Hey all, so since I have been born blind and I’ve seen a few threads around, I wanted to create a thread in case anyone wanted to ask absolutely anything about blindness, whether it’s for your own interest or as part of a game. I will do my absolute best to answer any questions, so feel free to ask me anything although please be reasonable.
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I honestly always wondered about this…
When I see braille signs around, it always seems to me to be somewhat inconsistent; inconsistent in whether it exists at all, and in where it’s placed. For starters, I always wonder, “if I couldn’t see, how could I know that the braille is there for me to reach out and read by touch?”
Are those braille signs around elevators and stuff really useful? I imagine they are, but my big big question is, how do you know they are there? How do you know where to reach so you can read whatever sign? And how do you know it’s even there? If it’s not in a place you expect to find it, are you likely to miss it entirely?
Thanks a bunch for your availability! 
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Hi Giger_Kitty. The truth is… Unless some good sighted Samaritan tells us about the existence of signs, most of us don’t know that they’re even there. TBH, most of us don’t expect them to be, so we don’t tend to feel around to try and find a sign or anything like that. This is why a lot of blind people have been campaigning for more consistent signage, so that when it is there it is in a logical place and in the same place each time.
tells us about the existence of signs, most of us don’t know that they’re even there. TBH, most of us don’t expect them to be, so we don’t tend to feel around to try and find a sign or anything like that. This is why a lot of blind people have been campaigning for more consistent signage, so that when it is there it is a logical place and in the same place each time.
I guess some other way a blind person might know is if they have received training in that location. If a blind person is going somewhere new and they can get this, they might go around with what’s known as a mobility or rehabilitation trainer, who will teach them the way to get for example from the entrance of the building to the toilets and then they can point out any signage that might be of use. But to answer your question, most of us would not know.
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Hi, Alyssia. Thank you, it’s very generous of you to make such an offer.
I often wonder about how blind folks get computers set up for them. I know that many computers have accessibility features like VoiceOver, but I imagine that these things have to be set up for you by a sighted person to start with. And then, once you have your computer, how well are you able to manage it yourself using those tools? Do you still have to rely on sighted people to maintain it? I’ve monkeyed with these tools a little bit as a developer and I find them frustrating, so I imagine that relying on them all the time must feel very challenging.
Ivan
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Oh, I have a lot of questions. No need to answer them all at once…
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I’ve read the the wake-sleep rythm is disturbed for some blind people. How common is that for blind people? And does it differ for people born blind and people with later aquired blindness?
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My father told me about a blind man who can eat with fork and knife like everybody else and without touching the food or plate with his fingers. How does he do that?
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Are the Braille letters different for different languages?
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How helpful are spoken over-voices describing what is to be seen in a movie? And can blind people enjoy a movie at all?
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Not OP, but since I’m also blind and the blind are not a monolith, I’ll chime in on questions asked here if OP doesn’t object.
Some background: I grew up with congenital glaucoma, my right retina detached when I was a baby, so I’ve been blind in my right eye since before I could form memories, and my left retina detached when I was 25, and I’m now 39 and blind in both eyes. Pre-blindness, my left eye capped at a visual acuity of about 20/100 and I mostly got by by getting close up with stuff and using a pocket telescope at a distance. I learned braille in school and pre-blindness, I could sight read it like normal print, but my touch reading speed has always been glacial.
On the signage front, I mostly dealt with it in places I had been familiar with pre-blindness and so already knew the signs were there, though because of my slow braille touch reading, I often find embossed/engraved print on signs more useful than Braille.
On the technology side, I can’t speek for Windows or Apple PCs as my only blind usage of the former was in a vocational rehabilitation setting where the computers were already setup for blind and low vision usage and I have no experience with the latter. I also can’t comment on iPhone as I have never used an iPhone either pre nor post-blindness.
For Linux, it depends on the distro. In the case of my preferred distro, Debian, booting the netinstaller plays either one beep(for legacy bios) or two beeps(fore EUFI) when the installer’s boot menu comes up, though this does require having a PC speaker. Pressing s and enter after the beep launches the talking version of the debian installer and using this version of the installer will configure the newly installed system to boot with espeakup enabled if you do a console-only installation, and with Orca enabled if you install a desktop environment, though my experience is a bit of post-installation configuration is required to get espeakup and orca to play nice with each other if you want to be able to switch back-and-forth between the GUI and the console. That said, sometimes when I need to reinstall Debian because something broke that I can’t fix, something will go wonky with secure boot and boot order that prevents me from booting the flash drive I’ve written the Debian netinst to and I need sighted assistance to go into my tower’s bios to fix them.
As for Android, many devices will have a button combo that turns Talkback on/off without having to dig into the phone’s settings. On the Moto G Power 2022 I bought a few years ago to give talkback a try, it was holding both volume up and volume down at the same time for several seconds, though even with Talkback enabled, I found just navigating the homescreen to be a royal pain and was only able to get through the new device setup by using a USB OTG cable to plug in a USB keyboard. Thankfully, that Moto G was on a spare line and I still had a functional flip phone on my main line.
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I can’t really comment on the statistics, but my own sleep cycle does seem rather variable, but it did even before I went blind.
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The tines of a fork piercing a solid chunk of meet, sinking into a pile of mashed potatoes or scraping against an empty plate feel quite different. A sighted person might not notice since they are likely to credit their eyes even when other senses are at play, but anyone can build up an intuition for how things feel different depending on the tool and what the tool is being used on… on the food prep side of things, there’s a different feel to cutting a tomato versus cutting an onion.
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Yes and no… Japanese Braille is completely different from English Braille, but the French and English mostly use the same Braille alphabet just as with print. Also, I suspect many of the contractions used in braille are language specific. Also, interesting bit of trivia, there’s a pattern in the Braille Roman alphabet: k through t are the same as a through j, but with the addition of dot 3 and u, v, x, y, and z are k, l, m, n, and o with the addition of dot 6. W breaks the pattern because w is not a letter in standard French, and Louis Braille, who adapted the phoneme based night writing to a spelling-based encoding and for whom the sytem is named, was French.
And if you didn’t know, each “cell” of Braille consists of two columns of 3 dots, the left column is numbered 1, 2, 3 from top to bottom and the right column is numbered 4, 5, 6. There is also computer Braille, which adds dots 7 and 8 at the bottomof the columns. Also worth noting, standard 6-dot Braille doesn’t have separate upper and lowercase letters nor does it have distinct numerals, instead making use of a capital sign and a number sign that turns a-i into the digits 1-9 and j into 0… and no, I’m not sure how Braille handles hexadecimal and other bases larger than 10.
Also, this technically makes Braille a 6-bit binary text encoding that predates ASCII by over a century and even predates the invention of the telegraph.
- Even without descriptive audio, I enjoy quite a bit of movies and television, even stuff that came out after I went blind, though well made descriptive audio can enhance the experience. That said, like with most things, some narrators are better than others and some scripts are better than others. I will say that intense fight scenes often don’t describe very well as there’s just too much going on for a narrator to describe adequately in the time available… On a related note, when I decided some time post blindness to consume the core Star Wars movies, I went for the radio dramas of A new Hope and The EMpire strikes Back and novelizations of Episodes 1-7 over tracking down descriptive audio of the movies themselves… Last Jedi was either new or upcoming at the time I finished the novelization of The Force Awakens and I never got around to obtaining audio books of the novels for TLJ and RoS.
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I’ve been planning on taking a big commercial game I made a few years ago and putting it on Steam (called Never Gives Up Her Dead). When I first released it on itch several blind people mentioned that they had heard of the game because it was mentioned on a forum for the visually impaired as a great game for use with screen readers.
Anyway, I thought about advertising this aspect of the game on the Steam page and reaching out to some visually-impaired streamers. Since you said we can ask anything, do you have any marketing tips for me? I literally sat down today and thought, 'How can I market this to visually impaired people?" I don’t expect that it’s a huge demographic but I do hope that people will enjoy having accessible games.
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What have been some problems that you’ve encountered in IF games that you’ve played over a screen reader? I’m guessing that the Sokoban puzzle in Zork III and the minimap in Beyond Zork and the puzzle pieces in Jigsaw would be troublesome; are there less obvious pitfalls that have derailed games for you, that future authors should avoid?
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That’s a generous offer. I attempted to make my IF Study Course accessible. Is it? Could it be better?
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Hello, Alyssia. (And Mewtamer)
Thank you very much for being so open.
My question involves the unnoticed.
Interactive Fiction has been accessible to the blind and visually impaired by coincidence, not design. No one at Infocom endeavored to make a product the blind could appreciate as much as the sighted.
That said, there must be numerous things written or designed with sighted assumptions. Just descriptions alone depend heavily on comparison to how other things look. This must penetrate further into plot logic or puzzle design. Assumptions made about likely player actions or assumed player knowledge that do no apply to the blind. What those things specifically are, I’m not sure; it is beyond my experience. I do suspect they very much exist, and plenty of them are probably repeated enough that common ones have become noticed tropes or jokes among the blind community. In the same way that TV tropes are noticed by the audiences at large.
Are there any gaps or false assumptions commonly made in parser games that are all too familiar to the blind community playing them? If so, would you be willing to share, and possibly explain, some of them?
Thank you for humoring our questions and I apologize if I didn’t articulate that well. I’m trying to corral the shape of something I have every reason to suspect exists while also having never seen, or more likely, just never noticed, myself.
Thanks, -Pinkunz
Edited-to-add: @sue I should have finished reading the thread before replying. Your question is pretty similar, and, frankly, you got it across in far less words, lol. Well done.
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I have 5 questions.
1.) I’ve heard that some blind people prefer the older, built-in text-to-speech voices; not because they are nicer to listen to, but because they enunciate more clearly at higher speeds and allow for more information to be heard at a faster rate. Is there any truth to this? What’s your preference?
2.) Is it preferable for terse story/game prose as much as possible?
3.) What are your top 3 videogames as a blind player? …and in a sentence or two, why is that game so enjoyable for you?
4.) Any advice for sighted play testers to test for blind accessibility beyond closing their eyes?
5.) Would it be of any benefit for an author to use the browser’s built-in text-to-speech voices? I assume a blind user would already be using a text-to-speech voice tweaked exactly to their liking and this would be more of an annoyance and not actually helpful.
That is all for now. Thank you so much for creating this space for discussion. 
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IFWiki has an “Accessibility” category at https://www.ifwiki.org/Category:Accessibility. What could be added? How could the wiki be improved generally? Thank you.
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Hey mathbrush. Honestly, I would suggest going onto forums for blind people and advertising your game there. Maybe you could try r/blind on Reddit?
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I’m not going to respond to anyone specifically about this, since multiple people raised it but regarding accessibility in text adventure games, certain puzzles like the mentioned jigsaw one in jigsaw can be pretty difficult. Mostly I’ve got around them through I’ve tried an error, or the use of the walk-through. TBF I’m pretty bad for using walk-throughs, I’m not good at puzzles and I’m not a particularly patient person when it comes to games. In terms of other things in descriptions, I find that IF authors tend to be very descriptive, they automatically mention colours or other things that might be relevant if it is needed for puzzles so I’ve not found too many barriers there. Maybe games that refer to the way print looks might be tricky for some people, but I actually can read very very large print (I use braille full-time because it’s a lot more practical) so I do have some knowledge about what letters/numbers look like.
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Hey, I love these questions! Here are my answers:
- I’m not too sure about this, I’ve never heard blind people having a specific preference for a specific set of text to speech voices, most of us tend to use what’s available. I will say I use the freedom scientific set, which comes installed with a lot of screen readers. I actually find some really old text to speech voices, like the Microsoft set that everyone makes fun of on the Internet a little more difficult to understand than the newer stuff.
- This one is totally down to personal preference, I like very descriptive pros although I do find if pros becomes a bit too purple than it gets a little annoying, although I don’t think that’s necessarily a blind thing, I think many people have the same opinion. I would argue it might actually be a little easier for me with lots of pros because my screen reader can read it to me very fast, whereas I think it takes people reading it a bit longer
- 3. I don’t have enough vision for typical video games, so I mostly play IF. I do have a favourites list on the IFDB but TBF I have to find the link. Aside from that I play a couple games on my phone, there’s this one called A Blind Legend which is quite fun which is an audio game that you listen to through headphones, but I’m always on the look for more games especially PC games, ideally that don’t break the bank.
- 4. Make sure to use the screen reader, and maybe consider turning on the screen curtain. Most screen readers have this feature where you can turn off the screen whilst the screen reader is a new. Ideally, if you have lots of time, try your game or software out with multiple screen readers as they all differ slightly. I would also say don’t use a mouse, most blind people don’t and only rely on keyboard navigation.
- 5. Most blind people probably would already be using a screen reader to get onto the website, so they probably wouldn’t have any use for built-in text to speech voices. I remember one website tried to be helpful and put audio descriptions on graphics and videos, but my screen reader I was already using was describing them for me anyway and saying the exact same things, so it drove me mad!
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Oh, and as to setting up computers, honestly I received sighted assistance until I got my screen reader installed, then it was all smooth sailing and I could do the rest independently. For VoiceOver, it is a built-in screen reader so all you’ve got to do is tap the side button or Home button three times and it turns on, but if that shortcut is not set up, you can always ask Siri to turn on VoiceOver for you.
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I meant videogames in the most general sense, including interactive fiction games. That said, what’s your favourite interactive fiction game due to the accessibility you experience and what are those enjoyable aspects?
Lastly, do you think many blind players use gamepads on their computers?
Thanks!
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What are some unintentionally annoying things that sighted people tend to do around blind people?
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Hey bikibird. There are a couple things. The first one for me is when they make patronising comments. Sometimes they think these comments are compliments, but they’re just kind of awkward. Being told things like you’re so brave, you’re such an inspiration, et cetera is a little difficult to respond to because at the end of the day, I’m doing the same everyday stuff as you. I think this comes from a place of people not imagining how they would function without being able to see, but it is so awkward to respond to. I guess the other one is when people say over there and gesture/point but that one tends to be an error that people make out of habit rather than an action they are trying to do for a specific purpose like the first one
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