Quick stroll through the dev blog, and I’m not seeing much for disability support per say, there was some discussion on how senses were to be handled, with some quick mockups of what it would be like in game here. Granted, there’s probably some info in the earlier dev forums that I am unaware of (sad that I missed out on this earlier) but it looks like there is a general consensus on allowing flexibility of senses.
Some actual discussion on how to support disabilities would be nice, and it would make, even for those without a disability, an option for more game-play - Thrive would be interesting when played almost completely without sight, for example.
So, here’s throwing my hat in the ring with ideas, given what I’ve read:
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Eins → Full nonvisual sense replacement: More than likely a fair bit of work, allowing the player to use any sense as their main. We already have some work being put into this now, though for the most part, looks like it’s been towards porting sound and smell to visual options, which would cover hearing loss fairly well on it’s own as an option.
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Zwei → Color Blindness and Partial Vision Impairments: Vision impairment would vary, I have a friend who has color blindness (red/green) that I’ll need to go bug about how he manages, but I know in some cases a color filter could work and would be a simple solution. Moving on… it would depend on how common software to support said issues is, and whether we could integrate something similar into the game. IF it is as simple as a color filter, we could probably just add an option in the graphics tab, though I need to do some research on that before I can say anything definitively…
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Drei → As you go further towards blindness it would get significantly harder: while gameplay in and of itself could be modeled just via an audio setup, actual editing would be significantly harder. Maybe have it so there’s a setting for voice descriptions on all the different parts? Hmmmm… Probably take quite a bit of support, especially as we get further on into the game, but at the same time it would be interesting to have the option to play without a screen entirely. Thrive Challenge run anyone?
This is probably not at exhaustive list, but my thoughts on things we could do and ideas on what to research for disability support. Thoughts welcome!
EDIT So, I completely forgot this was on community forums, but there was some ideas on this thread for hearing and echolochation options.