BLIND ACCESSIBILITY

[lirin]

Hello everyone,


From the title of the topic you may think I'm crazy or it's something weird, no, not really.

I'm completely blind person, musician, sound designer and gamer, of course. I'm playing games from many, many years and I love games as most of the people probably! :)

I watched Steins gate anime with my girl (also blind) , waiting for Steins gate 0 and I must say it's one of the best I ever watched in my life and there are a lot of series I've seen before.


Now, I REALLY want to play this masterpiece!
I know many people will call me crazy etc as most of the community even can't imagine how I'm typing, reading.


So, I tried everything to contact the developers or publishers but everything failed. No response on twitter (as usual) developers still are avoiding this kind of messages and I though my last chance is to put this here in believe You, players will help me out and will help blind community to play this amazing title.

There's actually only one fully playable visual novel on steam, thanks for one community member who wrote the patch and added screen readers support. It's Narcissu, really good VN in my opinion even if there's no choices etc. You can check the topic here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/264380/discussions/0/540739861382548810/


Steins gate is something I NEED to play and I believe there's something what can be done to make this dream true.


I'm actually behind the Skullgirls accessibility, a 2d fighting game fully accessible on steam and what Mike Z did is just amazing, I hope there are more people like him around the globe.
You can read about it here:
http://shoryuken.com/2014/01/31/mike-mike-z-zaimont-updates-skullgirls-encore-to-enhance-accessibility-for-blind-players/
And watch the gameplay of early version as me and my friend tested it (warning! we played like a noob! :D):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQgTdzMVaek


There are few ways to make Steins gate fully playable for us but first of all I need to ask you: Is there full keyboard support or just mouse? Keyboard needs to be there plus one library to send the text to our screen readers. It's called Tolk and it's open source. You can read about it here:
https://davykager.com/projects/tolk/


No idea if devs are around here or maybe publishers but if there's something I can DO to reach the team I will so, just let me know, PLAYERS!

Thank you for reading!

Tom

[初音ミク]

wait what?
Sorry no offense but how did you "watch" the anime?
Just curious

[初音ミク]

Most Japanese developers dont give a ♥♥♥♥ on this kind o staff, as Japan is a pretty self-contained "culture circle".

I wish you good luck on this one though.

El psy kongroo

[TheOnlyLate1]

I really don't have that much knowledge in the various programmes that you mention but I can say that Steins;Gate has Keyboard support as well as mouse. (Pressing F puts the game in full screen, I guess this means it can be used in conjunction with background programmes?)

I don't really have an ideal suggestion but this game has also just been released on IOS so there could be potential apps that work in conjunction with that iteration? I don't know what else to suggest but I hope leaving a comment will increase the chances in someone more knowledgeable coming along!

El Psy Kongroo.

[lirin]

Well, I'm sure it is not accessible on IOS. Sure, there is voice over builded in to the system but... don't want to waste the money just for testing.

I'm really unhappy I'm not a programmer, hacker etc just to decompile it and make a few small modifications to have this one fully playable. Contacting japanese devs (well, not only japanese to be fair) is a pain!

Anyway, thanks guys! hopefully someone more knowledgeable will jump here and will have some ideas and suggestions. :)

El psy kongroo

[dmdport]

Originally posted by lirin:

Well, I'm sure it is not accessible on IOS. Sure, there is voice over builded in to the system but... don't want to waste the money just for testing.

I'm really unhappy I'm not a programmer, hacker etc just to decompile it and make a few small modifications to have this one fully playable. Contacting japanese devs (well, not only japanese to be fair) is a pain!

Anyway, thanks guys! hopefully someone more knowledgeable will jump here and will have some ideas and suggestions. :)

El psy kongroo

You could always just try out the game and refund it if it doesn't work out for you. That would be my best advice.

[Drakkonnen]

There's a program called Visual Novel Reader, which takes text from VN, translates it and places it on separate window. I don't know how to use this program and I don't know if it works with english language, but maybe you can do something with it.
http://sakuradite.com/wiki/en/vnr

[ATKOtter]

Originally posted by WatanabeMayu:

wait what?
Sorry no offense but how did you "watch" the anime?
Just curious

The anime was dubbed so it's possible to watch and understand it.

Now in regards to the topic, unfortunately, with Steins;Gate's unique choice system, It'll be difficult at best to get any kind of text to speech reader making the game accessible, because the phone itself basically requires that you can see it to use it.

[lirin]

Why? is there any vibrates and click like in the anime to notify me about it? for sure there must be a text with it. If there are sounds for it and possibility to access the phone from the keyboard I can't see why it wouldn't be accessible.

[ATKOtter]

Originally posted by lirin:

Why? is there any vibrates and click like in the anime to notify me about it? for sure there must be a text with it. If there are sounds for it and possibility to access the phone from the keyboard I can't see why it wouldn't be accessible.

There's a noise I believe, but the phone requires that you click on words inside of the text messages in order to pick a choice, and text hookers would not be able to tell you where the words are to click them, nor which ones are highlighted.

[lirin]

Adding to it this visual novel reader is COMPLETELY not accessible for the screen readers so, kicked off this idea.

[mimizukari]

use ithvnr or something that converts the text ingame to text on your screen and copies to clipboard, it'll take a bit of manual setup but once you got it good, every time new text appears it should auto copy to clipboard and whatever you're using should read it out to you.

what abik has linked is regular vnr, ithvnr works much better and has much more functionality, it's what people use to translate things but it takes a loooot of setup and I can't really explain all the steps myself :| about the only way to do it though

[daxxy]

Originally posted by Schwarzstorch:

Hey! The only things you forgot -- are the files encrypted and if so how heavily, and is the exe-file packed. Lack of keyboard support isn't a big deal. Plus the Tolk you've mentioned is just a wrapper for screen reader's API libraries, it does nothing without those libraries, and those libraries are all go with their own licenses. So yeah. The only thing that you can expect from official devs is something like "text into clipboard" or SAPI/NSSpeach/Orca support (for non-free games).
Another thing is you can't just easily decompile something, make a couple of changes and it'll work :) For example -- the Narci anthology took me about 3 weeks of debugging only, about 800 lines of assembly and about one and a half thousands lines of cpp (not including wrapper for screen readers and such); and on top of that it wasn't packed or heavily encrypted.
I'm not looking forward to waste another 400 hours to break this game, but maybe someday, we'll see.

The game uses Steam DRM in maximum paranoia mode, but no external DRM, so that's not gonna be a problem. Text is stored with a custom encoding; there's a more-or-less accurate UTF-16 conversion table somewhere in the EXE but there's also control characters and escape sequences.

You can see our code[github.com] for reference; someone also made a hook patch for STEINS;GATE 0 (unrelated to the official translation) that'll allow a text hooker to read/modify clean UTF-16 text (only for the dialogue, not the phone IIRC) from the game.

For a decently skilled reverser the most difficult part by far would be figuring out the usability design for the visually impaired.

[Bani]

Anyone had any luck getting a text hooker to work for the Japanese version on Steam?