Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Last August, a "hearthstone Legend" accessible Mod appeared on Reddit, and the producer GuideDev said in a post that the accessible Mod can help visually impaired players use screen reading to play part of the hearthstone legend mode.

His original intention is to allow visually impaired players who are unable to play Magic offline because of the epidemic to continue to play card games online with other friends with normal eyesight, so he made this Mod for hearthstone Legend and hopes to serve as a model for making accessibility features for other developers who want to create accessibility features.

After the release of this Mod, many foreign "hearthstone legend" players have given high praise, more and more visually impaired players have joined the game, GuideDev is also constantly collecting feedback, according to the update of the version of "hearthstone legend", iterate and improve the function of Mod.

During this period, the Mod has also completed the localization of more than a dozen languages, including simplified Chinese, with the help of volunteers, and domestic visually impaired players can also use this Mod to play hearthstone legends.

However, because hearthstone Legend does not provide an official interface and updates frequently, GuideDev always needs to update Mod after the game update to make it available. When you encounter a major version update, or when you are busy in real life, the availability of Mod is difficult to guarantee. At the end of August this year, for example, GuideDev had a short suspension for nearly a month.

Fortunately, the barrier-free Mod, which travels in a gray area, was discovered by Celestalon, the head of functional design for the hearthstone team, who has been providing a test version of the game for GuideDev in advance so that he can decompile and patch it over the weekend, and complete testing and release after the version is officially launched.

However, the good times did not last long. After the release of the largest expansion package in the history of hearthstone, the March of the Lich King, GuideDev posted that as a visually impaired developer, he was very happy to see that visually impaired players could use Mod to play games, but because of his busyness in real life, he had no time to devote himself to the continuous repair of Mod.

Mod also got worse after being updated again and again, which made him so dissatisfied that he decided to stop the update, that is, after the update of the "March of the Lich King" expansion package on December 7, the accessible Mod may no longer be available.

Although visually impaired players can understand the difficulties of GuideDev and thank him for his continuous efforts over the past 15 months, there is another problem facing them-visually impaired players are about to lose the hearthstone legend.

Soon, a group of foreign visually impaired players launched a self-help project, petitioning Blizzard through a petition website, hoping that the authorities could launch the original barrier-free support function, and they did not want to lose the opportunity to play the hearthstone Legend. So far, more than 1500 players have supported the petition.

At the same time, domestic visually impaired players have also started a self-rescue project, and a player named "cool autumn" posted that they want to find the god through crowdfunding, continue to maintain and update Mod, or get Blizzard's attention to solve the matter.

There is also a demonstration video of the visually impaired UP host "fresh Fish Red Shuang" using barrier-free Mod to play with hearthstone, which has received a lot of attention after it was released. Some players are shocked by the speed of reading on the screen, some players feel difficult because of the memory of their card skills, and more players want to lend a helping hand, or go to the original author's project to see if they can help. Or in the video @ Blizzard's official account to provide some support.

Although the power of the visually impaired player community is small, what if it is the entire hearthstone player community?

Shortly after GuideDev announced the shutdown, a piece of good news spread to the visually impaired player community. Alkali, community manager of hearthstone Legend, said on her personal Twitter that she is conveying the concerns of visually impaired players to the development team and doing as much as she can. Perhaps in the near future, visually impaired players will be able to continue to play the Legend of hearthstone, after all, this is the Blizzard that immortalized the hero in the Vanguard of Watchkeeping.

But the discussion about accessibility is not over yet.

According to a statistical report of the World Health Organization last year, more than 1 billion people worldwide have disabilities, accounting for about 15% of the world's population. Among them, 190 million people aged 15 and over have severe functional disorders.

Although this population accounts for nearly 4%, that is, one in 25 people suffers from a serious functional disorder, few manufacturers are willing to develop barrier-free features in the decades since the birth of video games. After all, thankless and difficult to cover enough people have become obstacles on the road to development.

It is only in recent years that some games have gradually supported accessibility in terms of sound, graphics, control, and so on, such as "Last Survivor: chapter 2" and "Ultimate Speed: horizon 5"-both of which won the TGA Best accessibility Innovation Game Award in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

Earlier, Microsoft also introduced the Copilot function, which allows two controllers to be used as one, and the Xbox accessibility controller, which tries to get people with disabilities to play games in a more general way through highly free customization and continuous communication with the community, rather than repetitive wheels in different games.

The final result is gratifying, with the help of the Xbox accessibility controller, people with disabilities can also enjoy the fun of the game.

Whether it is the game built-in barrier-free function, or in the form of general-purpose peripherals to achieve barrier-free, their practices are worthy of praise and praise.

Perhaps the light has never been extinguished, and more and more people are still joining the fight.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag). Author: it's time to get a good night's sleep.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.