Hi All,
I know this is probably a weird question for most people, but I’d appreciate any thoughts you might have. I’m a board/war/card games fan who is interested in playing with Vassal. I also happen to be totally blind, thus making it very difficult to play most games in person without putting in a lot of extra legwork—Brailling the cards, and so forth. So Vassal is theoretically a good solution because I’m at the computer quite a bit anyway.
The tricky bit is that almost all of Vassal, for mac, in my case, is accessible with my screen reader except the most important part, namely the controls for whatever board or card game happens to be loaded. I can see all the standard server controls, and even something which looks like a game log, but the main “tabletop,” so to speak, is inaccessible for me. This is quite frustrating.
I am not a programmer myself, and have to accept that potentially nothing can be done about this situation, but I hope to be proven wrong. Given the amount of customization modules seem to offer, I would hope it were possible to design some kind of custom interface… Do alternatives to the main client exist? If not, could one be written with, for instance, a text-based UI instead of the graphical one currently used?
I would appreciate any thought that could be put into this question. I am willing to answer anything about my technology, the nature of my particular situation, or anything which might help in coming up with a workable solution. Thanks much for listening :
Thus spake BlindGuy:
Hi All,
I know this is probably a weird question for most people, but I’d
appreciate any thoughts you might have. I’m a board/war/card games fan
who is interested in playing with Vassal. I also happen to be totally
blind, thus making it very difficult to play most games in person
without putting in a lot of extra legwork—Brailling the cards, and so
forth. So Vassal is theoretically a good solution because I’m at the
computer quite a bit anyway.
The tricky bit is that almost all of Vassal, for mac, in my case, is
accessible with my screen reader except the most important part, namely
the controls for whatever board or card game happens to be loaded. I can
see all the standard server controls, and even something which looks
like a game log, but the main “tabletop,” so to speak, is inaccessible
for me. This is quite frustrating.
I am not a programmer myself, and have to accept that potentially
nothing can be done about this situation, but I hope to be proven wrong.
Given the amount of customization modules seem to offer, I would hope it
were possible to design some kind of custom interface… Do alternatives
to the main client exist? If not, could one be written with, for
instance, a text-based UI instead of the graphical one currently used?
I would appreciate any thought that could be put into this question. I
am willing to answer anything about my technology, the nature of my
particular situation, or anything which might help in coming up with a
workable solution. Thanks much for listening :
This is something which will have to be pushed to to VASSAL 4. Because
we’re defining an API for V4 clients, it should be possible to create
a client which works with screen readers. (I’m not volunteering to do
it, only pointing out that it ought to be possible. The most amenable
client we’re planning to produce could be a HTML5+JS one, but I’m not
sure.)
–
J.
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