X3 Accessibility, or, Literally Flying Blind

[CaplinCaplin]

Hi All,

I'm a huge fan of space simulation games who happens to be totally blind. In a fit of enthusiasm and perhaps foolhardiness, I bought a copy of X3: TC last night on Steam, based on some audio clips and a description of the game. I'm pleasantly surprised to discover that I'm able to enjoy at least some aspects of the game independently, and was searching for advice.

The autopilot and targeting system works quite well, and I'm able to generally get where I want to go with a minimum of fuss. Where I run into some trouble is the trading and other menu-based screens. I have a screen reader function which can provide optical character recognition, but this isn't great at handling data in tables, such as most of the trade info. I'm never quite certain of the prices for goods.

I'm wondering if there's any way to get the ship computer to read this information to me? Even if it isn't possible in the base game, I wonder if it's possible to mod the feature in somehow.

At the moment the screen reader is generally able to cope with most screens, and I just need the occasional audio nudge to figure out where I am and what's going on around me.

Thanks for any thoughts.

[Alan Phipps]

About the best that you can do in-game is to check that in Options, Audio you have 'Verbose Ship Computer' set to 'Yes'. Unfortunately there are no further in-game options that will help you in that way as further voice file coverage of menu options and effects etc probably does not exist in the game.

There may be other 3rd party applications that can better intercept all the subtitle and on-screen text output and convert all such displayed text to synthesised speech or numerics, but again that probably will not help much with their context nor with menus and on-screen option prompts to much greater extent than the existing voice files already cover.

Hopefully others using accessibility aids or well-versed in audio file modding can help you further. Good luck.

[CaplinCaplin]

Thank you. The most annoying screen for now is definitely the trade interface, I guess I will keep poking at it and see if I can do anything better on my end. I feel like if I can get that one sorted, the rest will follow easier.

[Gandalf The White]

yeah the trade screen does present a problem which i think you have solved now with that little trade script you've done. i'm wondering if you can modify said same script to work with factories as well? if i remember rightly and i could well be incorrect here but the screen for factories is quite similar to that of a trade screen. certainly factories are key if you wish to get powerful in this game.