Visually Impaired Players

In Equilibrium we have a few visually impaired players. They use screen readers to navigate the site. At EQ we make every accommodation we can to help them. They are indeed fantastic players and are huge assets to our faction.These players love the game, seldom ask for help, and pride themselves on being very self-sufficient.

They used to love territory wars; it was much better suited to their mode of play. But at some point, it became impossible for them to use the screen readers to find open wall spots due to an update made to territory wars. I know a few bug reports have been filed but I’m not sure the general public appreciates how frustrating it is for said players to not be able to participate in a war mode that they love.

This post is more to bring awareness to the situation and hopefully find a solution. Is there something staff can do to help them? Is there someone who could create a script to help said players find wall spots with screen readers? Any help would be awesome. We want these players to thrive and have a great experience in our family and in Torn in general.

Thanks for reading.

I agree, there really should be more accessibility options in a players profile setting to aid with things like this. Another good example would be making the "travel Home" button bigger when in other countries, as it is super small and hard to catch on screens with a reader.

I can’t see the problem.

I don't think half of Torn can read to begin with but not being able to see the pictures would suck

Priorities homie.

- Removed complimentary glass of champagne from WLT flights after complaints were received

Let us not be blind to this important issue

Agree, Torn needs accessibility features this can be toggled on or off for such players. As a client faced product person this is how we design our applications IRL.

Fully agree, maybe torn, in the future, should have a "thinner" version, with that people can switch to in order for their screen reader to be able to more easily detect text.

We have a blind member, and i know he switched a screen reader few weeks ago, a few days after he started to get the bot hunter on him, now, i dont need to tell you how annoying it is to have the bot hunter on your arse for a standard user, let alone visually impaired one.

He had no idea why (tl;dr we believe the screen reader was sending requests to torn in order to identify or get info idfk for sure) it triggered it, but once it had the man was absolutely lost.
Spoke with bogie about it, to maybe make an exception for that guy, though i cannot prove that he is blind and he will supply evidence on that issue only at his will (though he never hide it or anything ofc) but i know some efforts were made in order to restore regular usage, im not sure if this has been dealt with 100%.

Point is, that those guys and girls are dealing with a handicap, and they're doing their best to square up to any of us, lets not impede them further.

The thought of how I’d play if I went blind ran through my head yesterday. Crazy how this is posted today. Metallistar is Google and is listening to my shower thoughts.

Glad y’all are working on this, Bogie.

So SA is like the Blind leading the Blind?

Thanks for the support peeps. A couple of things to clarify so people have an understanding of the issue from the blind user perspective.

A screen reader is an application that allows me to interact with the computer, in this case torn on chrome browser. It takes what is on the screen, and turns that to speech, I don't even have a screen on. How it all works is pretty technical, but basically it looks at the code behind the page, so sometimes the things I hear, and what you see visually are different, depending on how things are labelled. I will use an example from work. In one of the systems I use, on certain pages there are edit buttons. Visually that appears as a pencil icon, but my screen reader says "edit button" when I move focus to it. If it wasn't labelled it would say "unlabelled button 1" or unknown graphic" depending on the element type.

In this case, wall slots, I can find available wall slots easy enough, I can do a find on the screen, funnily enough for the word "available" and it will move to the next instance of that word. I don't know how that looks for you, maybe it is a green button or something, but for me it is just that word. The issue is I can't interact with that word. Previously It was kind of hit and miss, but I could kind of fluke it, and available would become "join", and then I could take the spot. Now however I can't get any response from it at all.

Another thing the screen reader can do is extract all the links on a page into a list, which I can scroll up and down. It would be so simple it seems to me, to just have a plain "join" link that I could either do a find on, or bring up a allinks list and press J to move to that link. There are many ways to navigate with a screen reader, but if you can't interact with something like this "available" word, then you have nothing you can do.

This is also true of Bazaars since they were updated. Bazaar items appear to me as buttons, but pressing enter on them does nothing, essentially meaning I have a list of items I can neither get more info on or purchase, where previously I could do both easy enough.

I hope that helps pull back the curtain a little on how things look from the blind perspective.

Yeah there should definitely be a staff member who's dedicated to handling handicapped or semi handicapped individuals, maybe even more than one.

In my opinion, on showing some sort of a proof that one is visually impaired, that account can no longer be targeted by captcha or any of that sort.

With time this criteria can be extended to then include more groups of the population who need help, but for this to happen there should be a dedicated person in staff handling that task.

Have you considered doing some verification steps as you do for fallen members for visually impaired people so that they are excluded from the bot hunter but signalled as having suspicious behaviour and then investigated on a case-by-case basis while working on said improvements?

Ah yes, the bot hunter. Separate but no less annoying. I have had it come and go, but now it seems I am permanently flagged, and I have to go through the delightful audio challenge. Sometimes I can just check the box, but frequently it comes down to the audio.

Needs to be a priority, in my opinion. Disabilities are everywhere, this is a big one Torn could do better at.

Cancel Crimes 2.0 and sort this out first!