Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally Blind Player

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CaplinCaplin
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Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally Blind Player

Post by CaplinCaplin » Fri, 23. Jul 21, 16:41

Hi ALl,

I thought I'd make a post here as I've begun trying to play X4 totally blind, quite literally. I've done this semi-successfully with X3 in the past, but X4 always eluded me due to some screen reader software limitations. Those seem to be gone now, so I've begun trying to explore the game.

I use a combination of OCR (built-in to Windows 10, and a way to route the mouse to specific places on screen. Usually this is the recognized text, though I can also add "bookmarks," to specific pixel positions if necessary. This might help me in navigating certain screens which have consistent layouts.

There are a few problems so far. First-person mode is obviously a non-starter; I have no points of reference for where I am, and it's hard to tell when I walk into a wall because there's no obvious sound cue. Manual flight is similarly hard, as I have no idea how to steer towards a specific object, let alone do something like dogfighting. So I'm stuck using the map and context menus for things, which isn't impossible, just tedious.

I'm not above using mods to improve my experience if they don't fundamentally change the gameplay beyond recognition. I had some help from Reddit unlocking the Teladi game start, which seems like a nicer base to play with since it at least offers me a couple ships and a station to work from.

I am hoping to find or create mods which might help with things that are currently tedious, such as OCR errors, or enable me to do more things that I can't currently do, such as flight in some fashion. THere's obviously a lot that needs to be done to make the experience smooth, but I believe that with some ingenuity I should be able to make a go of the game.

I thought others might find this interesting, and perhaps be able to offer advice. If any modders are reading this, I'd love to talk about the more technical side of what's possible, and how, though I realize that's not entirely appropriate for the general forum.

Thanks all for reading and to Egosoft for such a unique game.
Last edited by CaplinCaplin on Sun, 1. Aug 21, 14:35, edited 1 time in total.

CBJ
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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by CBJ » Fri, 23. Jul 21, 16:46

Do feel free to contact me directly with specific suggestions that would help your game experience. In the past we've managed to make some small adjustments to the game to help those with hearing impairments based on feedback from a player and, without making specific promises, I'd be more than happy to at least consider suggestions that would make the game more accessible for those with visual impairments too.

kuertee
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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by kuertee » Fri, 23. Jul 21, 17:31

coincidentally, i just released a beta version of my mod, "Accessibility features" to another vision impared person on X4's reddit:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NrcalA ... sp=sharing

[edit]
here's the subreddit convo: https://www.reddit.com/r/X4Foundations/ ... avigation/
[end edit]

the mod currently only lets you dock immediately at the station/ship that you have targeted.

to use:
1. be within 20km of the ship/station
2. open the Interact Menu
3. select the Dock Immediate At X command.

future features that should minimise your need to leave the cockpit:
1. list of known stations within your sector. this allows you to select them without going to the map or when in the map, zooming out so that they get listed in the Objects panel.
each station will have these actions:
2. list NPC Comm contacts. chat to the npc via comm. i think this is possible. if not, i'll teleport the player to the npc.
3. list signal leaks: repair them to get their signal.
4. hack computers: this one, i don't know yet if possible from the cockpit.
Mods: RPG: Reputations and Professions, Social Standings and Citizenships, Crime has Consequences, Alternatives to Death. Missions/NPCs: Emergent Missions, NPC Reactions, Mod Parts Trader, High-sec Rooms are Locked, Hacking Outcomes, More Generic Missions, Waypoint Fields for Deployment. Others: Auto-cam, Friendly Fire Tweaks, Teleport From Transporter Room, Wear and Tear. QoL: Trade Analytics, Loot Mining, Ship Scanner, Signal Leak Hunter, Station Scanner, Surface Element Targeting, etc.

CaplinCaplin
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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by CaplinCaplin » Fri, 23. Jul 21, 17:37

Hey,

Just as a point of clarification, I am actually the same person. :-) I’m excited by the feature list you described, and look forward to trying the autodock later today. I just figured that there might be more people on the forum who don’t frequent reddit. I would imagine I am the only blind person masochistic enough to try the game in its current state.

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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by Falcrack » Fri, 23. Jul 21, 19:04

CaplinCaplin wrote:
Fri, 23. Jul 21, 17:37
Hey,

Just as a point of clarification, I am actually the same person. :-) I’m excited by the feature list you described, and look forward to trying the autodock later today. I just figured that there might be more people on the forum who don’t frequent reddit. I would imagine I am the only blind person masochistic enough to try the game in its current state.
Are you the same guy who posted this in 2019?

https://www.reddit.com/r/X4Foundations/ ... =post_body

CaplinCaplin
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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by CaplinCaplin » Fri, 23. Jul 21, 19:28

Falcrack wrote:
Fri, 23. Jul 21, 19:04
CaplinCaplin wrote:
Fri, 23. Jul 21, 17:37
Hey,

Just as a point of clarification, I am actually the same person. :-) I’m excited by the feature list you described, and look forward to trying the autodock later today. I just figured that there might be more people on the forum who don’t frequent reddit. I would imagine I am the only blind person masochistic enough to try the game in its current state.
Are you the same guy who posted this in 2019?

https://www.reddit.com/r/X4Foundations/ ... =post_body
that follows, yes. I’ve never made any serious progress with the game until this latest attempt, but I am the same person and always have been.

WhiteFang
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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by WhiteFang » Sat, 24. Jul 21, 02:04

No idea if this would help but I am able to make a Simulated Dashboard for you if you wish (we could do a back and forth to work out what you need) and have provided a link at the bottom but first some points about it.

Points:
1) Using an Android Tablet I make screens (using a third party product that costs $5) with buttons on them that simulate keyboard buttons or combinations of buttons.
2) They offer tactical feedback when you press (not sure if sound is possible but it might be).
3) I can make the buttons as large or small as you like.
4) The buttons can be arranged in any position on the screen.
5) The advantages are buttons can be big so easy to find so it might be faster than using a keyboard?, no need for shift etc keys, buttons can be arranged logically as you wish and feels like you are in a cockpit pressing buttons so more immersive.
6) An example of how this might work could simply be 4 buttons in 4 columns with blank columns of space in between. So that would be 16 buttons.
7) You could practice working out the positions while not in game with another person by accessing left 2 columns with the left hand with your fingers on the edge and using your thumb and vice-versa with the right side and right buttons.

Here is a link of a post I made explaining it with details and linked pictures.
viewtopic.php?f=146&t=440140&p=5065370#p5065370

CaplinCaplin
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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by CaplinCaplin » Sat, 24. Jul 21, 12:24

Hey,

While I can appreciate the added emersion that something like a custom tablet would provide, at the moment I'm more interested in just getting the game info into a format that I can easily read. The OCR often works but introduces a lot of weird ambiguity I'd like to avoid if possible. Obviously the data is available in the save file and other places, it's just a matter of outputting it to the screen reader program one way or another.

I appreciate the work of kuertee and anyone else willing to help out with this project.

CBJ, I'll certainly be in touch. I feel like if I can get to a point where I'm actually able to do things semi-easily, I'll have a better idea of what would help me out. As it stands now I'm very much just getting used to the UI.

CaplinCaplin
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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by CaplinCaplin » Tue, 27. Jul 21, 06:08

Hi All,

Just as a quick update, I've been exploring the UI for the past few days, and for the most part am relatively happy with what I've seen. Menus appear to behave somewhat more predictably than in X3, and it's easier to tell when I've reached the end because they don't appear to wrap around. Honestly something which would help a lot would be a way to unambiguously read the current UI item which has focus, something which is occasionally difficult with OCR as it stands now.

Speaking of OCR, the one area where it obviously has issues is things represented by icons with no accompanying text. This is seemingly the case with crew ratings, among other things, though in the save file they are apparently stored numerically.

In general, the biggest areas of frustration for me at the moment are icons I can't see, manual flight/exploration, and first-person mode. The latter is almost completely unusable for me, though I'm hoping mods might be able to help with that or at least make it less necessary. I've been trying to figure out if I can successfully navigate it by listening to the sounds of my character's footsteps, but I don't know if it's actually meaningful. Something which would help a lot in first-person mode would be a way to tell where interactive objects are, and ideally tell when I'm running into walls and the like.

This is actually a lot better than I expected. The map mostly works, though filtering things down to what I want to see is still confusing. Most of the ship/station information reads relatively well, though I'd appreciate uncluttered, text-based displays if possible. I certainly don't need the graphs :)

I'm hopeful that upcoming mods might help me iron out some of these problems. It's definitely an uphill struggle, but I'm enjoying myself a great deal.

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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by Skeeter » Tue, 27. Jul 21, 07:54

Is there a mod that would help like a no need to dock at stations mod where you can comm the station instead of having to land to talk to ppl on the station like traders or important npcs? Or was that rebirth that had that mod?

Something like that would help you i think if fps walking isnt possible for you.

What ego could maybe do to help would be when you ask for directions to a place like trader and you get the gold string on the floor to guide you. Their could be a audio cue. So if you stay near it then it has a audio hum, if you stray away the hum goes down and if too far away it goes away. This could help people with bad sight use fps mode to get to certain places. Tho when you get to the end of it how will the person be able to interact with the npc, like can the person be able to tell which direction its standing or sitting and would they be facing them. Still the hum idea with the line thing could be a idea for ego to help, so it doesnt annoy others it could be a toggle for disabled people to switch on.

But i still think just skipping going on stations for players like the above, would be best if possible without mods by just comm the station find the person if they can through a menu i.e trader or manager or special npc and do what they have to that way. So mostly could do it from the map.
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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by adeine » Wed, 28. Jul 21, 03:46

CaplinCaplin wrote:
Tue, 27. Jul 21, 06:08
The latter is almost completely unusable for me, though I'm hoping mods might be able to help with that or at least make it less necessary. I've been trying to figure out if I can successfully navigate it by listening to the sounds of my character's footsteps, but I don't know if it's actually meaningful. Something which would help a lot in first-person mode would be a way to tell where interactive objects are, and ideally tell when I'm running into walls and the like.
It should definitely be possible to make a mod for this. First person station walking already has directional and spot based audio cues such as the trading corner and landing pads, and there is no way to fall off or walk into a dead end.

It should be feasible to implement or mod in a positional audio cue for relevant objects such as people, turbo lifts and obstacles or walls that carries far enough to use it to navigate. The ship(s) don't even need that since you can use shift-D to return instantly.

CaplinCaplin
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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by CaplinCaplin » Wed, 28. Jul 21, 05:07

adeine wrote:
Wed, 28. Jul 21, 03:46
CaplinCaplin wrote:
Tue, 27. Jul 21, 06:08
The latter is almost completely unusable for me, though I'm hoping mods might be able to help with that or at least make it less necessary. I've been trying to figure out if I can successfully navigate it by listening to the sounds of my character's footsteps, but I don't know if it's actually meaningful. Something which would help a lot in first-person mode would be a way to tell where interactive objects are, and ideally tell when I'm running into walls and the like.
It should definitely be possible to make a mod for this. First person station walking already has directional and spot based audio cues such as the trading corner and landing pads, and there is no way to fall off or walk into a dead end.

It should be feasible to implement or mod in a positional audio cue for relevant objects such as people, turbo lifts and obstacles or walls that carries far enough to use it to navigate. The ship(s) don't even need that since you can use shift-D to return instantly.
This is promising. :) I don't know how feasible is to navigate using the keyboard alone, but I've been just randomly hitting "wasd," and trying to get used to the sound cues. Thus far I haven't had any luck with actually reaching other destinations, but I suspect that's because I haven't figured out the right direction to go yet.

For the moment, I'm just taking things one screen at a time. There are a lot of issues with OCR which make me wish the game had built-in narration for UI elements, but that's probably something Egosoft would have to implement. Still, I'm optimistic that with sufficient patience I'll be able to enjoy this.

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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by CBJ » Wed, 28. Jul 21, 11:28

We're already discussing the potential feasibility of building that kind of (optional) audio feedback into the game, so don't jump into modding too quickly. :)

We're also looking at which purely graphical UI elements (such as skill stars) could have some kind of optional written alternative.

Please note that this is very much an investigation at this point, and we can't make any promises about what can be actually delivered or when.

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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by CaplinCaplin » Wed, 28. Jul 21, 13:35

CBJ wrote:
Wed, 28. Jul 21, 11:28
We're already discussing the potential feasibility of building that kind of (optional) audio feedback into the game, so don't jump into modding too quickly. :)

We're also looking at which purely graphical UI elements (such as skill stars) could have some kind of optional written alternative.

Please note that this is very much an investigation at this point, and we can't make any promises about what can be actually delivered or when.
I'm very glad to here it's being investigated.

On the simpler front, it would be very useful to be able to tell which menu item is currently selected. I ran into a prime example last night; when outfitting a ship, OCR doesn't always make it easy to tell how many of what I'm purchasing. It would be good to be able to hear something like "5 satellites 22,000 cr," rather than having to continually guess and count the little "blip," noises as the quantities change.

Thanks for the support and willingness to look into all this. I have several friends who are very interested in this game, but hesitated due to the first-person aspects. I will keep poking at it in hopes of having good news in some fashion soon.

CBJ
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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by CBJ » Wed, 28. Jul 21, 13:48

Unfortunately having the game read out all the menu text isn't really an option. Those lines don't have, and indeed can't really have, voice recordings, and although text-to-speech is something we've experimented with, it isn't really a viable option for us at the moment, for a variety of reasons. We'd therefore need a clearer understanding of why your OCR wasn't able to provide what you need there, to try and work out whether there was anything we could do to enable it to work better for you.

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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by CaplinCaplin » Wed, 28. Jul 21, 15:43

CBJ wrote:
Wed, 28. Jul 21, 13:48
Unfortunately having the game read out all the menu text isn't really an option. Those lines don't have, and indeed can't really have, voice recordings, and although text-to-speech is something we've experimented with, it isn't really a viable option for us at the moment, for a variety of reasons. We'd therefore need a clearer understanding of why your OCR wasn't able to provide what you need there, to try and work out whether there was anything we could do to enable it to work better for you.
Unfortunately the OCR setup I use is jury rigged; It wasn't really intended for this kind of thing. Consequently I don't know why it works the way it does. I have a couple different alternative systems which occasionally yield more understandable results, but it's all still a bit opaque.

A lot of the issue seems to relate to the presentation of text in columns. OCR tends to flatten things like price lists so it's sometime's quite difficult to tell what I'm paying for. It's less aggravating than it was in x3, where almost none of that info read at all.

If TTS is indeed not a viable option, mods of some kind to clean up the display would probably help. I don't know if the OCR gets distracted by the graphical ship displays and such, but anything that can be done to make the presentation boring and text-only would probably help. It might even make a fun challenge: how much can people do without access to the graphical map and the like? :)

Back when I was trying to play X3, I had help writing a mod which output trade prices, among other things, to debug logs where I could read them free of Ocr interference. In a worst case scenario something like that would also help, though obviously the specifics would be very different given that the x3 scripting language isn't being used any more.
I'm sure we can figure something out. :)

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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by oasis1701 » Wed, 28. Jul 21, 16:19

Hi there
I am also completely blind; however, I do not own the game yet.

There is a community of us out there playing the games that we are able to (there's very few of accessible games to be honest), but usually there's very few of us adventurous enough like @Caplin trying out games and figuring out if they could be playable to us or not.
I would be glad to get the game as well and help with the feedback and also play it myself and enjoy it if there's a possibility of us playing it and get more blind players to try it out as well.

Cheers

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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by CaplinCaplin » Fri, 30. Jul 21, 06:09

Hi All,

I thought I'd post a bit about my efforts to use the game map, which is quite visual but behaves reasonably well, for the most part.

The map has a ton of information, some of which is probably presented in a format I can't easily detect. I appreciate that one of the things it offers is a sidebar listing (almost)all objects of interest depending on my current zoom level. This isn't perfect with OCR, but is a lot better than the actual graphics. I can generally route the mouse to ships and stations I want to interact with.

The problem comes when I want to move around at a larger scale, or get a sense of where things are relative to one another. This is particularly the case when moving between systems/sectors. The way I would do this in X3 would involve the universe map, which doesn't really exist in X4 as a separate entity, for understandable reasons.

A person on Reddit kindly pointed out that I can drop off nav beacons which I can then return to at will. They also make handy points of reference for centering the map on specific places, if I want to do that.

I appreciate the thematic element of dropping off a beacon I can then return to. I imagine I'll be using them more than most sighted players as I explore the universe.

The number one area of the map I would appreciate more info on is relationships between objects. A way to get distance and bearing info would be very useful, either from my current ship or between two arbitrary points. This info is obviously available to people visually but is a bit hard to deduce at the moment, though the ability to OCR the distance/speed gauges when flying around does help a bit.

kuertee had mentioned he hopes to work on a way to get distance/position info into a contact list of some kind. This will be very useful, it would be great if Egosoft could find a way to make the information available without need for a mod, but I appreciate any and all help.

I just thought this might be of interest to some people, as the map is still one of the components I struggle with, albeit it could be a lot worse.

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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by oasis1701 » Sat, 31. Jul 21, 03:07

CBJ wrote:
Wed, 28. Jul 21, 13:48
Unfortunately having the game read out all the menu text isn't really an option. Those lines don't have, and indeed can't really have, voice recordings, and although text-to-speech is something we've experimented with, it isn't really a viable option for us at the moment, for a variety of reasons. We'd therefore need a clearer understanding of why your OCR wasn't able to provide what you need there, to try and work out whether there was anything we could do to enable it to work better for you.
Hello
I understand that adding speech tts might be not viable; however, do you think that it's possible that you could pipe the information from the game to our screen reading software? (for example, pipe the currently focused item/text to the screen reader)
This work has been done by a video game called skullgirls and i believe the library that they use is open for all to use. The library is called Tolk.
I thought that i ask, so you guys could take a look at it and see if it is viable for you to perhaps add such functionality. I know that a game like x4 can have many focusable items, compared to a fighting game. I have no knowledge of programming so i do not know if this would take a lot of time or not.

When we play the game, we have our screen reader running to perform OCR and also to alt+tab out of the game and browse the internet and such. Sending text from the game to the screen reader as the items in the game are focused with keyboard or controller, or focused with mouse could be very helpful to us, this way, there is no need to include a tts service in x4 as well.

edit: This appears to be tolk project on github: https://github.com/dkager/tolk
Cheers

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Re: Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally BLind Player

Post by oasis1701 » Sat, 31. Jul 21, 13:45

I'm giving the game a try now!
One hard challenge i find is that when using the long range scanner, I think i am supposed to move towards the question marks that appear in the map, and detect the objects as my ship gets closer to them.
I do not know which direction to go though and i don't think i can ask the ship to auto pilot towards these question marks, can i?

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