[pygame] Games for blind players

[Luis Miguel Morillas]

A friend asked me to write a game for blind kids. He proposed me a
kind of hangman game. Do you have any experience using speech
recognition and text to speech into games?

-- lm

[Áron Ócsvári]

Hello,
I created a game (Sliding puzzle for blinds, but I didn't use text to
speech. It works with sound files. It can be donwloaded here:
http://audiopuzzle.googlecode.com
I think, you should use the apy of screen reader softvare (E.G. NVDA,
www.nvda-project.org) for your game. In this way, you can send text for
the screen reader program.
cheers,
Aron
2011.10.22. 15:51 keltez�ssel, Luis Miguel Morillas �rta:

[Bryce Schroeder]

You could do that, but I think a really cool idea would be an arcade
style shooter with the "display" in sound.
E.g. it gives eight distinct sequential sounds per "frame", one per
direction (N, NE, E, SE etc) the presence of an enemy alters the sound
for that direction, and you shoot it by pressing the button at the
right time. (All with appropriate aural feedback.)

[Alex Hall]

I am blind and a python programmer, so would like to weigh in here.
First, if you are developing for blind students, it is almost certain
that the user already has a screen reader installed (a program that
reads text aloud and/or shows it on an electronic braille display). If
you want to use speech at all, I highly recommend the
accessible_output package, from
http://hg.qwitter-client.net
There are other utilities there that you may find useful as you
develop the game. If you use sound, the game_utils or sound_lib
packages may come in handy as well. Depending on the game, you may not
need pygame at all; it could be done with wx (to my knowledge, tk guis
aren't accessible by blind users) and some use of event handlers and
bound methods. Let me know if you have any questions about how to do
this and what would work best for blind players.

--
Have a great day,
Alex (msg sent from GMail website)
meh...@gmail.com; http://www.facebook.com/mehgcap

[Luis Miguel Morillas]

2011/10/22 Alex Hall <meh...@gmail.com>:

> I am blind and a python programmer, so would like to weigh in here.
> First, if you are developing for blind students, it is almost certain
> that the user already has a screen reader installed (a program that
> reads text aloud and/or shows it on an electronic braille display). If
> you want to use speech at all, I highly recommend the
> accessible_output package, from
> http://hg.qwitter-client.net
> There are other utilities there that you may find useful as you
> develop the game. If you use sound, the game_utils or sound_lib
> packages may come in handy as well. Depending on the game, you may not
> need pygame at all; it could be done with wx (to my knowledge, tk guis
> aren't accessible by blind users) and some use of event handlers and
> bound methods. Let me know if you have any questions about how to do
> this and what would work best for blind players.
>

Thanks, Alex for these interesting resources. I've got a lot to learn
:-) I'll explore these repos and I'll ask you when I'll have got
questions.

-- lm

[Alec Bennett]

> games for blind people

This is such an interesting discussion.

What about a game of concentration, where each keyboard key has a different sound, and you have to find the other key with the same sound? Any key that's already been paired will then be silent or give some white noise sound.

The sounds don't have to be simple tones, they could snippets of music, speech, nature sounds, etc.

A variation could be that there's a list of descriptions of the sounds, and the object is to match the sound to its description. So you're not matching pairs of identical sounds, but matching the sound to its description.

Could be called "Chime In".

Another thought for a different type of game I keep having is that some sort of vibration speaker under a keyboard, which gives different feedback depending on which key they press. So the keyboard isn't a text input device anymore, but more of a controller. So the user presses multiple keys, which makes different sounds, and the keyboard vibrates (from the vibration speaker) to show the action on the screen. So maybe the game is like Marble Madness, where they're trying to balance some object. There could be two (or more) vibration speakers, mounted around the keyboard, to indicate when the "marble" is falling off, and the user moves their hands on the keyboard to balance the "marble".

Let me know if you can't find what I mean by a "vibration speaker". Ages ago a friend built a Space Invaders game that used one to make a tactile "thud", and I'm sure I could get a link from him.

And personally I love the idea of recreating old classics for blind people. Pong, Space Invaders, etc, all played through tactile or aural interfaces.

[Luis Miguel Morillas]

2011/10/23 Alec Bennett <wryb...@gmail.com>:

What do you mena by a "vibration speaker". I was thinking on using
vibrator with phones (or with gamepads)

> And personally I love the idea of recreating old classics for blind people.
> Pong, Space Invaders, etc, all played through tactile or aural interfaces.
>

Me too.

-- lm
>
>

[Jake b]

Speech recognition and TTS library http://code.google.com/p/pyspeech/

--
Jake

[Alex Hall]

Again, this (I assume) speaks through sapi5, not the user's screen
reader. Speaking from much personal experience, it is nearly always
best to speak through the screen reader rather than sapi. There are
many reasons for this, but a few are:
*the user is accustomed to the reader's speech
*sapi on Windows, unless the user has a third-party synthesizer
installed (and they cost money), is terrible, whereas speech in screen
readers is usually quite good
*the user has customized the reader with punctuation level, speech
rate, pitch, and a lot of other preferences that cannot be matched in
sapi
*if sapi is used, then the user generally has to turn off the screen
reader or put it to sleep, an additional step that is unnecessary if
the reader is used instead of sapi

Now, if your game is not mostly text-based, you may want sapi instead.
This mostly happens when the game needs the arrow keys, or if there
are a lot of keys and you don't want the reader speaking each one when
it is pressed. In that case, use sapi if you must, but (again
depending on the game type) pre-recorded or synthesized samples may be
best instead. If you (the original poster) would like me to test the
game I can, since I use a screen reader and so can provide feedback on
how the program works with it.

[Naomi Hinchen]

Not exactly what you were asking about, but I can point you at a couple
of games
designed to be accessible to the blind.

http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/audiodyssey.php
http://www.ananseproductions.com/stemstumper/

Hope these are helpful.