redefining 'blind playthrough' (Patreon)

okay this has been enough of a thing that i had to talk about it elsewhere, so i should probably talk about it here. 

those of you who play the new test build of reborn might notice some funny new sounds when you bump into objects. these are fully intentional, and the sounds now change and vary depending on what type of object you've bumped into-- whether it's water you can surf on, water you can't, items, NPCs, strength rocks, rock climb events, and so on.

we've included this for all players to help 'texture' the world a little bit better. it's a small thing that ideally most people shouldn't notice too much (unless we haven't tweaked the volume for those bumps yet, and i suspect we haven't)... but the real reason this was added was to help support visually impaired players.

This is something I really never expected I'd be talking about before it started happening, but here's what's going on. A few years ago we had a person come onto the forums and politely request some support to help make the game accessible to him, because he is fully blind. 

He pointed out how canon games had the funny noises the game makes when you hit a pokemon change sides depending on whether it was your Pokemon or the opponent's that was hit. Or, they apparently do in canon. In Reborn, they just always played on one side, so it was impossible to tell which side was taking the attack. So for e19 or maybe a late e18 update, I forget which, we added in the opposite side sounds to give him a fighting chance.

He also described how challenging the navigation was for him. And like, duh-- frankly, it's challenging for sighted players. But he described some systems that would help him do so and asked if we could implement them. Our answer was "wow this is crazy and really cool and we want to help, but what you're describing is probably a little out of the wheelhouse of what we can support right now, sorry". Nevertheless, one community member, DemICE, went out of his way to make the beginnings of a blind-navigation mod to help that user play. 

I believe he didn't get more than a badge or two in even after trying several times over a long period, but it was a first step. More recently, that same user came back and shared another request on the forum. Here is a library, he said, that would print the game's text to his text-to-speech program and help him follow the game's dialogue a lot. I asked our team a number of times if it would be feasible to implement that program, and the answer was generally 'no'.

Fastforward a bit to post 19 and I hear now that we have a new blind player in town making his way through the game. We didn't really have any tangible improvements to help him yet since the last guy, and I think the on-screen reader worked less well for our new blind friend than our old one... but there was a new mod made by Torre to help out, and another community mainstay (later, mod) Maken was helping guide him through the game bit by bit, which is pretty incredible on both all of their parts. 

So this new player has talked with me at length about improvements to help make the game accessible, and until we got the test build going, it hasn't really been practical to even start on. Now we have started on it, and that player joined the patreon server. He started talking to the team, and the rest of the new team seemed to get fired up about it (you go, guys!!!!) and suddenly enumag figured out how to actually implement the long-requested text-to-speech function. 

The text to speech and full blindstep mod integration aren't properly in the test build yet, but they are being worked on. And since then we now have two more blind patrons in our server, whattttt? If any of you guys are reading-- or rather, listening-- to this, hi! Welcome so much! This is a steep hill to climb but I hope we can crest it together. 

Support for players with visual impairments was not on my bingo card for one of the first things we'd be tackling when we got back to making updates, and it's a surreal focal point to me... but here we are! Even though this will realistically only affect a very small handful of prospective players, as long as we have characters like Elias and Danielle, I feel I owe it to them to do what is practical to help support them. 

Again, I have to stress how much of a community effort this has been-- thanks to DemICE, Torre, Maken and Enumag, plus a shoutout to stardust's NG++ mod skipping some puzzles. I'm proud of the community for rallying to offer this support.

Expect to see more blind-specific improvements in upcoming patches, with a focus on sound effects and perhaps puzzle-skipping tools for everybody.