How blind players succeed at sports video games they’ve never seen

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/03/how-blind-players-succeed-at-sports-video-games-theyve-never-seen/

by Tomte • 8 years ago

91 28 8 years ago

yaseer• 8 years ago

I guess not everything EA does is terribly immoral. Kudos for going the extra mile.

Agentlien4• 8 years ago

As someone working for EA I am so terribly tired of hearing all the negativity and hostility towards EA. Even the positive comments tend to be of the form "well, at least they did something good".

I'm not saying EA hasn't done things I don't agree with, but I do believe they get more than their fair share of hatred on the internet. Actually, I should say "we", not "they".

fatalVoltage• 8 years ago

If it's gotten to the point where most of the positive comments are of the "at least the did something good" kind, then you know something is wrong with the company.

Just because they do some good things doesn't mean that the company is good overall, hence the comments.

rhexs• 8 years ago

Are the anecdotes detailing consistent 80+ hour death marches near the end of project cycles accurate?

rc_hadoken2• 8 years ago

Not to be rude. But most of your games aren't complete or are mediocre and not because no one there knows what they are doing but because of the kind of business model EA created for itself. That's why ya'll get the hate.

_ea1k• 8 years ago

I agree with you. I mean, I wish that Madden were progressing a lot more as a game, but the level of hatred that really singles out EA is really unwarranted.

And you are right that a lot of the problems are really industry-wide. I really hope that this pay-to-win system can start to fade away again.

Insanity• 8 years ago

It's hard to get out of a negative image people have.

I actually share this - I won't get BF5 until a few months after release because it'll be pushed to release to compete with CoD and be bug-ridden until a few months later.

So, I can say: "At least they fix their games after a few months".

In addition, please don't take these things personally - the company can be nice to work for and everything but in general the idea the public has are due to its actions as a company, and not the effort of the individuals. I'm sure the developers are competent.

bsder2• 8 years ago

I'm not saying EA hasn't done things I don't agree with, but I do believe they get more than their fair share of hatred on the internet.

Good will takes a year to earn but a second to lose.

I'm going to take issue with you and say that EA deserves every ounce of hate that it gets.

EA gets hate because it buys and screws up beloved franchises. EA gets hate because it has game properties that it is clearly milking that would be much better if they weren't in its hands. EA gets hate because it yanks critical content out of its games and makes it pay to download. EA gets hate because it (used to?) make you install their buggy pile of crap online service to play your single player mode game.

And their only defense is: "Well, everybody else does it too."

When your child makes that statement, you generally have a not terribly sympathetic reply. Why should EA get any more sympathy?

AlwaysRock• 8 years ago

EA has started and perpetuated trends that have permeated the industry and affected it in a negative way.

While I'm sure lots of individuals over there are doing good work the company as a whole deserves the hate that it gets.

It's like working at Google and being upset when someone says, "Google is evil" because you're working on a morally good project.

ada1981• 8 years ago

Would you say EA is having a net net positive impact on culture and the world?

zodPod• 8 years ago

I'm shocked they didn't add this as DLC lol

contentpls• 8 years ago

content: https://outline.com/YGL2tS

dang• 8 years ago

Please don't do single-purpose accounts on HN.

Agentlien4• 8 years ago

This is great and I'm really quite impressed and pleased to hear about games I've worked on (Need for Speed) being played this way.

Accessibility is something that can be really difficult to get enough focus on during development even when a few people are aware and care.

For my own sake I'm just glad that some recent games (such as Battlefield) have added colour blind modes.

simion314• 8 years ago

Also would be great if games that use a lot of text could have an advanced option where the game would call an external script(or have modding support) with the text and some metadata. I was hacking at OpenMw (a Morowind open source engine) and experimenting with having teh dialogs,books,tooltips read using Text To Speech. I think it is important to allow the flexibility and not built the TTS into the game,

gojomo2• 8 years ago

I suspect the same sort of deep-learning/reinforcement-learning that manages to play video games could be used to both assess and improve playability for the sight-impaired.

For example, can a 'blind' agent, that's fed just the (stereo) soundtrack of a game, become good at it? (While not, add more audio cues.)

Can another cooperative agent, which can see the screen but only emit audio, learn to help the blind-agent do better? (Train up this helper-agent during playtesting, then add its audio cues to the main game – either always, or in a special 'audio assist' mode.)

(Parts of this could wind up like a rotated version of this "sound of pixels" work:

http://sound-of-pixels.csail.mit.edu/

But, instead of learning which pixel-regions are responsible for sounds, it'd be adding sounds to second-medium-communicate relevant visual information.)

gojomo2• 8 years ago

And of course, you'd want to ensure that the helper-agent'ss audio-cues remain pleasant to human ears – and not just computer-to-computer screeches.

To achieve this, you'd add yet another adversarial agent, that's trying to discriminate original audio from the helper-enhanced audio – without access to the video.

Only audio-help that successfully fools this 3rd agent, and is thus relatively-indistinguishable from the unassisted-audio, gets added to the game.

miki123211• 8 years ago

As a blind player myself, I've found mainstream games to be too much of an annoyance for me. Yes, I know it can be done, I know people who were doing it successfully, but it requires just too much time for me. I prefer games made for the blind exclusively or with mostly text-based games with focus on accessibility (like Dark Room on IOS).

Also what I've found very annoying were text games done in some fancy weird UI framework screen readers can't make sense of, usually Unity. WHen a game is written using the native UI toolkit or a toolkit that uses native controls under the hood, screen-readers can, by using the system APIs, retrieve the info the user wants to read. For those who don't know, screen-readers are programs that allow the blind to use the computer, mostly by reading the information on the screen with synthetic speech, putting it on special devices called braille displays and providing audio cues. They don't work in some magical way, describing the screen like a human would, usually they need good APIs to communicate with the app (or underlying OS), get as much info as possible about what's on the screen and what the user is doing, a bit like a malware and then present that information to the user, either automatically or upon request, after pressing some shortcut keys. If the app uses non-native UI toolkits, draws the UI by drawing things on the screen directly and doesn't expose the required information to screen-readers, absolutely nothing can be done with that app. This is, unfortunately, the case with most (all?) Unity games, as Unity's UI is not compatible with any native APIs. Plugins for built-in Unity screen-readers have been built, but I honestly have no idea how good they are (reinventing the wheel, when it comes to screen-readers, usually doesn't end well so I'm sceptical).

How blind players succeed at sports video games they’ve never seen

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