My son is severely sight impaired, although he is only 5 years old so probably not quite the same situation. He comes home from school and all of his friends are in to gaming so wants to do the same. After lots of trial and error, I’ve established that he cannot play PlayStation for instance, but as a middle ground I have managed to make a PC setup for him running various old emulators and he plays things like sonic and Mario. Using some additional software I’ve been able to remove a lot of the backgrounds etc. so that he can focus only on the character and obstacles. So on sonic for instance he sees the floor and sonic, along with platforms and enemies. The rest of the background is white. This works for him. I’m not sure if that would cure the itch for you as the games are so dated but it might help.

I was feeling the same way as you when my RP started to heavily affect my vision. I stopped playing anything for over a year until I found a new hobby last year, modern board games. Thanks to that I also reconnected with friends from high school. If you haven't looked into board gaming, I highly recommend giving it a shot.

I've lost the ability to be able to play console games effectively recently. so I've begun playing civilization 6 on my PC and have figured out how to play it with relatively no trouble. I use a screen magnifier and went into the program files and increase the font size of all the text in the game and it works great. It still takes me a little bit to read longer chunks of text but I still enjoy it immensely. I assume the same kind of techniques can be used for other PC games.

[deleted]

I’m running a Dungeon & Dragons game through Skype with fellow visually impaired and blind people. You don’t need to have played before, it’s just for fun. If you’re interested, message me.

I am legally blind and shooters aren’t an option. I play some turn-based strategy games on PC with magnification software. Turn based games are slow enough that I can keep up. I have also had to stop playing console games, so I can’t help there.

I was a huge gamer and spent most of my time playing games or creating art, but now I mostly write stories and play tabletop games online. If you’re comforttable at all with a screen reader, to avoid eye strain, roll20 is fairly accessible and discord is... hit or miss. Also, if you have a TV with an HDMI port, it’s likely that you can plug your computer into it and create a monitor for yourself instead of dropping a lot of money on a larger monitor.

I miss World of Warcraft a lot, particularly vanilla and the first two expansions, and I heard they are opening classic realms at some point which makes me extremely envious of people who can still enjoy and relive the whole experience. I know I can play it blind by relying on other people to act as guides as well as target things, but that's not the experience that I remember, and if it's just for the sounds I prefer to listen to my niece play while telling her stories about the old days.

I've been playing video games my whole life (I'll be 41 this year) and losing that hobby has been very depressing for me. I am partially sighted and I can still play certain games (mostly older games emulated on PC so I can use save states and graphics tweaks) if I want to strain my eyes, but because of that, I rarely play at all anymore. There are audio games out there, and EA has posted in this sub regarding its efforts to make its sports titles accessible to the visually impaired.

I fill the gap by listening to a lot of YouTube videos regarding the history and design of video games. If I can't actively participate at the level I once could, at least I don't have to also give up the culture surrounding video gaming.

I have one maybe completely stupid idea about game without visual elements. Not audio novel and analogues but complete action in at least 2D space, but only using sound. I did simple game: you should move player to target point using arrow keys. I used stereo headphones: left one yields sin-wave with amplitude equal to horizontal distance to target point and right headphone - vertical distance. It works, I mean I can move a player to the target point without looking at the screen. But frankly speaking after 10-20 minutes of "game" I get very tired.

Of cause sin-wave most simple and maybe not very pleasant sound indicator, but I don't know what to replace it with.

Playing video games was always such a big part of my life growing up so I can't imagine being left without them. Though I don't play them quite as much as I used to, I found I much more enjoy the creative process involved in making them. Most recently I've been involved in a new platform for creating and playing interactive stories that use 3-D audio to create immersive worlds. The stories are currently free to play, everything happens right in your web browser with nothing to download or install, and has text-to-speech support so games can be played entirely eyes-free. We're still working out the details of how to bring the smoothest experience and welcome any feedback. Let me know if this is something you'd be interested in and I can provide more information.

Wow, thanks for the replies everyone :) some very interesting advice here :)

I would suggest getting into dungeons and dragons! I think it would be an amazing replacement for it, the toughest part would just be finding a character sheet that’s accessible for the sight impaired.

Some blind people insist that it's possible to play the latest games with patience and effort, but refuse to explain how, so I'll pretend they're exaggerating out of frustration with the sorry state of audio games. (The only audio games I ever got a sighted person into were those made by $1, since they include some very basic graphics (Swamp is an FPS, but the graphics might as well be a top-down HUD zoomed in to fill the screen. The screen size was deliberately chosen to balance the strengths and weaknesses of playing visually / audibly.).

My solution to this has been to try and make my own &/or accessify classic games. I say "solution", but that implies I succeeded at some point.

You should really consider joining the D&D group. I am. :D

I can really relate here. I grew up with video games and it was always my escape when I was bored. Over time I lost most of my remaining vision and it’s just not possible to play the same games anymore. I can still sit and watch my partner play his games from time to time because we have similar interests, but it’s not really the same. Especially now that Kingdom Hearts 3 has finally come out and I can’t play it after 13 years of waiting! But anyway...

D&D has really been the best thing to come into my life since video games weren’t an option anymore. It can truly be immersive and more engaging than video games ever were because you actually have the chance to impact the story in a meaningful way. You should really consider joining: it would be great to have more people involved :)Also, I’m 28, so the above age estimation for the group is likely correct based only on available data. You’d fit right in.

So, since console gaming isn’t an option anymore, maybe consider a few other things. If you like Pokemon and have a Windows PC and are comfortable using the NVDA screen reader, someone made a blind friendly Pokemon Crystal version. This was a lot of fun for me because I loved pokemon growing up.
Also, look into MUDs. These are text based games that work really well with screen readers, though I’ve met a few magnification users who rock them too. The game style seems to be fairly close to the typical high fantasy stuff, so it’s sort of like going through Skyrim without the graphics.

Hope this helped.

Some people try to do the whole listening thing. I am not a gamer so don’t ask me how hahahaha!