Pokémon Reborn accessibility for blind players

[Gamulation]

Hi

I am fully blind and love Pokémon. I have tryde to play this game, but the map is simply to complicated for me to navigate. I navigate by using the wall sound, which means I bump into the wall quite a lot during a gaming settion.

I am writing this because I hope that the reborn team could ad some accessibility features for blind players out there, it's not just me who want's to play this.

I hope this can be considderd adding into the game

Object sounds: this means that whatever item, house, person or wall your close to will make a sound, the closer you get to the thing, the louder the sound will be. This will be usefull for navigation as this removes the need for bumping into walls. This is the biggest improvement for accessibility there can be, it would make this game much easier to navigate, and a lot more fun to explore the map.

I really hope that this can be considderd, and hope you all have a wonderfull day. Thanks for reading this.

Everyone should be able to play equally.

[bruhtonium]

wow, I did not know blind people could play a game, and i am quite intrigued, sorry if this may sound insensitive. But would you be kind enough how you to tell me how you play the game ?. Do you have a special reading program, that reads all the dialogue for you or something else. btw i am not a dev

[Gamulation]

I have a program that tryes to read text for me, it's not very acurat, but5 works for what I need. I navigate the overworld only by wall bumps, so can't really explore much, an item could just be a wall for all I know. I have been able to play the main series based on this, although Ruby was a hard one, sence it was much surfing.

[Athrun]

I'am Not from the dev team but  I truly hope that you'll be able to experience that game and enjoy it ! You've said something so true " Everyone should be able to play equally. " and i'am pretty sure that the dev team feel the same way. I hope that someone will have the abilites to help blind people enjoy this beautiful game ! I'am pretty useless for this to happen but you have my full support ! Hope someone can make it !

[DemICE]

@Gamulation Hello, I may not have enough coding skills to create an object sound depending on distance feature, but I made a mod  that will allow you to know by text (I bank on your text reading program to read it correctly) how many steps in any direction there is an obstacle. 
If the obstacle happens to be an event, like an NPC, item, cut tree, or another interactable object, it will say that it is an Event instead of an Obstacle.

 

How to use this mod:  With the Alt key pressed, click on any direction. Instead of moving, a text will appear saying how many steps in that direction there is an obstacle or event.

 

How to install the mod in the game:   Create a folder inside the Data folder of the game,  and name it Mods.  Then dump the mod file into the Mods folder.

 

The mod file is attached in this post. If you need help with anything or have a suggestion regarding this mod that is within my capabilities, let me know.  If you are satisfied with it, also let me know, so that I make a proper Thread with this mod in the mod section for other people to use it if they need it.

 

Dem - Distance Gauge.rb

[Gamulation]

This is cool. I installed it and got it to work, but my speech program can't read the text. I know it works sence I herd a text box opening sound when I tryde to move. I can't read any text in Reborn.

[Gamulation]

My friend tryde it with his game and it worked, I have a suggestion if it's ok.

If you add like a path finder, so if we hold alt, and then let's say P it will cycle between places of intrest, let's say a pokémon center. Then when we hold alt it will give us step by step instructions to go to the center, to up, five right ETC.

[DemICE]

@GamulationUnfortunately this pathfinding idea sounds quite complicated for me.  At least right now I can't think of a way to even start making that.  Maybe I will find a  way later but definitely it isn't gonna take a short time. 

For now though, i revamped the mod,  and instead of text,  It creates text to speech recordings i made that verbally say what was written in text before.   Sadly for now numbers over two digits will be said by mentioning each digit separately instead of saying the actual number, but until i implement more recordings for at least 50 steps ahead (probably tomorrow), I hope this will work for now.   

 

This time the file i'm sending is a .rar,  containing the mod, which you should extract in the Mods folder as usual,   and  the recording audio files, which you should extract in \Audio\SE.

 

Distance Gauge.rar

[Gamulation]

that is amazing thanks!

You could try to call out microsoft SAPU, that could speak it for you, don't know how complecated it would be, I am not a programmer, but you wouldn't have to record a bunch of lines.

[DemICE]

i googled microsoft sapu but i only found results about mouses...
the text to speech converter i've been using is this  http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/   can you check it and tell me which voice do you prefer?  so far i went with Alice, which is the default choice, but there are 4 other options.

[Gamulation]

I am stupid, I wrote it wrong. It's this SAPI Microsoft speech API. I will check out the site though.

[DemICE]

sure, when you check it tell me what voice you prefer so i can do the rest recordings in that voice.

[Gamulation]

I checked it out, Alice is the best one. It sounds te best out of the others.

[Malta10]

@DemICE I could give you a hand wih the pathfinding algorithm, but don't know if I'm helpful. I have zero expirience with modding, but with assistance on what data is available, I could try to adopt some pathfinding algorithm like dijkstra or a* and provide the resulting pseudocode.

[DemICE]

48 minutes ago, Malta10 said:

@DemICE I could give you a hand wih the pathfinding algorithm, but don't know if I'm helpful. I have zero expirience with modding, but with assistance on what data is available, I could try to adopt some pathfinding algorithm like dijkstra or a* and provide the resulting pseudocode.

This is fine,  before i tried this out, i didn't even know how to determine that a certain tile has an event on it or not, so this was certainly a learning experience for me too. The main issues i see with this whole idea is that there would be need for a code that scans a x amount of tiles around the player, and then determine whether one of them is an event that is a warp to a pokemon center.   then this would have to be done for every "point of interest"  if this was a regular pokemon game i could see it being feasible, but reborn's maps are quite complicated, with quite more points of interest, considering some things you get out of them can help progressing through the battles a lot.
After that, the pathfinnding part of the function should take effect, and generate and announce the proper directions for every single one of those points of interest.

[DemICE]

@Gamulation Improved the mod to a level that i can deem satisfactory. 
Up to 50 steps distance,  unique recordings will play, which will sound more natural, and take a shorter time to execute.
Over 50 steps distance, a multiple of 10 of the first digit has replaced the first recording, so instead of  hearing  "five two steps"  you will now year "fifty two steps".
Over 99 steps you will hear "over 99 steps."  The only place i can imagine this to be of any use is a desert section you probably haven't reached yet.
I discovered i can reduce the delay between each recording by less than 1 second, so the whole process will execute faster.

Like always, the package with the mod and the recordings is uploaded below, and should be installed the same way as before.  You will be asked to replace some recordings with newer versions of themselves.  Accept that.

Looking forward for impressions or any issues from this one.
 

Distance Gauge.rar

[Seb2314]

I am also fully blind, and have been playing pokemon games for ages without mods that made these games accessible. I want to thank you DemICE for doing this, I'll test this mod and will let you know what I think.

[Seb2314]

I had the chance to test this for a bit and I have to say this works really well. Apparently Gamulation also has a script for footsteps sounds which I don't have, so I assume his experience is even better than mine. If I may suggest. Would it be possible to use any other key instead of alt? Reason being that alt makes the game go faster. Thank you so much for doing this once again.

[Gamulation]

For anyone interested I'm doing a reborn live stream on Twitch tomorrow, if anyone wanna see blindness in action join tomorrow. It's probobly going to be a fail, but sence I have the mod now, let's see how far we can go.

[Malta10]

10 hours ago, DemICE said:

This is fine,  before i tried this out, i didn't even know how to determine that a certain tile has an event on it or not, so this was certainly a learning experience for me too. The main issues i see with this whole idea is that there would be need for a code that scans a x amount of tiles around the player, and then determine whether one of them is an event that is a warp to a pokemon center.

With a prior selection of the wanted type of POI, the complexity of the search should still be linear. If a simple identification of a tile exits, for example the warp point to a pokemon center, in my estimation a search of 250x250 grid should be search quite fast. The way your are writing, i suspect it isn't as simple like "if(tile.isEntry())". Maybe an initial search on the entry of a map, which saves stationary POIs?
With the search as the bottleneck, a prior computation on the data to save the stationary POIs of the whole game in an extra file could be helpful. On the other hand, I don't know if file opening is possible with the modding language.
Of course the range could be limited.

 

Should I send such thoughts with a dm before i cram this forum section with my ideas?
I guess I need RPG maker XP if I want to give it a go myself?

[Amethyst]

5 hours ago, Gamulation said:

For anyone interested I'm doing a reborn live stream on Twitch tomorrow, if anyone wanna see blindness in action join tomorrow. It's probobly going to be a fail, but sence I have the mod now, let's see how far we can go.

 

I'd love to see how that works if I end up being around for it. Can you post your twitch link here for myself and anyone else who'd want to join?

You're also welcome to drop it into the discord server when you actually start streaming-- might get some more attention that way. Is the "BlindMaster" user on discord you or someone else? That person was also asking for this, and I noticed they spelled 'tried' the same way as you, but I don't know if that's just a quirk of a common transcription program or something. 

 

2 hours ago, Malta10 said:

With a prior selection of the wanted type of POI, the complexity of the search should still be linear. If a simple identification of a tile exits, for example the warp point to a pokemon center, in my estimation a search of 250x250 grid should be search quite fast. The way your are writing, i suspect it isn't as simple like "if(tile.isEntry())". Maybe an initial search on the entry of a map, which saves stationary POIs?
With the search as the bottleneck, a prior computation on the data to save the stationary POIs of the whole game in an extra file could be helpful. On the other hand, I don't know if file opening is possible with the modding language.
Of course the range could be limited.

 

Should I send such thoughts with a dm before i cram this forum section with my ideas?
I guess I need RPG maker XP if I want to give it a go myself?

 

Having RMXP will be the easiest way unless you use an external script editor/yeeter which is a bit of work to set up in current scripts. Simple answer is yes. 

 

 

Also I super appreciate you doing all this, DemICE, it's super cool to see this coming together

[DemICE]

@Seb2314 I'm glad to hear this is doing the job in practice. You can change the fast forward key from the pause menu and selecting the controls, although gamulation has implied that the text reading program can't read any text in the game... and this could include the pause menu. is this true?

@Gamulation If its at a time where i don't sleep, i'll definitely want to join that stream.  Watching you play will help me figure out a priority of things that would need a mod to improve the game experience.

@Malta10 I think discord's dm's are a comfier way.  DM  DemICE#1752 if you can.

@Amethyst Yeah i too am glad to see how this is growing to be something bigger, and with meaningful results too.  I can see this having potential to attract many people from a previously uncommon demographic in reborn.

[Tensoon the Kandra]

Hello,

Another blind dude here. 

Just wanted to say thanks for endeavouring to make this.

 

I tried doing something similar just before I went blind but my knowledge of programming was too limited.  The best I could manage was to make tiles white or black and negative the text boxes' colour to make everything high contrast to make it easier for low vision players to see.  It made the game ugly as hell, but at least one could navigate.  Cool lookin' tiles kind of lose their value if even the Pokecentre appears to be a red blur to you, haha.

 

This path finder idea looks amazing!

[Abyssreaper99]

5 hours ago, Amethyst said:

Is the "BlindMaster" user on discord you or someone else?

EDIT: Just checked and ye it is, they changed username forum side

[Seb2314]

The screen reader can actually read text in the game using OCR. Speaking of this, is there a way to actually change the font of the game to make it easier for OCR to read things? I'm having a few issues in the battle menu or while trying to view the stats for a pokemon.

Once again, thank you so much for being interested to make the game more playable for us.