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

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: Liu Wengyi

"at that time, I was very happy, and I was able to reach the highest Rank like those who could see it."

On November 6, the player "fresh Fish Hongshuang" released a video of the game "hearthstone Legend" in bilibili. In the video, he fluently passes cards, jumps fees, and ends the game, and finally wins the ladder ranking competition. On the face of it, this is just an ordinary game, but the continuous reading of the screen in the background reminds the audience that the protagonist of the video is a visually impaired player.

After that, the other side chose to surrender. In recent years, barrier-free design in the game industry has gradually come into people's view. Microsoft launched Xbox Adaptive Controller, a hardware device for disabled players in 2018, and added accessibility mode to games such as "Last Survivor: part II" and "Ultimate Speed: horizon". In China, there are also creative teams that develop games for visually impaired players. For most "hearthstone" visually impaired players, the ability to play games smoothly is mainly due to the plug-in "HearthstoneAccess" developed by a foreign player and programmer Guide Dev. With the help of this plug-in, visually impaired players can use the screen reading software NVDA to read the text that appears in the game, understand the specific situation on the field, and complete the game operations such as playing cards and selecting targets through the keyboard shortcuts. Even when there is a certain time limit, skilled visually impaired players can play a wonderful game leisurely.

But on November 5th, with the release of the latest version of the auxiliary plug-in, developer Guide Dev announced that HearthstoneAccess would stop updating. This is bad news for the visually impaired players of hearthstone: it means that HearthstoneAccess will not be able to adapt to the new version of the game after the March of the Lich King, a large expansion of hearthstone, is updated on December 7. This month may be the last chance for visually impaired players to play the Legend of hearthstone.

In order to cope with the upcoming version update, visually impaired players at home and abroad have taken action. Fresh fish is one of their appeals on social media and forums, hoping to attract the attention of operators and other technicians.

Xianyu has added some barrier-free game communication groups, and when he talked about "hearthstone legends" and HearthstoneAccess plug-ins, he wanted to call on visually impaired anchors with a certain fan base to release videos to speak for the player group, but rarely responded. So he "got hot in his head" and recorded a game video of himself using the "Chaofande" card group, and uploaded bilibili directly without post-processing. Just a few days later, the video received more than 400000 views, and more than 400000 players joined his "hearthstone legends" barrier-free communication group.

Fresh fish didn't expect this video to get so much attention. He seemed relaxed when he mentioned his experience of uploading videos to me. Generally speaking, it is quite complicated for a visually impaired user to learn to use the screen capture software OBS, record games, and then successfully upload bilibili, but Xianyu says he learns quickly-he has become adept at using bilibili's features in just a few days. He even completed tedious live identity authentication, pushed streams with the help of OBS, and briefly broadcast several games.

Fresh fish has been online for eight years since 2014, and it has been playing games for a long time. He has tried some games designed for visually impaired players, such as some word games written in zMUD and easy language, and heard that someone has written a "visually impaired player version" imitating plants vs. Zombies. In recent years, more games have added barrier-free support, such as "rhythm doctor", "my world", "full moon night", "star dew valley tale", "last survivor: part II" and so on. At the same time, even if the games do not have barrier-free functions, with the help of auxiliary plug-ins, visually impaired players can successfully play games such as "Hades", "Boxing King 14" and "unparalleled 4-2 of the warring States".

The "Hades" game itself has a targeting auxiliary function. A visually impaired anchor once showed the process of playing "Hades" with an auxiliary plug-in: after installing the plug-in, screen-reading software such as NVDA can directly read the text in the game, and the plug-in allows players to choose which room to go to through teleportation. Thanks to the auxiliary aiming mode of the game, players only need to press the left mouse button to automatically target the enemy to attack. In addition, there are many visually impaired players in the Street Fighter series, which can judge the position of opponents by sound effects. In the Story of Xinglu Valley, visually impaired players can connect with non-visually impaired players. "the biggest difference is that I don't have to insert a torch," one visually impaired player joked.

Even so, for visually impaired players, most of the games on the market now have a high threshold. In addition to barrier-free adaptation, when it comes to online games, how to ensure "fair competition" is also one of the difficulties. Fighting games and FPS games require players to respond quickly to the information on the screen, and some skilled visually impaired players may be able to judge their opponents' moves and positions by sound effects, but not every player can do the operation of these "game gods" after all. Those auxiliary plug-ins that support transitions in Hades are obviously not appropriate for online games-it is unfair to players who do not use auxiliary plug-ins.

In order to allow visually impaired and non-visually impaired players to play together, a game that is less time-limited and can rely on detailed text instructions to supplement visual information is undoubtedly more appropriate-in 2020, programmer Guide Dev thought of "hearthstone legends."

2Guide Dev is not a visually impaired player. But his eyesight was briefly affected by a traffic accident. It was also because of this experience that Guide Dev began to pay attention to whether there were games suitable for visually impaired people during his recuperation, and the results did not satisfy him-in his view, many games that boast of supporting the experience of visually impaired players are only "scripts or modules created to get the job done" and are not entirely for visually impaired players.

"before this, I always knew something about accessibility." "but only after you have experienced the feeling of visual impairment more closely can you really delve into the needs of visually impaired people and try to help them," Guide Dev said in an interview with game media EuroGamer. "

Between "hearthstone Legend" and "Magic Brand", Guide Dev finally chose "hearthstone Legend". On the one hand, hearthstone Legend has rich single-player adventure content, which is suitable for players who do not like to fight against people, which is the first feature of his plug-in; on the other hand, Guide Dev himself is an old player of hearthstone Legend and is familiar with the content of the game. After setting the goal, Guide Dev began a long road of "liver code".

The original version of HearthstoneAccess had nearly 30,000 lines of code, all written by Guide Dev alone in his recuperation and other spare time. Coincidentally, in July 2021, a completely blind player focused on promoting games for the visually impaired posted a post on Reddit's hearthstone Legend community: "can blind players play hearthstone legends?" Players put forward a number of ideas in their responses, while others questioned the feasibility, such as the need to convert all mouse operations to keyboard operations-the mouse may not be suitable for visually impaired players. there is also the inevitable question of game time-can visually impaired players compete fairly with non-visually impaired players in the game?

When Guide Dev noticed this post, the development of HearthstoneAccess was drawing to a close. He shared his thoughts in the post and announced: I have solved the things you questioned. A few days later, Guide Dev released the first version of HearthstoneAccess, opening a new window for visually impaired players in the gaming field.

In order to show his results, Guide Dev put on an eye patch and personally demonstrated a game to download the patch pack around 20MB for free from the project's public website, decompress it and put it into the installation directory of "Legend of hearthstone". The screen reading tool NVDA installed on the computer in advance can read the information in the game. In terms of operation, Guide Dev adds keyboard shortcuts to a variety of functions, and the introduction of play methods is also succinctly recorded in the game documentation and teaching mode.

After the release of HearthstoneAccess, many visually impaired players expressed their heartfelt thanks to Guide Dev. Some people used to be die-hard fans of hearthstone legends, but they lost their eyesight because of illness and had to say goodbye to their favorite games; some people were born blind and could only listen when their brother was playing hearthstone legends. Now, the auxiliary plug-in gives them the opportunity to knock on the pub door with their own hands.

"I just finished my first practice match in six years, and this is the first time since I went blind!" One player replied, "Thank you for everything."

The news released by 3HearthstoneAccess quickly spread throughout the visually impaired player community. Fresh fish first came into contact with the hearthstone Legend and this auxiliary plug-in around August last year. Xianyu said that he was very quick to get started with the content he was interested in, and successfully downloaded and installed the plug-in. After reading the instructions twice, he understood the usage of the plug-in. After a few trials, he was soon immersed in the atmosphere of "hearthstone legends".

"what attracts me most about this game is fair play." Xianyu said, "although the effect of some cards is very supermodel, the game can always give you a sense of expectation in the game, even if you are at a disadvantage, what if the next card is flipped?"

There are many visually impaired players who love "hearthstone legends" like fresh fish and are willing to participate in the discussion. With the help of screen reading tool NVDA, visually impaired players can read and respond to scrolling messages on the screen in just a few seconds. I chat with fresh fish in the same group, and from the point of view of the group chat, apart from the occasional misspelling and the difference in the habit of using emojis, I can hardly tell the difference between visually impaired and non-visually impaired players.

In the video of fresh fish, many viewers lamented: is it too fast to read the screen? It takes a lot of work just to listen to the description of the hand and the units on the court, and to understand the situation and decide to play the card in just a few tens of seconds. The operation of fresh fish is almost incredible to them, but visually impaired players are used to it. In order to make the voice in the video clear to the audience, fresh fish even specially slowed down the screen reading speed, which they usually listen to twice as fast as in the video.

Thanks to the experience of using screen reading software, coupled with keyboard shortcuts for auxiliary plug-ins, the difference between visually impaired and non-visually impaired players has narrowed significantly. After work, fresh fish will spend at least three hours a day on the hearthstone Legend. At first, the auxiliary plug-in did not have Chinese, but also can only play adventure mode of the book of heroes and practice mode. With the continuous update of the plug-in, domestic players "Old Man" and "Blue Emperor Moon" got in touch with developer Guide Dev and quickly completed the Chinese localization of the auxiliary plug-in in August last year. Thanks to Guide Dev's tireless efforts, with the game update in October 2021, HearthstoneAccess users can unlock all classes for ladder ranking, leisure and friendlies.

Many players around the world have contributed to the localization of plug-ins, which is epoch-making good news for players who use auxiliary plug-ins: visually impaired players have a stage to enjoy games with non-visually impaired players. After that, visually impaired players began to show good strength in ranked. In his "hearthstone legend" experience, what impressed fresh fish most was the "legendary" level in which he first climbed the ladder with the "Pirate Wars" card.

Fresh fish told me: "at that time, I was very happy, and I was able to reach the highest Rank in the game like those players who could see it."

Despite receiving countless thanks from players, Guide Dev, as a developer, has come to realize that it is not easy to maintain a long-term update of a plug-in.

Guide Dev likens maintaining an HearthstoneAccess to "fixing a car": "imagine if hearthstone is a car that requires a steering wheel and a pedal to drive the car. The steering wheel and pedals are like the user interface of the game, and everything under the hood is the internal structure of the game. If you want to transform the car, use auxiliary plug-ins to control the car, one way is to make a pair of manipulators and legs, weld them to the steering wheel and pedals, and use auxiliary plug-ins to control them; another way is to let the auxiliary plug-in directly connect with the engine, bypass the steering wheel and pedals, and directly control the engine. "

The first method is to rely on OCR (Optical character recognition) to directly recognize the text of the information on the screen, and then convert it into voice output to the player. This approach seems simple and straightforward, but in fact, there will be all kinds of problems, such as long recognition time, high error rate and so on. On balance, Guide Dev chose the second method: directly let the auxiliary plug-in read the internal information of the game. To do this, he must reverse analyze the game client after each version update, directly find the location of the game text content, and deliver it to the screen reader software NVDA.

Guide Dev said that the first approach does make it easier to update and maintain plug-ins, but it will never bring the visually impaired players the closest to the native gaming experience as the second. For players, this is the difference between "identifying content and simulating a mouse click on a card" and "selecting a card directly with the keyboard". The fluency of the two is completely different. Thanks to his efforts, HearthstoneAccess has indeed brought an unparalleled operating experience to players, and its adaptation to the game is almost like the original barrier-free function of hearthstone Legend.

On the other hand, however, this means that Guide Dev has to take on a huge amount of work. A constantly updated game like hearthstone is an ever-changing "car". Sometimes, the outer shell of the car looks a lot changed, but the engine has not changed; sometimes, the outer shell looks the same, but the engine has changed dramatically. Whenever he sees frequent errors in the test program, Guide Dev has to look for and correct the problem manually.

Once the game is updated, the previous version of the assistive program can no longer be used. After learning about this, the project members of hearthstone sent the new version to him in advance before each update so that Guide Dev could catch up with the update. Even so, it's not easy to get visually impaired players to play games simultaneously on the first day of the update. Every time the game is updated, he spends more than 10 hours debugging the new version of the auxiliary plug-in. If it is a large update, it will even take him more than 30 hours-HearthstoneAccess has released 41 updates in the past 15 months, and you can imagine the hard work of Guide Dev.

However, Guide Dev does not want to include a paid option for auxiliary plug-ins. It is true that some players want to support the project financially, but he thinks it is difficult to continue. "this plug-in must be all free, and I can't provide more features for paid users."

The burden of auxiliary plug-ins becomes heavier and heavier. Guide Dev is part-time production and maintenance of HearthstoneAccess, an average of biweekly updates, for him has been much more than a "spare time public welfare project." He also looked for someone who could take over the project, but after knowing the price behind the project, more than 20 admired programmers chose to give up.

In desperation, after 30 hours of tiring work, Guide Dev completed the update of the Auxiliary plug-in for version 24.6 of hearthstone Legend and issued an announcement: "from then on, the HearthstoneAccess Auxiliary plug-in is about to stop updating."

The update date of the Legend of hearthstone is getting closer and closer.

This is not the first time that visually impaired players can't play the Legend of hearthstone. HearthstoneAccess updates stalled around August this year, and players had no choice but to find another way. For example, go back to play "Hades" and "Story of Xinglu Valley". For such pro bono plug-ins, players can't ask too much for developers' update speed, and the only thing they can do is wait.

Fortunately, in September, Guide Dev started updating again. Players were delighted when no one thought that HearthstoneAccess would bid them a complete farewell in two months' time.

". Realizing that they still have to go back to play games for the blind, I feel that the blind have always been unable to integrate into the big family of society, and they are suddenly very lost." One player said in the exchange group, "since childhood, the blind have been attending special schools for the blind, doing work that can only be done by the blind, finding objects that are also blind, and playing games that only the blind can play." trapped in a frame and can't come out all the time. "

In the days when the news was just announced, fresh fish were still playing "hearthstone legends" and doing live broadcasts as much as possible. He also thought about what should be broadcast live if the Legend of hearthstone can't be played. He is not familiar with the Story of Xinglu Valley, and he hasn't figured out what's interesting about the game. The number of games that visually impaired players can play and broadcast live is quite limited, even if those games are not the type of games they are really interested in, at least as a channel to communicate with more people. For the later live broadcast, fresh fish asked others in the group: "if you want to play 'Stardew Valley', do you have to install a brilliant ring that can shine so that the audience can see the picture clearly?"

An anchor is demonstrating how to use an auxiliary plug-in to play the Story of Xinglu Valley, but there has been no live broadcast of fresh fish in the last two days. On the one hand, there is a network problem. Since broadband is not ready, he can only use the traffic card to top it first. Dozens of GB have been consumed in these LVB pushes. On the other hand, he really does not intend to make live broadcasting his main business. He appealed in the group: "I think there are also a lot of student parties. If there is no stable income, don't give gifts."

The fresh fish seemed quite calm about the heat brought by the video: "it doesn't mean anything. I'm not the only one who speaks for blind 'hearthstone' players." now looking back to watch my video, the operation is not good. It can only prove that I stood up. "

Things took a turn for the better on November 9 when Blizzard announced that the development team had been trying to improve the hearthstone audio system for a long time and was in touch with Guide Dev. This time, they noticed the news that the hearthstone legend auxiliary module was about to stop updating and decided to shift the focus to the development of the original barrier-free features of hearthstone legends.

Blizzard's voice brings hope to visually impaired players that this is good news. Seeing the result of his voice, fresh fish was also very excited: "very happy, very excited." our appeal is not wasted. "

According to Blizzard in the announcement, feature development will take time, and they apologize to players who can't play the Legend of hearthstone during this period. Ideally, even if hearthstone can update its native accessibility features in the next major version, it will take a few months.

Even so, many players are looking forward to it: "just wait a few more months. The important thing is that the official decision to take over means that our future updates are guaranteed."

Fresh fish are busy with broadband these days. After the broadband is installed, he plans to continue to play games live. Not to make money, but to communicate with others. He works in a medical institution and often spends his days in novels and chats after work. The experience of live streaming makes him feel very new. Some people watch him play games and there are bullet screens to interact with him.

"when hearthstone can't be played, I should play some other games. It is estimated that very few people will watch it." He added, "but I don't eat live either."

"the main thing is that playing games and live streaming is no longer as boring as it used to be."

(at the request of the interviewees, fresh fish Hongshuang is an alias. )

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