like navigation and aiming are the two big ones at the minute for me. But I’m looking forward to seeing what else comes out of current and future projects.

Brilliant, brilliant.

Okay, but we’ll go to Marshall with the last question and then I’ll wrap us up just after. Wow, that was absolutely amazing. Yeah, that was absolutely amazing.

I didn’t know about F125, to be honest.

No, I mean, it kind of, it sort of just appeared out of nowhere. That was the interesting part of it. It kind of just was like, oh, this has driving cues.

And then I was like, wait, I’ve got to try this now. And I mean, it will take you a while to get it set up with, without of course, many narration be in there.

But if you’ve got assistance, a lot of people say sighted assistance is a luxury, or there are some who do.

I would say, you know, if you’ve got it and you’ve got people who are willing to help you with it, you know, take the opportunity when it’s there, in terms of setting stuff up like this, or in terms of getting through parts that otherwise would stop

you. You know, that kind of thing. Because it’s fun to game with, you know, friends, relatives, et cetera, who are willing to help you. And, you know, they might enjoy it as well.

They might not realize they’re going to enjoy it, but they might do.

Yeah, so I’m just going to wrap us up with one slightly more philosophical one in terms of the accuracy of 3D audio in games.

Do you feel we’ll get to a point in future where the audio engines are so good that so much stuff doesn’t need to be described in quite the same way?

Will we get to a point where we have audio ray tracing effectively, where you get a lot of high quality cues from the environment as you walk around, almost like echolocation, or is that still a long way off?

Well, as it happens, I believe it’s currently being looked into, and there’s actually a demo on YouTube that I saw fairly recently that shows a working prototype. From what I remember, I’ll have to see if I can find it.

But it does apparently exist and it’s being looked into. I personally still believe there is always going to be a case for cues and things.

Partly because, let’s say, if you want to challenge yourself and play The Last of Us Part 2 in mono, you want to know where the stuff is left, right, behind you, that kind of thing, which you could do via additional little extra cues.

But those cues, if you wanted to then try and play that in full 3D, you don’t want to have to rely on people having really expensive headsets or specialized rigs or anything like that to just enjoy a game.

Also, don’t forget, let’s say you’ve just been to a concert, you come back, you want to play, you’ve just been to see Sleep Token, I don’t know.

You want to come back and you want to just play a casual video game at home, and your ears are slightly still ringing and your hearing is not 100 percent, let’s say, even with earplugs in from the gig.

You try and play, but because the game is trying to force you to rely on that 3D audio, it’s more frustrating. You should never force the player to rely on one singular method of navigation, arguably, in terms of audio stuff.

Because not everybody can process it that well. I’ve had times where people have said, oh, it’s definitely this. I’m like, well, no, it doesn’t sound like that to me.

So it would need a fair amount of work. But it’s an interesting thing to think about in terms of how clear it could be, how useful it could be, that kind of stuff. It’s definitely an interesting sort of future development to look into.

And the thing is, I’m hoping for many more games to be accessible. I’m trying to look long term to see what’s missing. That’s why I mentioned about engines earlier.

And it will be interesting to see where that goes. But I’m hoping, you know, that we’ll see in the next sort of few years, we’ll see more games embracing, you know, the innovations that have come up to now.

So stuff like audio navigation, audio aim, audio description, many narration with adjustable speeds, that kind of stuff. So it might seem like the basic things, but the basic things create a good solid foundation for the advanced stuff.

So, yeah, I mean, this year is arguably a turning point. It’s been five years since Last of Us, well, Last of Us Part II, ten years since I’ve been doing this. But we’ve seen progress in that time.

And here’s to another ten plus, you know, longer than that years of accessibility progress.

And who knows, maybe in 2035, I’ll come back and do a similar thing to this and be like, yeah, we’ve seen audio innovations in, I don’t know, VR over the past ten years. That have allowed me to play a fully accessible VR game.

That’s, you know, mainstream, that kind of thing. So who knows?

Brilliant. Well, that’s a great, great time to wind this up, I think. Amazing presentation and great Q&A session as well.

So thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much, Jay. And if any of you want to connect with me afterwards, you can find me as SightlessKombat on socials and things, S-I-G-H-T-L-E-S-S-K-O-M-B-A-T.

And of course, if you want to e-mail RNIB to get any gaming questions through there, you can do so at gaming at rnib.org.uk.

And don’t forget, if you want to read about the Design for Every Gamer initiative, you can type in rnibdfeg into your search bar of choice.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Sound Without Sight podcast.

Sound Without Sight is a community-driven online hub, collating resources and opportunities to enable blind and partially sighted musicians and audio engineers to break down access barriers.

Why not share some accessibility solutions you’ve found on our Knowledge Hub? You can learn more and get involved at soundwithoutsight.org. If you’ve enjoyed listening to this podcast, please consider making a donation to support the project.

You can do so at soundwithoutsight.org/donate. The music you’re listening to was composed by André Louis and members of the Sound Without Sight community.