Re: PS4 accessibility features
Hi.
Suddenly, an awesome idea came to my mind:
No, a screenreader might not be able to read the menus in games. But... What if a recognition feature could be made, so the users could write their own text for each menu, and then get it read by the screenreader?
Here is the concept:
You get a new game. You ask a sighted person to help with the menus. The sighted person can pick a menu, go to an accessibility menu, and then write the menu item in plain text which will then be read by the text to speech feature when arrowing through the menus. Then, those menus could be shared, so you can either share them with your friends, or share them in a special accessibility spot, where users could share their menus. What do you think about this?
I hope someone will write to Sony about this feature request.
Crowdsourcing accessibility is a great idea.
However, the operating system h as no way of knowing that menu items are being arrowed through (or in technical speak, which UI element is gaining focus), or even that a menu is on the screen. As far as the operating system is concerned it's all just one solid mass of pixels, that's why so many iOS games are completely invisible to screenreaders.
So two things would need to be done:
1. The text to speech to be coded in such a way that it reads out whatever has focus (for all we know if might currently just be individually generated audio files for specific menu buttons)
2. Game engines to pass out information on what has focus
If a game engine developer is going to go to the effort to implement number 2, they may as well put the labels in too. It's not like web, the issue isn't whether or not buttons have text associated with them, that bit is easy. It's the more fundamental issue of whether the screenreader is even aware that any buttons exist.
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