Hey everyone! Hope you’re all having a good week.
By way of an introduction, I’m an award-winning, multi-credited accessibility consultant from the UK. Even more importantly for this post, however, I’m a gamer without sight (having never had any sight whatsoever).
I’ve always wanted to play a souls-like game, on my own terms, with no sighted assistance. Given this title is in early access, I thought I’d check it out and see what accessibility might already be present.
I was excited for this game as the audio I’d heard from gameplay indicated that the combat, if I could get to it, might have good enough telegraphing for parries etc to be landed without the need for much additional tweaking.
The first thing I was pleased to find was that the game had non-wrapping menus (in that they don’t infinitely scroll when holding up or down on the DPad for instance). This means that you’re less likely to get lost in a menu in general, though I can understand the positives of having wrapping menus for those using switches and the like to scroll through for example.
However, much like so many titles in this day and age, No Rest For The Wicked currently lacks any kind of menu and UI narration (where menus and other elements like boss names and health bars are read out, usually via text to speech either pre-recorded or hooked into via a library or plugin). This menu narration is what prevents you from getting lost in scrolling or longer menus as well, for clarification.
This lack of narration not only means that I have to use workarounds like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which takes a picture of the screen and attempts to extrapolate text from it with results being just about usable at best and a completely garbled mess at worst, but it also means that I’d need sighted assistance to verify what I’ve selected or go through anything that OCR can’t pick up on easily. This is something that not everyone has access to and, given how many menus there are likely to be in a game like this, it just isn’t always practical either.
Implementing this of course isn’t necessarily easy either, but the earlier you look into this and other accessibility elements like navigational assistance implementations and additional audio cues, the less costly they prove to be.
I’d love to be able to play this game without the need for any sighted help, that includes within the menus as well as in gameplay.
If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know and I’ll answer what I can.
I really appreciate the opportunity to give feedback here and look forward to seeing future developments unfold.