Making it accessible

[jgallacher1987]

I would like to see this become accessible for us who are Blind. It appears to be a great program, but unfortunately, it does not work with screen readers. If there could be a solution to this and it implimented so that we can use this program, that would be great. I have ideas on how to do this if someone is interested in taking this on.

[Zuu]

Some weeks ago I made a simple 2D-game in a Ludum dare mini (48hour proggramming challenge). This game is all pixel graphics like OpenTTD using HTML5 canvas. For fun I have ported the GUI from pixels to an overlay <div> so that the text is screan reader accessible. (Im hearing impaired so listening on the screen reader is a bit troublesome sometimes, but I found a log window of NVDA to read the text. lol) What is still on my list for this game is to make it possible to move around a cursor using tab or directional keys (or if aria-* have something better) to focus building in that game and then be able to call up the window of that building. This game is only a few 1000 lines of code. eg only a fraction of OpenTTD and also had the nice thing of being in HTML with aria attributes and browser-screen reader integration already provided.

In OpenTTD we have similar challenges as while we do have widget and window focus, it is only mouse based. Eg not only do we need to expose the text strings on the screen to some place where the screen reader can read it, but also the GUI lacks the level of keyboard support that would be wanted to fully support blind users. That said, Im sure there are people that will be helped py partial solutions too depending on what type and level of blindness.

And to be clear, at least I dont work on this matter for OpenTTD right now if my post can give false expectations. Still I support your question in that it would be great if OpenTTD had screen-reader support, just that it is quite a non-trivial task.

[jgallacher1987]

I understand that completely. I play a game called Cast Ways quite a bit, and it even has problems with Screen Reader because of the amount of information that is given at the same time.