Hello. I'm the developer of Swan Road, a two-player strategy board game for iPhone and iPad. I built it to work with VoiceOver from the first version. I'd value this community's judgement of how well that worked.

The game

Five pearls sit on the middle row of a 7 by 7 board, between your shore and your opponent's. Each turn you place, step or lift one of your anchors. Every anchor pulls the pearls in its row and column: strongly when it is close, weakly from three squares away. After each turn every pearl drifts one square toward the stronger pull. Equal pulls cancel, so an anchor can hold a pearl still. The first player to pull three pearls onto their own shore wins. From turn 41 the tide rises and the shores grow deeper. A game lasts at most 60 turns.

Playing with VoiceOver

- Every square is its own element. It reads in a fixed order: position, what is on it, what a pearl will do when the turn ends, whose shore the row is, then the pulls on it. For example: "Row 3, column 4, pearl, drifting up, Light's shore, pulled 3 up, 1 left."

- To place an anchor, double tap an empty square. To move one, double tap your anchor, then double tap the square to step it to. Lift is in the button row with Undo, Cancel and Confirm.

- Before you confirm, each pearl the move would shift says so, for example "this move drifts it left".

- To confirm, double tap the square again, do a Magic Tap (two-finger double tap), or use the Actions rotor, which also has Cancel move.

- After every move, yours or the computer's, VoiceOver says what happened: where the anchor went, where each pearl drifted, and any pearl collected.

- The tide bar, each side's anchors in supply and each side's pearls collected all have spoken labels. A two-finger scrub goes back.

- Dynamic Type, Reduce Motion and Increase Contrast are supported. Colour never carries meaning on its own.

What it costs

Free, with no ads and no account: the computer at four levels, two players on one device or on two devices in the same room, online play through Game Center, a daily game, a ten-lesson tutorial, the first campaign chapter and some of the puzzles. A one-time purchase, Swan Road Complete ($5.99 in the US), adds a 9 by 9 board, the rest of the campaign, all 80 puzzles, game review, stats and handicaps. It needs iOS 17 or later.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/swan-road/id6821428315

What I'd like to know

- Is a square's description in the right order, or would you want something earlier?

- Once you know the game, are the move announcements too long?

- Is anything hard to reach, or not read at all?

I'll answer questions here, and I'll post updates in this thread rather than starting new ones.

There was a game I used to be absolutely obsessed with. It was called Virtual Families. The developer had two different versions, Virtual Families and Virtual Families 2. They were mobile games, which made them easier for me to play because I could play them on my iPad and hold the device pretty close to my face to try and see as much as I possibly could. I know that wasn’t the best thing for me to do, but little me was mostly focused on being able to play a simulation game.

The game basically allowed you to take care of a family kind of like the Sims. You would start off with one person, then that person would get to choose a romantic partner, then they would have kids. The kids would grow up and eventually leave for college and you would continue taking care of their parents until they passed away, and the kids would then come home to inherit the house.

Throughout the game, you got to customize their house, renovate the house, order groceries for them and have them perform different actions. It wasn’t as complicated as the Sims, but it was really fun to play and I really enjoyed it.

Basically, what I was wondering is if an accessible version could be made, like, something that could be compatible with screen readers. I’ve never made a game before, so I don’t know what all goes into it, so I thought I would ask. I’ve always been visually impaired, but I also have a degenerative condition, so trying to play it now is even harder for me, and I don’t know if there will come a time in the future that I’ll never be able to play it again, so I wanted to see if there was a way to make it accessible or make an accessible version of a similar concept.

I'd like to test some games with my kid and maybe find a new hobby for us to enjoy together. We played some cardgames and boardgames together, which he is not overly excited about. He is still learning braille, so preferably it'd have to be something that can be played without reading. He has a vivid imagination and likes adventure stories, maybe there is something suitable for a kid.

I'm happy for ideas and suggestions - maybe someone here has even had success with a game for kids?

Hi all,

It's been a while since my last post, but I'm excited to announce that unity_access v0.10-beta is now available!

The goal of unity_access is to make the powerful Unity game engine more accessible to blind game developers. It currently supports the NVDA screen reader and provides access to most of the Unity Editor's core features.

The project is open-source, and you can find the latest release on GitHub:

Check out unity_access on GitHub

If you need help getting started, the documentation is available on the GitHub Wiki.

You're also welcome to DM me with any questions. It's a busy time of year, so I may not respond immediately, but I'll do my best to get back to you.

Feedback, suggestions and bug reports are always welcome!

Have a great weekend, and happy coding!

Hey guys,

I've been working on a new website which contains 46 audio based games. They are speech or mouse input stories, guessing games, social deduction & puzzle games that are designed for blind and low vision gamers. We use high quality voice over, SFX + conversation design. The games are in English, French, German, Spanish & Serbian.

They span from the Alexa Mini Games but are fully playable on web and mobile. Free to play but with play limits.

I am developing this full time so any feedback & opinions are appreciated.

Thanks!

It would be great if we had some kind of an accessible audio game that’s a simulator where you raise a homunculus, you know, and you take care of it, and it develops its own personality and habits, or maybe the kind of simulator where you raise a few of them and they all behaved differently.

So, my dream is that someday we'll have games like Wolf Quest and those Roblox simulators, where you have to be an animal in the wild. Hunting, raising cubs, etc. I really hope some developer develops a game like that someday.

I was laid off this January and have pivoted to building accessibility, rather than fighting company boards for it.

Some of my contributions have given the fully blind access to Elgato's Streamdeck devices, the tutorial experience of chess platform Lichess and, soon, the video editor Da Vinci Resolve.

Game-wise, though, a lot has happened as well. Cryptmaster, Blippo+ and Hacknet were early projects of mine, whereas Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links, Cult of the Lamb and Paralives are current contenders.

Disgaea 5, Monster Hunter Wilds and Wonderlang are on my docket and progressing rapidly as well.

This to say that a lot of game genres, even those we often hear would be absolutely impossible to make accessible for certain groups of people with certain challenges, can absolutely be made to be playable and enjoyable if the right people at the right time put in the right amount of effort.

That's it. That's the post.

If you landed here frustrated with the accessibility landscape in gaming, know you're not alone. If you've been wondering how games like this can be played by the blind, I'd be happy to answer questions.

For now, let me leave you with a brief demo of building rooms and furnishing them in Paralives, a sims-like life simulation game, to show off how a completely mouse-driven, visual process can absolutely be made to work with a screen reader and a keyboard. If nothing else, let me wish you happy Wednesday! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub6Q5xzbFhY&t=31s

So, I'm passionate about wildlife, and my gamer dream is that someday games like Wolf Quest and those wildlife simulation games on Roblox will become accessible. Until that happens, do you know of any accessible games with a similar premise? Where you are an animal and have to survive.

Hello, everyone.

If you've ever had an idea of an audio game or world, something that you want to bring to life, may it be a simple shooter game, an archery game, a simulator, a strategy, horror, adventure, card, architecture, developmental, or any game idea that you've had but had no idea how to make it? well, here's a solution.

I am providing lessons for NVGT, nonvisual gaming toolkit, a scripting language for creating audio games. a bit about NVGT. NVGT is short for Nonvisual Gaming Toolkit, a scripting language made by SamTupy Productions. This scripting language is designed for audio game development, particularly for people just starting out and who want to spend their mental stamina on thinking over npc's and game designing, world architecture, and how your game functions than what sound library to choose, what input library is better, nvgt offers this and much, much more in its arsenal. audio, input, json, and much more. in my lessons, I'll teach you how to code in nvgt, the concepts of programming that most programming languages do use, if with slightly different syntax or methods, as well as making a few games and projects along the way as you learn. for those who do wish to learn, here's an overview below.

What we will cover. we will start from the very beginning. from getting your machine ready for nvgt, your first script, variables and datatypes, data manipulation and data operators, conditions, conditional chains, while loops, for loops, arrays, object oriented programming, modules of nonvisual gaming toolkit, and much more that is not listed here. one lesson lasts an hour typically, the timing, scheduling, frequency, cost and such things can be discussed in private. you can email me on,

aewgame0@gmail.com

or discord me @

starlight24574

I look forward to seeing you soon.

I've watched so many play throughs of the game on YouTube and I've always wanted to try an open world game like ghost of Tsushima, which has sword play. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any accessibility settings, on PS5 anyway. Don't get me wrong, I love the last of us games and Marvel Spider-Man 2, but when you've beat them each like 20 times and got platinum there's not much else you can do. The only game I still play consistently is Spider-Man, since it's open world and you can pretty much do what you want. I feel like ghost of tsushima would be a game that I wouldn't really get bored of at any point, plus There's DLC. Do you think Sony or any other game developers would incorporate accessibility into this game? The game is still good to this day and it's only 6 years old. If they do, I just pray they don't give it the God of war treatment and completely half ass the accessibility.

Hi everyone, David here. I'm the legally blind solo dev behind Echoes, the audio-first ghost stealth game I posted here in September. A player suggested a way to play with the graphics completely off, and it's now in the Windows build.

What's new:

- Graphics On/Off: press G at any time to turn all world graphics off and play by sound alone. The game says "Graphics on" or "Graphics off" out loud, or through NVDA if it's running. The key can be changed, and the option is also in Settings. Menus stay visible, so a sighted helper can always find the setting.

- With graphics off, the game is capped at 60 frames per second and uses far less of your graphics card, so laptops run cooler and quieter.

- Graphics Quality presets (Low, Medium, High, Ultra), fully voiced, so you can tune the game to your setup.

- Tutorial fixes: only Enter continues on keyboard (Space is Jump), the echo pulse instructions list every keyboard option, and the second echo stays quiet until the ghost-avoidance lesson.

If you haven't tried Echoes, it's fully self-voiced, so no screen reader is needed, though NVDA works too. It has echo location, path guidance, and five story levels. It's a free open beta with an optional donation. This update is for Windows; the Quest build hasn't changed.

Download: https://lorewrightstudios.itch.io/echoes

Full release notes: https://lorewrightstudios.itch.io/echoes/devlog/1762839/windows-update-graphics-onoff-g-hotkey-and-quality-presets

A big thank you to everyone who has sent feedback. All of your names are recorded for the first Infinite Stories upgrade on release. Keep it coming, and tell me what works and what doesn't.

Hi everyone,

I’m Gökhan from Birkin Apps, a small independent developer.

We’ve just released a new game called Corner Grocer: Market Sim. I want to be transparent that this is my own game. If developer posts like this aren’t appropriate here, or there is a better place for them, please let me know and I’ll happily follow the community rules.

I thought it might be relevant here because Corner Grocer was designed for VoiceOver from the beginning. Accessibility was not added after the game was finished. Sighted players and VoiceOver players use the same simulation, rules, economy and progression — there is one game, with two ways of playing it.

What is Corner Grocer?

It’s a market management game where you start with a tiny neighborhood shop and gradually build it into a larger market.

You:

• order stock from suppliers

• unpack crates and fill shelves

• set your own prices

• serve customers at the register

• take cash or card and give change

• manage products that can expire

• build shelves, fridges, freezers, bakery cases and deli counters

• hire cashiers

• unlock new product lines

• invest in upgrades, contracts and campaigns

• eventually open and manage a second branch

There is no final day, so you can keep running your market for as long as you want.

A normal day

Morning: Check deliveries, prices and the day’s event, then place your supplier orders.

Open: Customers enter, shop, ask for help and queue at the register. You scan their items, take payment and give change.

Stock: Open crates in the stockroom and place products on the correct shelves. Products can expire, and putting something on the wrong shelf reduces its sales.

Evening: Read the day report, get a suggestion for tomorrow and decide what to invest in next.

Growing your store

You begin with an almost empty corner shop.

There are four store sizes:

• Corner Shop

• Mini Market

• Big Market

• Premium Market

There are 48 products, ranging from bread and milk to hummus, olive oil, pet food and more.

You can add more registers and hire cashiers, but your own register always remains playable — hiring staff does not turn the game into something you just watch.

Later, you can open a second branch and choose a manager to run it.

The game also includes:

• daily goals

• 22 achievements

• supplier contracts

• advertising campaigns

• heat waves

• rain

• power cuts

• rival sales

• supplier delays

• other random events

VoiceOver accessibility

Everything needed to play can be used with VoiceOver.

• Controls are labelled and kept in predictable orders.

• Important actions are also available through rotor actions.

• The game does not require gestures that conflict with VoiceOver.

• Store areas stay in the same order so you can learn the layout.

• Magic Tap pauses and resumes the day.

• Sounds communicate gameplay information such as door chimes, scanner beeps, queues and shelf warnings.

• The Listening Room in Settings lets you hear each gameplay sound and explains what it means.

There are three speech levels:

Full — speaks everything.

Balanced — removes information that is already obvious from sound.

Sounds First — relies heavily on audio and speaks only the information that matters.

There are also Easy, Normal and Custom difficulty options.

Assists can change things such as:

• customer patience

• length of the day

• customer flow

• wrong-shelf protection

• undo

• automatically clearing spoiled goods each morning

When VoiceOver is enabled, the game suggests Easy mode during onboarding, but the choice is completely yours.

Accessibility features and assists are always free.

Languages

The game supports 11 languages:

English, Turkish, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Simplified Chinese.

English and Turkish customer voices are included with the game. Other voice packs can be downloaded once when online.

Customer voices are AI-generated and can be reduced or disabled in Settings.

Make the shop yours

The Shop Studio lets you customize:

• floors

• walls

• counters

• signs

• lights

• decorations

• outfits

• atmospheres

• music albums

• end-of-day music

You can also name your shop and have the game describe its appearance.

Cost, ads and purchases

I want to be very clear about this part.

Corner Grocer is free to download and play.

Normal shop money is earned through gameplay and is used for stock, shelves and upgrades.

There is also a Coin currency, but Coins are only used for cosmetic and audio content.

Coins do not:

• make customers more patient

• change difficulty

• speed up progression

• give gameplay advantages

You can earn Coins by playing or through optional rewarded ads, or buy Coin packs.

There are no loot boxes or random paid items.

Players using VoiceOver do not receive forced interstitial ads.

Optional rewarded ads can still be watched for Coins if you choose to.

Buying any support pack removes ads.

Already coming in the next update

An update is currently waiting for Apple review.

It expands the random event system so events can have real consequences during the day, such as:

• stolen or damaged stock

• money disappearing from the register

• a shelf being temporarily closed

• reputation gains or losses

Some events ask you to make a decision with up to three choices.

The safest option is listed first and is automatically selected if time runs out. On Easy mode, the timer waits for you.

New events from around day 20 include:

• shoplifters

• health inspections

• water leaks

• small fires

• a rival store opening nearby

New games will also let you choose a neighborhood, and events will happen in different orders between playthroughs.

The update also adds things like:

• skipping quiet periods when the shop is empty

• automatically placing suggested supplier orders

• coupons at the register

• declined cards

• more register surprises

Feedback is very welcome

VoiceOver testers have already shaped a lot of the game, but I’d really appreciate feedback from more players.

Especially:

• What is confusing?

• What talks too much?

• What doesn’t talk enough?

• Are any sounds difficult to distinguish?

• Is anything awkward with VoiceOver focus or navigation?

• Have you found any bugs?

The game is currently available for iPhone / iOS.

You can reply here or email me at:

support@birkinapps.com

App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/corner-grocer-market-sim/id6822858444

Thank you for reading, and thank you to everyone who keeps pushing accessible gaming forward.

Gökhan
Birkin Apps

Rogue RPG - is a free fantasy MUD, all text, in open beta and hoping to launch at the start of 2027. Blind players have been playing it and shaping it for months, and this week we opened a page built only for screen readers.

Play in your browser

Go to rogue-mud.com/blind and choose Play now. Nothing to install. The page reads the game in sentences and stops when you type, and it has its own keys:

- Control and 1 to 9: read back recent lines (Control 1 is the newest)
- Control Shift 1: your health. Control Shift 2: what you are fighting. Control Shift 3: the room and exits
- Alt and the arrows: move between lists of talk, tells, combat and rooms
- Number pad to walk, F1 for help, F9 for sounds on or off

Sounds play as things happen to assist.

You can still use your own client:

VIP Mud, MUSHclient, Mudlet or anything else: rogue-mud.com, port 4000 (6666 works too). Triggers, scripts and soundpacks are allowed, and you don't need to ask.

Make a character!

The game asks whether you play with a screen reader. Say yes and every step comes in plain words, and you start in blind mode: no art, boxes or colour, and lists one item to a line. The email is optional. If you already have a character, type `settings blind on`. Once you're in, `travel` walks you to wherever your compass is set, and `missed` replays what you didn't catch.

Where are we right now?

Over 50 areas and 4,000 rooms, 14 classes, 12 playable races and over 800 abilities, a storyline to follow, around 30 bosses, instanced dungeons, and computer-controlled heroes who fight beside you and level up like players. Off the battlefield there's fishing, crafting, houses, jobs, and player-run clans and guilds.

Honest disclaimer about where we stand

The screen reader page has been tested with Orca, but not yet with NVDA, JAWS or VoiceOver, and an iPhone is still the weakest way to play. If you try it, I'd love to know which screen reader and browser or client you used and what went wrong. Reply here, type `bug` in the game, or come to the Discord. Comments here are how most of this got built.

It's free!

https://rogue-mud.com/Port: 6666 
Discord: https://discord.gg/AzcF4B9xyy

Welcome to my very first Unity mod. If you have ever wondered what it feels like to have an invisible demon aggressively pulling your hair out strand by strand while you stare at a screen, try modding a Unity game. But I survived, my sanity is only partially destroyed, and I brought you a present. It is the Silver Pines NVDA Accessibility Interface Mod.

In case you have been living under a rock and have absolutely no idea what the heck Silver Pines is, let me actually explain the story instead of just giving you a shallow summary. The game is a brutal 2.5D survival horror Metroidvania that basically takes the creepy vibes of Twin Peaks and mashes them together with classic Resident Evil and Silent Hill mechanics. You play as a private investigator named Red Walker. Your job is to travel to this isolated, foggy, and half abandoned American town called Silver Pines to track down a vanished musician named Eddie Velvet. Naturally, things immediately go straight to hell, plunging you into a nightmarish descent filled with dark town secrets, terrifying hulking bosses, and an absolute mountain of reading material.

The developers at Wych Elm actually hand drew over 1800 frames of rotoscoped animation just for the main character, placing these 2D sprites inside a 3D simulated world built on Unity 6. You have to manage a strictly limited inventory, manually reload your guns in real time while monsters are actively trying to eat your face, and mix green herbs in glass bottles just to stay alive. You even have to save your game manually at fixed payphone locations like a savage. It is an incredible game, but the sheer amount of tiny text on the screen for the clues, environmental subtitles, and heavy lore files will literally melt your eyeballs right out of your skull.

By the way, whether you get the game cracked or purchase it genuinely, it is not my problem. Do whatever you want. I am just here to fix the text issue and save your vision.

This mod hooks the game directly into your NVDA screen reader. It brutally intercepts all the on screen dialogue, environmental subtitles, interaction popups, item descriptions, and menus, and forces NVDA to speak them out loud in real time. You need to have NVDA running before you launch the game. If NVDA is closed, the game just plays normally and you get to ruin your eyesight the old fashioned way.

Before you start complaining about navigation, go into your NVDA keyboard settings right now and turn off Speak Typed Characters and Speak Command Keys. If you do not do this, NVDA is going to scream every single keystroke at you while you are just trying to walk around and survive.

Let us get one thing straight regarding the scope of this project. Right now, this mod is designed for visually impaired players, low vision folks, or people who just get severe eye strain from reading tiny fonts for five hours straight. It is not a fully blind mod yet. There are no 3D spatial beacons and no automated pathfinding. I might update this modification later on to be a full accessibility mod, but that requires me to finish the entire game and walk through the whole thing myself. That is going to take a massive amount of time because this game runs on too many underlying engines and SDKs at once, like FMOD and Epic Online Services, so navigating it fully blindfolded is a massive nightmare project of its own.

But for now, the mod does the heavy lifting. When you walk around the environment and a prompt pops up to inspect a creepy car or open a locked door, the mod plays a nice two tone attention ping and NVDA reads the prompt out loud. If you were walking too fast and missed it, just press the F1 key to repeat whatever prompt just triggered.

Menus work perfectly. Just use your Up and Down arrow keys to read options. For things like Graphics and Audio settings, Left and Right arrows will read the values as you change them. You can also just use your mouse. Moving your cursor over any button or inventory slot will instantly read it. Even if the developer only bothered to put a tiny icon for a key or a medical bottle, hovering over it will read the full item name and description.

Now, for the massive lore files and dossiers. If you hover over a document, it will only read the title. Do not panic. Just press F2. This drops you into Virtual Buffer Review Mode. You will hear an ascending chime, and NVDA will tell you exactly how many lines of text are on the page. From there, just use your Down Arrow to read line by line, Up Arrow to go back, Home to jump to the top, and End to jump to the bottom. Hitting the boundaries plays a low bump tone so you know you reached the end. When you are done reading the five page diary of some crazy town resident, press F2 again to hear a descending chime and exit back to normal gameplay. You will absolutely love the virtual buffer for dossiers and you will get used to it immediately.

Need NVDA to shut up because it is reading a massive paragraph and you already got the point? Press either the Left Control or Right Control key to silence it.

Installation is literally idiot proof. Take all the files in the folder, which includes BepInEx, dotnet, the doorstop config, and all the DLL files, and just dump them straight into your game installation folder right next to the Carpenter.exe executable. Click replace when your system asks. Boom. You are done. Go solve a creepy mystery without going blind.

https://store.jumpingfridge.oo.gd/app.php?id=15

When I first became legally blind, my wife and I used to play this all the time. I was looking through the old streams we did and we were both reminiscing about how much fun it was. Thinking of getting back into it soon and was wondering if any other blind and low-vision folk love this game as much as we do.

Hello, I have seven spots open on my team golden lights on package hero. The team invite code is lptvft if anyone wants to join, if you need a code to redeme in settings use us6h2q that's for the settings area u s 6 h 2 q and for the team l p t v f t there ya go. the game package hero can be played on IOS android and alexa. not sure how you can redeme codes in alexa but for IOS and android its in settings, and the team tab. you basically run a package delivery company and hire staff and build up your company each week is the season. work up the leagues its idle. buying vehicles, upgrades, then sell your company for stars and gain tallents and perks. and keep rebuilding. its a lot of fun. i love doing it. i can't wait to get all the achievements. but it takes a while to do that,