Enjoying Civ As A Totally BLind Player

Caplin

Chieftain
Joined
Feb 14, 2020
Messages
1
Hey All,

I'm a fan of the Civilization series who happens to be totally blind. This presents a few obstacles towards enjoying the games, which is unfortunate, as there's very little in the gameplay itself which is inherently inaccessible. I wanted to write here in hopes of brainstorming ideas to make this a little easier.

At the moment I have access to Civ 5 on Steam, which is reasonably promising inasmuch as I can read a lot of the game information using OCR. The area where things fall down is accessing map data, I can move the mouse from tile to tile, but I can't tell where on the map the tiles are, as I have no way to access readable map coordinates. I guess they aren't displayed by default.

I can generally read unit statistics, and anything which is displayed in text format, though OCR has issues with the font in some areas, and certain tooltips like resource information appear to be icons, though there's also a lot of readable text.

I'm writing here wondering what mods might be able to do in terms of getting map info into a more comprehensible format. It seems like the SDK is fairly comprehensive from what I can tell, I'm just not sure how extensive its support for getting data out of the game itself is.

I know this is kind of a modding-centered topic, but I figured it might get more traction in general discussion. It also applies to other versions of Civ, though I don't have Civ6, and thus far 5 is the one which seems to show the most promise. I believe a lot of the information I need is accessible from the game as it stands, I just need to figure out how to get it into a format I can understand.

IF this kind of thing is possible, or at least of interest, I'd love to hear from anyone with ideas. I am not familiar with the Civ modding tools, though am a quick learner. The biggest problem will probably be getting data into a format I can read, but I'm hopeful it is possible.

If I can go into more detail about my particular setup, or the current issues I'm encountering, I'm happy to do so.

Thanks all. :)
 
Hey man. I think the best bet will be to use the Vox Populi Mod https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/community-patch-project.497/ as there are already quite a few improvements to UI there and it's easy to make changes to the DLL so pretty much everything should be possible. I can't promise anything but I'll give it a go.

Tell me more about what you are using so I can try it out myself and also let me know specifically what else you'd need in order to play.
 
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