What sort of game style are you looking at?
Most direct X games tend to be highly graphical in nature, and as such don't often translate into suitable programs for easy access for the vision impaired.
To make a game accessible, a different approach may be useful. Possibly having a keyboard/text based interface with a graphical interface bolted on top.
This is achieved fairly well in the applications on unix/linux world.
A couple of pointers from the Linux documentation project, including alternative speech engines.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Accessibility-HOWTO/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Accessibility-Dev-HOWTO/index.html
The W3C take on accessible interfaces.
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
I am not a graphical interface programmer, but it's fairly easy to map an 'button image' with an action, which could be either a wrapper around a text interface, or a call to an underlying event engine.
A big picture look could be:
Module 1: Game engine.
This engine controls the physics/rules/world.
It also has an interface (an API) that provides information to, and receives information from a user interface.
The user never directly interacts with the game engine, but only interacts with a user interface module.
Module 2: User interface
There may be multiple styles of interface. This has no game rules at all. All rules are in module 1.
a) text based interface (accept keyboard input, returning text based information)
b) Web based interface (to accept requests from a web form, returning information on a html document)
c) graphical interface (accepting mouse inputs, returning differing screen layouts).
d) text based input, sound based output.
....
z) voice based input, sound based output.
An example: A solitaire card game.
Module 1 has the rules of what is allowed/not allowed, win/lose conditions.
It has the following procedures/modules:
*New Game
*Shuffle Deck
*Initial Deal
*Deal 1 card
*list all piles of type.
(blank) - returns list of all piles, with pile type
discard - returns list of all discard piles (probably only one)
- Returns a list of piles with any specifying characteristics. I.e. discard pile, dealt cards, played cards.
- list is
-- 1 : discard pile
-- 2 : dealt card
-- 3 : stack (1st)
...
-- 8 : stack (5th)
*List all visible cards in pile Y
*Get Number of cards in pile Y, returns W known, X unknown
*List X visible cards in pile Y
- Where X can be 1 to number of known cards in pile
* Move X card from pile Y to pile Z
* get information about game
Module 2a) - text module
Calls (1) get information about game
prints information to screen
Calls (1) shuffle deck
calls (1) initial deal
calls (1) list all piles (type of stack)
- For each pile returned
-- print "stack pile" (pile number) has
-- (1) get number of cards in pile (pile number) returning unknown number
-- If number of unknown cards > 0, print "x unknown cards"
-- (1) get all visible cards
-- print "visible cards " ...
calls (1) list all piles (type of dealt cards)
-- print as above, but for dealt cards
...
Module 2c) - graphical interface is your standard gui, but instead of printing text, it places images of cards in the appropriate areas, with a card from each pile being a 'hot spot'
...
Module 2d) text input, sound output - takes the same inputs, but instead of printing to screen (or maybe as well as), it passes the output through a speech synthesiser.
module 2z) voice input and output. Takes the input of the microphone, passes the sounds to a speech to text engine, and then applies the obtained text through the same routine as 2a) above.
Regards
Keith Kube
Managed Services Consultant
Alphawest
Tel: (61 3) 6233 7277
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-----Original Message-----
From: marvin hunkin [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, 17 March 2004 12:53
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Game Programming Tips For Developing Accessable Games
Hi.
Could anyone give me tips on how to create accessable games, using the text
to speech sapi, or free microsoft engines. Or do i need to licence the
elloquence software speech? Where can i find the game engines to base my
games on? I have direct ex 9 and visual basic 6.0 pro.
Please send tips, tricks and suggestions off list via e-mail.
Cheers Marvin.
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