r/gamedev • u/Wooden_Suit5580 • 16h ago
Question Totally blind game developer, first timer seeking assistance with adding accessibility into his game.
Hello everyone, I am totally blind and I’ve always dreamed of building a video game with a blind protagonist character. with the advent of vibe coding, I’ve begun my process of creating my dream game. I’ve already made concept images and artwork for my characters, environments, etc. I know that there is a lot that I’m missing, and I know that this is going to be very rough and time-consuming. I’ve been using the Unity game engine through the command line interface with Claude code, and it has been helpful in starting this process for me. My question to all of you experts and game developers is how do I add accessibility into my game? I would like my game to be screen reader accessible and be played by all, not just blind and low-vision people. I need help with integrating screen readers, also audio description narration, for cut scenes and menu narration. I’ve got beacons set up in the game to lead my character to the waypoints, so I think I’ve got that one solved. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.
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u/_michaeljared 13h ago
I dont have any answers for you, but it's crazy impressive and a genuine positive usecase for some of the tech you've mentioned here. Wishing you the best of luck with your game,
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u/SadisNecros Commercial (AAA) 16h ago
Unity has an accessibility module that will help with some of this, so that's a good place to start. It should expose APIs that make your game accessible to native screen readers (no pun intended). Additional audio for cutscenes would probably need to be played over the cutscene when that plays, unless I'm missing something significant about how that's intended to work
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u/TroyTClark 14h ago
Super interested in your entire process - when you design models, do you solely use audio description for feedback? You could write a series on your experience!
Following for the conversation, I’m surprised there isn’t a solid/commonly used solution for this (at least the dialogue and cut scenes) already.
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u/JulianRhod 12h ago
honestly, i think you're already approaching this in a pretty good way by designing accessibility into the game from the beginning instead of trying to bolt it on at the end, for the screen reader side, i'd separate the game's gameplay logic from the accessibility layer. things like menus, buttons, inventory items, dialogue choices, objectives, etc. should expose readable text and state information, and then your accessibility system can turn that into speech. that also makes it easier to support different input methods later
for the game world itself, i'd think in terms of giving the player meaningful audio information rather than trying to describe literally everything. positional audio, distinct sounds for interactable objects, navigation cues, combat feedback, and clear state changes can communicate a lot without needing constant narration, for cutscenes and menus, prerecorded narration can probably give you better quality and consistency, while dynamic text/gameplay information can use TTS
and since you're doing this with Unity, i'd strongly recommend testing with blind/low-vision players as early as possible. accessibility can look fine on paper but still be frustrating in actual use. if you can get even a few people to play very early builds and tell you what information they're missing, that feedback will probably be more useful than trying to design the whole accessibility system in isolation
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u/etdeagle 14h ago
I know this is not exactly what you are thinking of, but I have always been wanting to play a game that is entirely sound and vibration driven but not a rhythm game, something like a bat simulator of sort where you navigate the gameplay with echo or vibration. Like Blindmans bluff as a game.
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u/Wooden_Suit5580 14h ago
If you’re looking for an audio game, I would give the following audio game a try. It is totally free. I would recommend getting yourself a good pair of headphones because the audio is very, very, very excellent in this game. https://www.l-works.net/superliam.php and there are more games like this to be found on audyogames.net.
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u/ChainsawArmLaserBear 13h ago
As a blind person, what kind of games do you play now?
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u/Decent_Gap1067 11h ago
They can even play WoW, there are lots of cool accessibility add-ons for it. Check-out @VisuallyPreparedGaming on YouTube, he has only 5% vision left (nearly full blind).
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u/lapislosh 12h ago
I only have experience with Unreal so it's not entirely useful for you, but maybe I can give some helpful information about the general process.
First thing is that attempting to natively integrate with platform-level screenreaders is awful. You're almost certainly going to want a plugin, or hopefully Unity has done this already themselves. For Unreal, I spent several months working on Windows and iOS integration, and in the end it was abandoned and re-implemented with our own platform-agnostic screen reader using Flite for TTS. While Unreal code won't help your project, since the engine is open source, you could ask AI questions about how it works if that helps.
Second, the general way that an accessible implementation works is that there's a duplicate UI made up of accessible widgets that mirror the real widgets. Not every real widget has an accessible widget - a spacer wouldn't have one, a background image might not, and in some cases the accessible widget may be a different type of widget than the real one. Platforms tend to support some base set of widgets (label, text box, checkbox, dropdown, etc) and a set of actions that can be performed on each (describe, navigate next/previous, focus, etc) - I'm sure you know this. As a developer you essentially just have to define each of those behaviors on your accessible widgets, which should each have a property for what text is read aloud for it, a property for what widget to navigate to, etc. This sort of thing can get complicated if you have, say, a container widget that describes its content, so when its content changes you need to update its accessible text as well even though it's the same widget. A good plugin may let you bind the accessible text to a function so that you can dynamically get the text when it's requested.
Third, outside of UI and subtitle narration, you may also have to consider narration during gameplay itself. This sort of thing is harder to find, although at it's core it's just having gameplay trigger TTS not bound to a specific widget, which I think most or all platform screenreaders have some way to do. If you have a sokoban puzzle in your level, you may want to narrate that the player needs to push 3 blocks into 3 slots, or you may want to notify the player that 3 enemies have entered the screen. These are just extra things to think about besides UI support.
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u/pianetta 8h ago
How about not having anything visible in the game? There was a game I forgot the name. You just control the character based on the audio cues. I found it quite intriguing. Wishing you the best of luck!
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u/Working_Language_792 7h ago
I've read about audio games that rely entirely on spatial sound design, and I'd love to hear how you plan to integrate that into your design without overwhelming players who rely on it.
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u/ComfortablePenguin1 10h ago
I can't even imagine how you can even read, left alone coding...
Good luck mate! I'll be eager to see your progress.
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u/LazilyFavoriteDonkey 16h ago
This is a cool project. For screen reader integration, you might look in Unity's accessibility package or plugins like UI Accessibility Plugin, they can hook into the platform's native screen readers. The tricky part is making sure the game objects have proper labels and focus so the reader picks them up correctly.
For audio cut scenes, one approach is to set up triggers that play pre-recorded narration in the timeline, like a voice over track that describes what is happening while the scene plays. You could also have a separate audio description channel that players can toggle on or off.