How Accessibility-ready is FG for visually impaired users?

[calliban]

Hey!

I am thinking on getting FG for my group, but one of my players happens to be blind.
We tried other VTTs before, but hey are mostly completely inaccessible for his screen reader software.

Our current campaign uses Roll20, but he can't access his character sheet, nor anything other than the chat window. This is a deal breaker for us.

For those of you who happen to have a visually impaired played on your groups, or that tried to use screen readers with Fantasy Grounds, how accessible is the software? How easy would it be for a blind player to find his way through it?

[LordEntrails]

Hey Calliban, welcome to the forums.

I know their are groups that have players that are color blind or visually impaired (but not blind) and they use some large font and high contrast theme extensions to enable play.

I know in the past their has been discussion about screen readers and Reference Manual content, and that it did not work well. But I have no idea if the character sheet would be accessible (or the extent of other parts).

Hopefully someone will jump in and give you their experience. But if not, SmiteWorks has a 30 day money back guarantee, so you could do a one month subscription (either for one player for $3.99 or unlimited number of players for $9.99) and test it out. The base subscription comes with multiple rulesets, and includes things like the 5E Basic Rules and you could create a character and see if the screen reader works. If it doesn't, then you can always get your money back. You might be able to do enough testing with just the free demo, but it won't have the Basic Rules so creating a character won't be as fast/easy.

[Nylanfs]

Welcome to the forums & FG community!

What I would recomend is both of you installing the demo and using the sample 35e campaign to see how it works.

[Trenloe]

To be honest, I really don't think FG will work well in this situation. FG is very visible and a lot of the functionality relies on menus that are initially hidden, tight integration between the combat tracker and the map, etc..

A screen reader might help in terms of the chat output, but roll output is not formatted to be nicely read aloud, or story entries. Beyond that, you're really not going to get much from FG for someone who is blind.

[damned]

Yeah I agree - I dont believe screen readers work as the fonts are rendered bitmaps.
You can scale the output up and use a higher resolution theme but that will only help if the player still has a reasonable degree of vision.

[shadzar]

FG is NOT visually impaired friendly at all.

The fonts are all hard-coded, and come form the GM's table. Users have no choice in anything when they connect to a table. Everything including font-size is controlled by the GM when the program is loaded. If the GM does not have that extension by Trenloe to increase the chat font sizes, then the fonts will all be super tiny and hard to read for anyone that is visually impaired.

FG cannot partake of the OS native system built for vision for the end-user. Once the program is loaded, you can't change to another extension on the fly to make the fonts or anything larger if it is your table, and the users can change nothing at all, this includes the images on the sidebar, the chat image sizes, font, nothing.

FG fails every possible test for being vision-impaired friendly, even for people that are partially sighted. Someone without sight would need someone else to use FG for them and describe everything to them as everything in FG is look at, point and click based.

This is commonplace in most modern software design that isn't built from an OS capable platform to take advantage of the OS features because the demographic range is ages 18-35 (probably still male focused as well) and is either designed by or the designed team is headed by someone who is not vision-impaired, or thinks everyone within that demographic has perfect sight and nobody outside of that demographics would be using "gaming" software, even though games became popular among people age 16, 50 years ago, so the early adopters of computerized gaming are already in their 60s and losing eyesight and new generations aren't slowing with their use or electronic gaming.

FGU might be able to help with this if it offers capabilities for the "player"-side to adjust their own settings in the software to use their own font sizes and colors in chat for visibility, and their own "themes" for the desktop, windows, buttons, etc. But that would make FGU NOT backwards compatible with all the extensions that currently exist that are "GM"-side only configurable.

Though FGU could do it while leaving the GM side able to choose their own currently available extensions for themes to see themselves, however it would break everything else that is extesions like DOE, MOTD, etc.

Really FGU should break out those things from "extensions" and make the fonts, "themes", decals, etc portions of extensions into just a UI classification of files so each user can choose their own settings, and the only forced images form the "GM"-side of the connection are those for maps.

Possibly it would even allow the player to pick local tokens and "upload" through FGU their own tokens to the GM's table so they are then in the campaign folder if the image capabilities were expanded to allow "player" side image/font/etc options for accessibility.

IF nothing else, it would mean a player can choose their own theme, so they don't have to gripe at GM's because the GM's "table is too bright colored" because then they would be able to choose their own "theme", and make the chat fonts as larger as they personally need to read.

[damned]

It does appear that again you make vast sweeping statements that suggest that you know all about a topic.
You are correct on many of the points you make and yet you ignore the blindingly obvious feature for players to scale their screen from 50% to 200%.
Each player can have their own scale completely independently of the next.
Will this help a blind person? No. Will it help the majority of other people you scooped up in your net?
Probably I shouldnt ask you because you obviously dont know the answer.

[Trenloe]

... ignore the blindingly obvious feature...
Well played sir, well played!

:)

[pindercarl]

Hey!

I am thinking on getting FG for my group, but one of my players happens to be blind.
We tried other VTTs before, but hey are mostly completely inaccessible for his screen reader software.

Our current campaign uses Roll20, but he can't access his character sheet, nor anything other than the chat window. This is a deal breaker for us.

For those of you who happen to have a visually impaired played on your groups, or that tried to use screen readers with Fantasy Grounds, how accessible is the software? How easy would it be for a blind player to find his way through it?

I'll agree with the other posts that FG and other VTTs are unlikely to work and play well with screen readers. However, my curiosity has been piqued by this post. If a VTT did allow screen reader software to access something like the character sheet, what would be the expectation? I'm having trouble imagining how a screen reader would produce useful output.

[damned]

I'll agree with the other posts that FG and other VTTs are unlikely to work and play well with screen readers. However, my curiosity has been piqued by this post. If a VTT did allow screen reader software to access something like the character sheet, what would be the expectation? I'm having trouble imagining how a screen reader would produce useful output.

Hi Carl from what I have seen of users of screen reader software is that it reads the whole thing section by section until you tell it to stop. It often reads very fast - the user sets the speed and they get very good at listening to things at high speed - and it doesnt take as long as we think it might.

[pindercarl]

Hi Carl from what I have seen of users of screen reader software is that it reads the whole thing section by section until you tell it to stop. It often reads very fast - the user sets the speed and they get very good at listening to things at high speed - and it doesnt take as long as we think it might.

I can understand how that would be useful for reading a webpage or a Word doc which is why I specifically referenced a character sheet. Assume, for the moment, that fields and values are organized in such a way as to be linear, e.g. strength followed by the value followed by the bonus. If I wanted to check if my character had an item in their inventory, the reader would begin with the name and class, work its way through the stats, then through spells, and then inventory. If the original assumption is not true, then the reading would be meaningless as the fields and values would be disjointed.

[shadzar]

... ignore the blindingly obvious feature...

Well played sir, well played!

:)


yes because that worked in 2015 too huh?




The font is too small, making text difficult to read. You cannot change the font size. You have to scale the entire UI in order to make the fonts readable, which isn't ideal. Since I also have the physical manuals and adventure, I tend to use those rather than trying to read too much text from FG....
Try the extension below as a quick experiment. This increases the body text of story entries and reference entries from 10 points to 11 points (the body text, not the headers).

Instructions on installing extensions here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/Data_Files_Overview#Extensions

Activate the "5E Reference Font - 11 points" extension for a 5E campaign.


here is another variation using a bigger font again.

oh wait, it seems scaling the UI wasn't the answer and you both had to make extensions to solve the problem because FG isn't vision-impaired friendly... and the extension has gotten bigger since then that it is now not 11 pt, but 14pt Clear Font for 5e...

on top of that, scaling the UI doesn't help with the theme problem either, since that doesn't make someone magically, no longer color-blind.

the GM/table owner still has total control with no ability in Classic for users that actually play to have any say. That is something Unity had better fix somehow, unless FG still intends to be vision-impaired unfriendly.

https://static-cdn.jtvnw.net/emoticons/v1/100590/1.0

[SirGraystone]

The only way I can see some kind of text reader working would to use a note in FG and write in that note the information the player need from his character sheet in block of text like npc block text. The DM have access to all the players sheet and can modify them if needed. But that wouldn't tell the blind player how much HP he got left or thing like that.

[Ssinne]

I can understand how that would be useful for reading a webpage or a Word doc which is why I specifically referenced a character sheet. Assume, for the moment, that fields and values are organized in such a way as to be linear, e.g. strength followed by the value followed by the bonus. If I wanted to check if my character had an item in their inventory, the reader would begin with the name and class, work its way through the stats, then through spells, and then inventory. If the original assumption is not true, then the reading would be meaningless as the fields and values would be disjointed.

I am totally blind. I play D&D quite easily. I use notepad to organize my character sheet, inventory, spells, notes etc. A series of notepad documents actually. That said it would be fairly simple to just organize everything into a table, stats, inventory, resources etc. Tables are absurdly simple to navigate with a screen reader, add in a super basic coordinate system like letters for columns and numbers for rows that is announced, like "C5 Strength", navigate to the next cell in the table to read; "c6 14(2)" or D5 14()(2) and you've solved any navigation issues I can think of. Navigating any page might take some familiarity with it to get quick with, but is as simple as remembering past experiences.
As far as disjointed information, welcome to my life. The entire world is designed from the perspective of looking at it. Most of the world is disjointed if you look at it with your eyes closed. Some screen readers (all I am aware of, but lets say some), have things called placemarkers you can put on a page to quickly jump to them, for pages you navigate frequently. You can jump around by buttons and headings, lists, by paragraphs, from table to table, cell to cell within those tables, control F to find specific text etc. There are so many ways to navigate webpages and applications it is a little overwhelming to learn at first. Also listening is much faster than reading. My screen reader is set to 450 words per minute. I would be surprised if most people could read at 1/3 that speed. The tricky part I would imagine would be if someone integrates a battle map that requires players to interact with it. Not sure if this has been done yet, but I imagine it has. The theatre of the mind sort of game is ideal for blind players, no one can see what is happening, so everyone is on the same ground, everyone understands that if it isn't said it isn't real yet.
Honestly I'd just like a common place to roll, take out the chat even. Just a roll board where everyone can roll publicly in front of the group so nobody can claim a roll isn't what it is. Skype/discord/zoom chats are more ideal for remote gaming imho.
Maybe throw in a place to store character sheets and inventory so the DM can keep track of and if need be make adjustments to players inventory, and for the party to keep track of group loot if they choose to implement such a thing,
assets, time lines etc.
The most difficult part of playing blind, especially online is finding a group to play with. Specifically due to the lack of a public way of rolling. Get fantasy grounds blind player ready and you will corner the blind d&d player market by default. Blind people are only 3% of the population though, blind Tabletop players are an even smaller portion I imagine, not many people cater to our demographic.