AI War II and the BLind

[Caplin]

Hi All,

This may be a bit of an odd post, but I'd very much appreciate your thoughts on it. I am totally blind, and have been a fan of strategy games for years. I just purchased AI War on a whim from Steam, and am trying to figure out if I can play it, given my particular limitations and software setup.

Traditionally, my method for playing games is to dive in and poke at them, with the help of my screen reader's OCR feature, and sighted friends who are patient beyond words. I've begun trying to use this approach with AI War II  but thought I'd also drop by and get this discussion going.

The limited exposure I've had to the game thus far (finishing the first tutorial) suggests a company which is quite aware of accessibility issues. I'd love to figure out a way to enjoy this game to its fullest, even if by default the presentation is quite visual. In particular, I was curious about the options to play the game without ship models or other visual clutter, which might help my screen reading program immensely.

Any thoughts on this topic in general would be very much appreciated. I'm more than happy to engage and answer any questions or provide clarification as needed.

[Draco18s]

As I said in your other thread, I admire your ambition in this regard, but things are almost certainly going to be rough.

The main problem will likely be the galaxy map and the sheer amount of information that can't be represented in text. At least not easily (note: I am aware that I'm likely going to describe things in a way that you only have a conceptual understanding of, rather than experiential, such as color or other visually based adjective).

For example, take the following connected graph (listing each connection once, i.e. if A connects to B, then B connects to A):

A connects to B, A connects to C, and A connects to D.
B connects to E, B connects to F.
C connects to D, C connects to F.

None of that information is going to be available with OCR. You might get some near-by-ish information (eg. A and B appear next to each other on the screen and your screen reader picks them both up one after the other), but those connections themselves are only displayed as lines.

What's more those lines also have contextual information, such as which connections are between your planets (colored in your player color, default is blue) which ones are between hostile worlds (again, in a player color; the AIs count as "players" as do minor factions) and then you have connections between two different players that are hostile towards one another (ie. the link between your planet and a planet controlled by the AI) in a hashed or "broken" line.

On top of that even, if the AI is in the process of attacking you, the hash animates rapidly to indicate that, hey, there's going to be activity coming through here in a few minutes.

As a blind player, you're probably going to need to screen-read the wormhole connections themselves in the planet view (as opposed to the galaxy screen) as the only names you'd get would be the connected planets. And then you'd have to build up that mental model of the graph yourself. At which point I suggest playing on small, simple maps. You may need a friend to help with choosing the right settings, but I'll leave details here that they'd be able to quickly follow.

Main Menu; Custom Start
Map type: Snake
Number of planets: as small as it will go (40's the minimum? yikes) (this is a slider bar)
AI difficulty: Between 1 and 4, you'll probably have to tune this (this setting is on the factions tab and there are 3 dropdowns, change all of them to the same value, but may want to set the Hunter Fleet at an even lower value than the other two)
Add a minor faction that is allied with the player (Factions tab, add faction); Suggestion: Human Resistance Fighters. Pull "strength" up to 8 (this is a slider bar).
Options tab, under AI Behavior: turn off "AI can retake planets"
Options tab, under AI Waves: turn "wave advance warning" to long.

I think you can save setups for later use as a quick-start, not sure about this.

[Caplin]

Hey,

I appreciate the info about this. It's going to be tough, but I am confident there are solutions for many issues. One thing which helps a lot is that I have the ability to move the  mouse to specific positions on screen, bookmark positions for future reuse, and re-run OCR at any time to pick up changes in context.

One thing I'm not immediately clear on, are wormholes the single means of travel between planets? That is, can I also fly in "real space," between them? If the former that actually simplifies the situation.

I'm probably also going to try and look into what's possible with mods. One of the things that has helped with other games is the ability to change the way certain elements are positioned. For instance, in Stellaris it's possible to set hyperlane connections to appear in a predictable pattern, and to limit the range of camera scrollins such that my cursor is almost guaranteed to land on them, given a predictable initial position.

I'm looking forward to having more time to play around this week, and hope to hear more from anyone else interested. Thanks for the support and encouragement.

[Draco18s]

One thing I'm not immediately clear on, are wormholes the single means of travel between planets? That is, can I also fly in "real space," between them? If the former that actually simplifies the situation.

Nope, wormholes only.

I'm probably also going to try and look into what's possible with mods.

Certainly a possibility. Galaxy maps are heavily randomized, but creating a heavily simplified/more predictable layout would be something we could look into (the generators are external C# code, not easily modifiable XML data). I could probably whip something up in a couple hours, when I have a couple hours. I'm out this weekend, but its something I could look at next week. That's one of the reasons I suggest the snake map: each planet would have at most 2 connections, so you'd be able to navigate in a largely "next" and "previous" manner and not need the galaxy map at all.

Fortunately there's going to be very little text in the main viewing area when you're looking at a planet. All of it is either going to be off on the left (with several tabbed lists; the tab names are vertical text; don't know if your OCR can pick those out or not) or in a tooltip aligned bottom left, or in a bar along the top. Alert notifications will be top left, under that bar, though are little more than the planet name and a timer until you position the mouse over them (and clicking will take you to the planet).

You may also want to create a custom planet name list (that I think is something you can mod in yourself fairly easily) so that the names are things you can easily pick out from other text objects. The default name list is probably ok in this regard, though they're made up and sometimes hard to pronounce (eg. I don't know how well your reader handles names like "Murdoch", "Zhar", or "Etzioni"). Might be worth editing so it has its own context (eg. instead of "Murdoch" you have "Planet Murdoch") and remove any that the screen reader doesn't handle well. Same would go for fleet names, though I'm not sure where those are pulled from.

Also, the UI layout is moddable, though that might be quite the task in and of itself. The XML data for it is rather involved, from what I remember.

[Caplin]

Hey,

This sounds promising, at least.

Something else I need to figure out how to handle is notification of events. In my ideal world, we could pass messages directly to my screen reader, to avoid reliance on OCR. This is doable with a couple quite simple libraries, but obviously that's not simple XML either. The main problem I've had with OCR in the past is inadvertent changes in UI/FOV/whatever breaking my bookmarks, which is a tedious mess to redo.

[Draco18s]

Definitely being able to push things directly would be great, I just don't know how easy that would be to do. Almost certainly not something you would be able to do externally.

[Kraiz]

I am actually an IT security instructor for a nonprofit that works with blind and visually impaired clients, and I am myself legally blind as well.  So, I have a lot of experience working with assorted applications and scenarios where accessibility isn't considered, from remote-assistance tools to UEFI screens.  I teach this type of stuff, too, so this falls squarely in my area of expertise.

I can point out a huge amount of problems you will face with AI War 2.  Unlike AI War Classic, the galaxy map is not fixed.  The zoom level does not allow you to view the galaxy map in its entirety, so some panning will be necessary at some point.  Unless you are pixel-precise in your panning, keeping your cursor coordinate bookmarks in line will be tedious at best.  Much of the game is based on iconography as well, from the galaxy map to the Planet-view sidebar displaying icons of units.  Can you figure out what is on a planet?  Yes.  Will it be possible to determine specific locations?  Doubtful.  That becomes important with locations of defenses on AI Planets.

I could continue, but you get my point.  I don't doubt that you can find a means of interacting with the game and getting something out of it.  But, the amount of working around you'd have to do versus how much you'd get to play the game seems heavily one-sided towards tedious OCR and cursor bookmarking.  If that trade-off is worth it for you, then don't let me discourage nor stop you.  I just know that, if it were me, I'd likely opt for something else to entertain me.

That said, I have played AI War 2 with my clients as a group in the afternoons after we finish up for the day.  I'll have 3-4 students, and 3-4 fleets, describing the landscape and letting them determine what goals they'd like to pursue, who's moving their fleet where, gain XP for their fleets and trade ships, let them discuss who gets the ARS ship line added to their fleet, and so on.  It's quite interesting to have 4 of them off doing their own thing, only to bounce around and help each other out, make and set goals, etc., just with me as the one controlling the game given I have enough sight to do so.  The hysteria that ensued when we fought the Devourer with 150 strength across 4 fleets and some turrets, me calling out the Devourer's hull every 5% down to zero.  I thought they were going to need to change their pants after the parasitic units in our fleet converted the Devourer into a friendly zombie which proceeded to go on a killing spree in AI territory.  I've done this with XCOM, Stellaris, FTL, Darkest Dungeon, and many other strategy/tactics style games.

I say all of the above because finding someone to screenshare with and play almost as an over-the-shoulder style co-op might be more enjoyable than fighting with a screen reader for hours on end.  As long as the person who's controlling things is good about describing what's going on, and the two of you can discuss and agree on what to do, I think it might be better.  I've gotten nothing but positive feedback from my students about our Friday afternoon gaming sessions.  Even one of our directors who is blind sometimes comes across the hall to my classroom when we have an hour or two to kill.

[Caplin]

Hey,

I appreciate the honesty here, and recognize that I'm probably fighting a losing battle with this. That being said, I am still going to  at least try to make things work. I have also purchased AI War Classic, on the chance that it might offer a bit easier interface in some ways, I know it's not really being updated anymore, but that's not really as important to me as finding something I can poke at.

I also work in accessibility professionally, by coincidence, with game accessibility as more of a passion project than anything.  Your points about sighted help are well-taken, and I intend to explore this possibility as well.

I  hope Unity continues to work on implementing screen reader support, but that's a moving target and more for developers in any case, I guess.

[Kraiz]

The galaxy map on AI War Classic is fixed, and there is far less information on the galaxy map in AI War Classic than in AI War 2.  So, I'd anticipate it's a bit easier to interact with that element of the game.  In either case, the biggest hurdle will just be positioning of units.  It's doable to figure out what units are on a planet.  But, locations of said units are very important.  Tractor beams can grab units that come through the wrong wormhole, same for cloaked ships and Tachyons.  Being in range of a guard post while out of range of the others, so on.

I'm not saying it's impossible.  I've had a totally blind student successfully and reliably terminate Ethernet cables into the tabbed RJ-45 connectors, which requires aligning 8 colored copper conductors in a specific order.  Before them, I'd have considered it something that wasn't doable.  So, I've been proven wrong enough to know that, in most cases, its a matter of determination and perseverance.  I wish you the best either way.

[CRZgatecrusher]

Turning the stacking for player ships and AI ships to as low as possible can help with reducing the amount of ship symbols on screen. it may be possible to rig the setting to hit one symbol on screen per fleet ship line and that should reduce clutter immensely. to find the stack setting head into performance tab in the options section of the lobby. turn both start stacking for you and the NPC units down to 6 (the lowest it can go). I hope this helps you. (also you should skip drawing ship models in the settings. that way you'll only get symbols for the ship). Your endeavor seems difficult but I reckon it'll be possible (also If I am misunderstanding what you want I am sorry but I hope this helps you). also I might make an XML to allow more things to be stacked. (I am saying where to find it becasue I got lost finding it lol)

[Cyborg]

It's a matter of time and perseverance. When it comes to gaming, the persons with disabilities community has shown incredible ingenuity.