[games_access] Toolkits for making GL rendered content screen reader accessible?

[Ian Hamilton]

Yes, BBC tried it, didn't work sadly!


Reason being that the layer is rendered by the CPU and the visual by the GPU, and mobiles only have a tiny bus width, so constantly switching between the two layers do to the updates caused framerates to slow to an unplayable crawl. So BBC just put an end to developing with Unity for cross platform web games and use HTML5 instead.

For PC you can use Tolk, Skullgirls managed to get it working nicely for their UI. It still needs to be actively integrated by a developer, it only outputs what is passed out to it so is still far more work than it should be, involving focus management and passing the info out to all be handled at a game developer level, and doesn't work with all screenreaders or cross-platform either. But it's something at least. That's about as good as it gets for now, until if/when engine devs integrate something like it internally.

https://davykager.com/projects/tolk/

I don't think OCR would have much chance of working with most games due to the kind of typefaces and typography used, but most of the text, text strings for copy and text labels for UI elements, is already there inside the game anyway. Just (just..) need the engine devs to implement a way of exposing it.

That's easily my top thing I'd like to see happen in accessibility, such a frustrating barrier.

Ian

________________________________
From: games_access <games_access-bounces at igda.org> on behalf of Brandon Keith Biggs <brandonkeithbiggs at gmail.com>
Sent: 13 January 2017 14:20
To: IGDA Games Accessibility SIG Mailing List
Subject: [games_access] Toolkits for making GL rendered content screen reader accessible?

Hello,
I am wondering what research or work has been done on making GL rendered content accessible to screen reader users?
Ian was mentioning on the Unity Screen reader accessibility thread:
https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/screen-reader-accessibility
That Apple had an idea to replicate the UI above the app, but I can't find any information about this at all. Are there any articles or papers on Apple's trial? Was this invisible UI ever tried on the PC?

I think that a layer like this would be very useful, especially if the application had some sort of image or character recognition to present new content to the screen reader.
Are there any other applications or companies who have made (or tried to make) any programs to add accessibility to prebuilt apps and particularly GL rendered apps and games?
Thanks,

Brandon Keith Biggs<http://brandonkeithbiggs.com/>
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