First, let me say thank you for being willing to encorporate accessibility into your game. That's an unfortunate rarity. And there are a lot of visually impaired and Blind gamers out there.

The Last of us 2 is the gold standard for sure, both in the implimentation of accessibility and the proof that it is, in fact possible. Ideally that's the route you go, but if you don't have the resources for that much, there are still lots you can do. A big question is, what kind of game is this?

Sometimes the simplest things can make accessibility possible. Case and Point:

I just finished Control by Remedy on the PS4. I have just enough sight to bumble through it, but barely. Several things I found super challenging:

1. Reading the tons and tons of in-game Lore. There are text files everywhere! Now I used Remote Play and NVDA, a screen Reader on my PC to use text recognition to read these collectables for me. It works,, but that solution is dependant on text being of an easily readable font and contrast. I'm playing another game now, Shining Resonance Refrain, and the text boxes in that are transparent to a degree, which means some of the text is indecipherable. It's also a lot of hoops to jump through, even when it does work. That's why I insist on full voice acting in games. It helps immersion and accessibility. Of course, the Last of us 2 proves that text-to-speech can be implemented in games so that one can read all those files.

2. Holding the action button to interact. This is a weird one. I don't know how many other people, blind and sighted constantly press the intract button while searching a game space for points of interaction, but this new trend of having to hold the interact button down for one to two seconds before something will happen? Not okay. It's annoying for the sighted, and it's even more so for people like me. Just let me press the button!

3. A map that doesn't suck, or just isn't there. Control's an amazing game, but its map is far from it. I find it very easy to get turned around and lost in many 3D game worlds. A clear map allows me and many others) to keep track of where we are. Bonus points if your map contains good contrast and clear icons.

4. Picking up items. It would be amazing if games had an audible radar of sorts so that people knew when something was around that could be picked up or otherwise interacted with. It's very easy to overlook things just lying around on desks etc. And in this particular game, missing out on these means you miss out on finer parts of the story.
5. Difficulty. I actually had to put this game down back when I first tried it because it was way harder than it needed to be. Now granted it's a shooter platformer so by its very nature, it's going to be harder for someone like me. But even some sighted gamers had trouble. Remedy actually fixed this themselves by essentially allowing one to set certain game parameters, such as increased health, even God Mode and 1 hit kills. This was perfect, and is something I'd love to see more of. It gives people the opportunity to play at whatever comfort level they wish. It also allows people like me who primarily play games for there stories to make the combat portions faster, which is great because I don't have a ton of time. everybody wins. While I'm not saying such a feature is necessary, it's certainly nice. Or there's always classic difficulty options. Though I really like the flexibility of Control's Assist Mode.

Finally a special shout out to timed dialogue choices and quick time events. easily some of the biggest bains of my gaming existance. When I have five seconds to choose a dialogue response in a game, it immediately frustrates me. Special mention to those games which actively disable the pause feature during a prompt. The Telltale Games were horrible for this, and the features cropped up elsewhere. I understand the immersive reasoning, but having to read scramble to maybe find the right choice or hope a walkthrough has them listed kicks fun right in the pills. THIS is one of those things which could be intirely optional.

As for those quicktime events, that's pretty much gamebreaking without jumping there a ton of hoops. When I have to madly take a screenshot or record a video with the PS4's share feature just to analyze a scene to figure out how to pass the QTE, I'm working far too hard. Audio quicktime events are not only possible, but also practical for the visually impaired, and even those with full sight who have a hard time following often frantically moving prompts.

Sorry, I went off on a lot here. I hope at least some of this is helpful. I've been playing games since the NES days, and with each generation, it seems like for one reason or another, games are getting harder to play. I was so excited when Sony came out with its accessibility features, but they quickly fell by the weighside and were abandoned. Now the PS5 is looking to be implementing more, but even they are not encorporating accessibility or even there text-to-speech functionality into games. Or the developers aren't.

Great. Glad to help.

OK but you were asking how you can make gains better for blind people. So a lot of us have no site. But you weren’t talking about adding any audio cues. So how is that going to make this better for blind people? Your ideas are great if people have some vision, but not everyone does.

You're thinking of descriptions from the wrong direction.

You're talking about rendering the scene and then processing the frame on real time. That's not gonna work.

Since you're working from inside the game engine, you can actually list the pockets in the view port and their relative positions even before they're rendered.

That way you're using all the information you already have and you're not backtracking. You can even get colors and texture. Good luck pulling texture descriptions out of every frame in real time, right?

Many blind players have finished TLOU2, and bought consoles because of it 🙂

Yeah, may be a slower type of thing but if the game can have some sort of built in already describing it then that would be better but some sort of screen recognition if not straight from developers would be good. TTS support would be also good. Or make a screen reader for the game or in game voicing. But it would be cool if the units can already do this.

Sure but does consoles have their own I don’t play games actually. On the computers they would have it but yeah.

That’s great! How accessible is the game in general?