Much more work will be needed to make video games completely accessible to blind people, even portraying health bars in fighting games through sound cues. A blind person still cannot get Super mario into the castle in Super Mario 64, nor defeat Lavos in Chrono Trigger, although perhaps one could probably play Radical Dreamers now. This doesn’t, however, mean that all games are accessible. Along with the text-to-speech AI service, RetroArch has not only become the first emulator to implement accessibility for blind people in menus, but also in reading game text as well. RetroArch is the first “emulator” to now offer Accessibility to blind people by speaking the interface. With this being a part of many screen readers, blind people could use that to read menus, character select screens, and unspoken dialog. With the rise of machine learning, however, blind gamers now have another tool in their arsenal: optical character recognition, the extracting of text from images. Audio games have been created, to fill the void of video games which could not be played, an some blind people braved fighting games by memorizing menus and special attacks, but audio games were few in number, and didn’t usually have much content.Įmulation has helped many people who are blind relive their childhood playing fighting games.

People can reasonably count on others to understand the meaning behind video game references.įor people who are blind, however, these games could only be enjoyed through their great music, or by reading novelizations or fanfiction. Childhoods were changed by iconic franchises like Super Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Castlevania. Written by Devin Prater, Certified Assistive technology instructorĮdits by Barry Rowe, AI Service and Accessibility contributorįor decades, video games have offered entertainment for many people. This and more will be available out of the box starting as of version 1.8.2.Īlso read our version 1.8.2 release announcement post here.

See here the perspective of a blind person talking about the new accessibility features available in the latest nightly versions of RetroArch. RetroArch singlehandedly takes big strides to cater to an underrepresented group of people, opening up a whole new world of entertainment. However, in specific, the accessibility feature for blind people is why we are posting this here. Our main release post can be found here.

Retroarch ppsspp system menus