> any accessibility efforts that would be worthwhile for big games

The Last of Us 2 has become a massive hallmark for a wealth of accessibility features, and may well become the gold standard in that regard. $1 from a buddy of mine showing how combat looks in it. (He also streams this and other games twice a week). Here's a $1 (including a detailed tour of the features) from one of the consultants who helped create it.

One major feature missing from games is Audio Description, a narration track which describes the visuals in between existing dialogue. While common in film and TV, it has never really been done for games. We've $1 ourselves for some games and trailers, but no Triple A game has included it yet. Closest we've gotten is Xbox having AD versions of their trailers now, which is super cool to see (especially $1 where everyone can get in on the hype).

It's also been a while since I played, but the biggest annoyance was screens which scrolled when combined with OCR. I ended up creating a bunch of bookmarks for Golden Cursor, which basically allowed me to move the mouse to specific places, but they only worked on my particular screen resolution, and were not ideal for areas like race and galaxy creation with huge lists.

Now, the advantage of something like Civ 6 is that you have an actual SDK to play with. I wonder if Civ 5 might be easier, since it had a fuller modding kit available last I saw. In theory, you could fairly easily hook up the game functions to speak via screen readers using something like the Tolk library.

Basically, my preference is for games I Can control with the keyboard almost entirely, and if I can't find that, games which would allow mouse bookmarks, like Stellaris. Civ seems to fall into the former category for the most part.

I like the sound of this. I'm hoping you'll have more luck than I did looking into this, or maybe one of us will make a breakthrough that'll help the other. I looked before, and the best hope from what I could see seemed to be in the scripting in mods that uses LUA. I don't know that myself but I'd imagine I can learn it. The one thing I couldn't figure out though was how to get hold of the text assets displayed in order to announce them somehow. Then there's the mystery of how to announce them itself. A couple of ideas spring to mind, but I'm going off on a tangent here. Sorry. It turns out I've got a lot to say on this :)

Anyway, for what it's worth I'm always a keyboard and mouse user with all Civ games. Quite apart from anything, yeah, those shortcut keys make life so much easier. Things to look out for, I think it depends whether you'd target a user who is completely blind or with some useful vision, there's a spectrum after all. I think you'd need screen reader support of text for both though. I can see enough to navigate (ish), but my reading is slow and sometimes in accurate, so the screen reader support would be an immense help. So having it read out, say the hover-over tooltips, some way of reading out the end of turn events, and something I genuinely can't access because my reading isn't quick enough even with a magnifyer, the combat results, would be really useful. So there's all that. Some of the advisory and flavour text is already read allowed, so that's not so bad. But some isn't, so that'd also be useful. So yeah, text is a big part here. Once you've cracked that that's a whole bunch of the way there.

The next major hurdle will be navigation, in particular for completely blind players, as a lot of it is mouse centric. I'm imagining you'd need some sort of way to navigate hex by hex. To be honest I think I'd find this useful too. The hex system doesn't necessarily always play great with arrows, 6 directions and all. So I'm thinking, either 6 roughly co-located keys on the keyboard, maybe with a modifier key, or hope that people will be comfortable using a mouse, but that can sometimes be a bit alien to some blind players. Though I think that's less the case now than before, so hopefully that's got legs. If mouse navigation was an option, you could have it make a small noise when moving hexes, then read out the hex popup, or something like that. Actually, I'm warming to the mouse idea, but would be open to suggestions. Sorry, just kicking ideas around here.

OK, that's enough for now. Apologies for the long reply. Happy to expand on any of these points further.