do either of you understand the concept of minecraft, basically its about using graphical blocks to build stuff in the game and create your own world I think anyone who even thinks this could be made accessible is in fantasy land, basically the hole concept is visual in nature from construction to finishing your stuff your building to interacting with it. its just not realistic to think it could be accessible without it being a totally different game. Its a nice dream but not going to happen.
Well someone could make a game where building things are labeled and you can use them to make other things and text to inneract. I've always wished I could play Mind Craft as well when my kids were doing it.
A
I agree with that. They could label the blocks somehow, so you know what the blockss are. I know the blindfold games are out there, but… Not many people play them, because there’s not really many sound effects. The only one that’s closest, is the blindfold racer. Anyway, I hope they can come up with something. I would like to see more Apps/Games accessible for the blind.
There are lots of mainstream games which could theoretically be made accessible. Some would even require minimal work, while others would need a little more. Minecraft though is probably not one of those. Even if you labeled every single block, rendered the 3D workd in a way easily traversable by someone with no sight and made everything else somehow work, the amount of sheer tedium which would be required to actually play it would probably bore most sane people to tears. Imagine trying to keep track of hundreds of blocks over a vast space. The game's already a huge time sync as it is. It might not be the worst thing that it isn't accessible. Though as a mainstream gamer myself, the blind really do get shafted in the quality department. I'm sure some of what's out there is decent. There just isn't that much variety.
hi.
I have two things to say.
1. Do you guys think that maybe if the same pluggin used for Crafting Kingdom could be used to make minecraft somehow playable with VoiceOver?
and 2. Perhaps a game similar to minecraft could be created to simulate something like minecraft.
Also, I've heard there are mods that somehow enhance minecraft's actions and how they affect the game. Perhaps an accessibility mod could be added?
Tunmi
I tried playing crafting kingdom, but it really wasn’t my interest. However, if they added an extra build an accessibility feature for Minecraft, had a game similar to Minecraft, that would be terrific. I actually have a Minecraft shirt. And a lot of people have talked about it, from what I have heard.
I have some usable vision, and have played Minecraft in the past. I'm really not sure how a game like that could be made accessible. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be very tricky. and like a previous poster stated, the amount of information that would need to be conveyed would likely make things pretty tedious. Maybe once VR, haptic feedback, and other tech get further along...
If anything a 2D game like Terraria might be easier to represent. I haven't played it much because the visual UI is very small for the game, but it's kind of like a 2D Minecraft type game for consoles and PC.
I know that'd be super hard to pull off but it'd be amazing. Maybe do it as a 3d audio experience so you could listen and hear how things were layed out? I'd also like to see some kind of accessible game like The Sims. If sandbox games like this could be made accessible, they would be my absolute crap! I love creative freestyle things like that. also, Crafting Kingdom is nothing like Minecraft.
Honestly, I think the only way we can play any rendition of Minecraft would be the interactive movie Minecraft: Story Mode which is available, audio described and accessible on Netflix. It's basically an interactive narrative set in the Minecract universe. It's not what people here are looking for, but it's actually quite well done. I would actually love to see more of Telltale Games's narrative games like this brought over to Netflix, because they're all very good.
i bet all that would have to happen is use direct touch and place blocks around the screen, then the user would drag a block to another to connect. I mean, it's possible, I don't really see what's so impossible Alex. sa
There are so many ways to add accessibility features to gaming platforms in 2020 there is no longer an excuse for lack of information. We now have the first ever fully accessible mainstream game for everyone. Inclusiveness for all!!!
I wrote this out before I realized how old this post was, but screw it, I poured my heart into it. Here goes.
As someone who played Minecraft for 6 years of my life, I want to say that I would love, love, love this to happen. It's my favorite game of all time because of what it's done for me. Long story short, I owe my technical skills, personality, and romantic relationship to Minecraft. It is an incredible game which has brought incalculable benefits to my life. That's why it breaks my heart to say that, no, we will likely never get to play this game without sight. First, I must add that I have not played Minecraft in over 3 years due to my vision, so my knowledge of the game will likely be laughably out of date. Basically, I'm a Minecraft boomer, but the base game probably hasn't changed too much. Second, this is a long post. I'm doing my best to condense a game with near-infinite potential into a few paragraphs of text. Minecraft's scope is far, far, far wider than most other games. It's not my intention to come across as passive-aggressive or hostile. I ask a lot of questions to try and communicate the breadth, depth, and variety of everything this game has to offer. Minecraft is not your typical FPS, RPG, RTS, or survival horror, or what have you. This game is so much more than that. Minecraft blurs the line between videogame and creativity tool. It is a three-dimensional canvas where the only limits are your imagination and your CPU. seriously, this thing is more resource-intensive than Chrome. If you don't want to read on, imagine Minecraft as a world built out of Lego blocks. You can arrange them however you like. You have as many blocks to play with as you could ever possibly want. You can defy gravity and physics. You can build simple circuits to push blocks around. You can construct automated storage systems and simple, functional calculators, if you like. Like I said, the possibilities are endless, and Microsoft is constantly updating the game with more and more and more content.
At its core, Minecraft is a 3D voxel sandbox. The world is built out of cubes which are grouped in chunks that are 16 blocks square and (when I last played), 256 blocks high. Most of that height is empty air with ground level at around layer 64. When I played, there were hundreds of blocks: grass, dirt, farmland, mycelium, smooth stone, cobblestone, mossy cobblestone, water, lava, multiple types of wood, chests, doors, fences, fence gates, pressure plates, levers, redstone to create circuits with Boolean logic, stairs which could be placed in almost any orientation and connect with adjacent stair blocks, half blocks which could be put towards the bottom or towards the top of a block space, crafting tables to create tools and weapons, furnaces to smelt ore and cook food, cauldrons to hold water, hoppers to feed items into chests or furnaces or other interactable blocks, brewing stands for potion making. That's not even considering passive and aggressive creatures. Imagine our world but made from giant, 1-meter, blocks. With enough patience, I have no doubt that a Minecraft world could be made accessible, but there are two huge hurdles: worlds are both procedurally generated and dynamic.
Every Minecraft world, single player and multi-player, is completely unique and unlike any other. Yes, people do create custom adventure maps, but these are almost always made by tiny teams, or even one single person. Most of the time, you won't be playing these. You'll probably be in a world on your own, with friends, or on a public server. Unless someone in your group is an MCedit wizard, that world will be procedurally generated from a hash. When you spawn, you might be on a beach, or in a forest, or in a swamp, or on a mountain. It's impossible to say which and even more impossible to say just how dense that forest is, how narrow or curved that beach is, or how tall or snowy that mountain might be. Start walking around, and you'll soon find yourself in a savannah, a desert, or a swamp. There are even ocean biomes. That's not even getting into there being multiple worlds, each with their own completely unique aesthetic and block types. This means that there would be absurd amounts of content that the game would have to describe. What block is your cursor pointed at? What blocks are around it? Perhaps you'd like to know the position of the sun or moon overhead to know when it will get dark or light out. Monsters spawn at night, which makes it dangerous to be out. Do you want the vista described? How does one describe a blocky hill with some blocky trees without overloading the player while still providing enough information to get around and not fall off a ledge? How about a subterranean ravine with waterfalls, narrow pathways way above, and pools of lava? Many of these are not laid out to follow the grid of the world and instead run diagonally, making the walls quite jagged and chunky. Perhaps there is a smooth floor with a single block missing. It would be really annoying to fall into that 1-block-deep hole and have to jump out. What if there's a coal ore block on the nearby? Does the player want to know about it? Maybe they're loaded to the brim with coal already? Perhaps they're coal-starved and looking for any scrap of fuel. How does one describe the vein of coal behind that block once mined? How does one communicate that there's a lake of lava directly above, and that you absolutely should not mine the ceiling, lest you want a quick death? How does one accurately describe the size, shape, and slope of a dark cave? A cave which has tiny passages that lead to other caves? Passages so small that sighted players must add markers or risk being stuck underground forever? What if you mine a wall and cause a chunk of gravel to come falling down? Gravel blocks have gravity. You can even get stuck underneath them in a cave-in and suffocate.
That's not even to mention all the creatures, or mobs as they're called. Some of them make plenty of noise like zombies. Others, like skeletons, stay at a far distance and snipe you with arrows. There's also the creeper, bane of every single survival player, which stays completely silent until it's too late. Creepers hiss for a bit and then blow up. There's a good chance they'll take your buildings, and your life, along with themselves. These mobs also leave behind items for you to pick up. Mining blocks also does this. You must get close enough to suck them up in your inventory. Should the game add audio beacons for dropped items? What if you died and left behind an inventory-full of stuff? That's going to be awfully loud and cacophonous. Maybe there's a wall or some blocks between you and the items. How best to go about communicating this and suggesting a viable path to get to said items? Oh yes, what about mobs like Endermen? Tall, slender, pitch-black creatures that are whipped into a rage simply because your crosshairs fall upon them. Oh, and they teleport and can pick up and move blocks. You're not the only one who can modify the world. Imagine you come across an abandoned mineshaft or stronghold? Perhaps, since these are pregenerated structures, they could be described with audio. What about when you decide to set up your base of operations in a stronghold? How is the game to know that the antechamber to the portal to "the end" world is now your dining room?
Speaking of player-created objects, how would the game be able to tell that a series of fence posts with wooden pressure plates stuck on top and some wooden stair blocks around it are meant to represent a table? Perhaps someone would like to add doors behind each stair block to make high-back chairs. I played, and later administrated, in a very popular Minecraft server. We had a custom, curated world that was designed to recreate the world of a popular cartoon? Maybe data can be added to naturally generated structures in a procedurally generated world so that the game can give basic descriptions of what you're looking at, but what about a world built from scratch by a human? The game won't be able to tell a mountain from a motorway. Creative mode can eliminate the problems of resource collection and hostile monsters, but that still leaves world description to tackle.
I haven't even talked about chat. Yes, text-to-speech can read out messages from other players, but keep in mind that that same text-to-speech is also being used to describe the world around you. This might be okay on a small server with a few friends, but what if you go on a popular server? What if the server has dozens or hundreds of players all vying for chat space? What if that server also has plugins which add roleplaying features such as classes, levels, and skills? Those messages could get completely lost in the sea of chatter. You would never know that you just leveled up or unlocked some crazy magic that would seriously help you out.
These are all serious hurdles to making Minecraft accessible. Could it be done in some rudimentary form? Maybe, if you simplified the maps, nerfed the mobs, and made other concessions and compromises. This could work for a while, but what if you decide to build a house and add furniture? What if you transform a cave into a house? What if you want to recreate a structure from another videogame? How will the game know that the collection of clay, iron blocks, glass, iron bars, and polished stone is supposed to represent a vault or a dungeon or a laboratory? What if your friend builds something and doesn't tell you about it? What happens if another player destroys your build and turns your house into something more akin to flaming Swiss cheese? If we simplify and simply instruct the game to list what materials are in front and near the player, then we end up with a list of items that has absolutely no meaning and will be outdated in a matter of seconds as the player walks or sprints around. That doesn't sound like fun at all to me. I didn't even mention mods, but the base game is so overstuffed with content that it's not even worth addressing the topic. Maybe limiting the player to a static, bird's-eye view of blocks could make it accessible, but you've now taken a world that is literal millions of cubic kilometers and forced it to become a 2.5D or even simply 2D plane of tiles on a touchscreen
Minecraft has done so much for me. I would not have discovered my true self, found a career path, or met a loving partner without it. Truthfully, I do not think I would be alive without Minecraft. I want nothing more than to play it again, but I just can't imagine a way we could experience it without sight. Nothing would bring me more joy than for Microsoft, Mojang, or a modder to prove me wrong and make it accessible. Hell, I'll take the Bedrock version. It doesn't need to be Java.
The appeal from Minecraft comes from the fact that you can create almost anything, so long as you can transform the contents of your imagination into blocks in the game. That means creative mode is a bust. Turning survival mode into a text-based adventure would strip Minecraft of its core gameplay mechanics, leaving it as simply a Minecraft-themed survival text adventure.
Reading my post again, I don't think I did Minecraft proper justice. The base game alone has near-infinite possibilities. Combine it with server plugins which require no modding on the player's side, and you can do basically anything, from an automated item sorter to entire fictional worlds, with enough people and dedication.
Turning Minecraft into a text game or MUD means you remove the creativity aspect. It can be done, but then it wouldn't really be Minecraft anymore. It would just be survival or perhaps an adventure with very limited world modification.
hey
OMG!
this post is so lovely that I want to play the game!
I'm not even a gamer. only game I play is rs games but this sounds amazing!
well, I think anything can happen.. if the people think about it, they can make anything accessible. all it takes is just a thought and imagination. but then again that's just me :) perhaps, some day wil come where mindcraft is more accessible.
I’m not sure when it happened, but mojang Synergies has added accessibility and a self voicing screen reader to their game.
I am attempting to use it, but it is not intuitive. Some help would be greatly appreciated
its the actual minecraft game that has a screen reader built in. but I agree its not intuitive at all, they clearly didn't do any testing with blind users. I find that when I start the minecraft game a popup comes up saying that a screen reader has been enabled, but the popup then asks if you want to turn it on or leave it off, and flicking doesn't seem to move me between the turn on or turn off options, sometimes if I touch the screen I can touch the turn off or turn on options. But then if I double tap the screen reader simply reads out the dialogue again. any guidance how to navigate this dialogue would be appreciated, as I have tried tapping with various combinations of fingers both single and double and nothing seems to actually work. I did also enable VoiceOvers direct touch setting.
well some how more by luck that judgment I got minecraft to prompt me to use a microsoft account. but when I try to navigate the screen it just repeats the prompts. I suspect its a bit misleading to call this a screen reader in the VoiceOver sense of the word, I think literally all this accessibility does is read text on screen but doesn't provide true accessibility to controls. is there any indication this makes actual game play accessible, surely the hole concept of minecraft is fundamentally graphical in nature and so just wouldn't work with a screen reader. I think this could turn out to be useless unless people have vision to begin with. though if anyone has actually been able to progress with this screen reader on please do let us know.
I used to play Minecraft a few years ago when my sight was a lot better. I agree with the posts above that it is hard to imagine a blind gamer getting anything out of it - at least when playing on their own. However, as a multiplayer game I don't see why a blind gamer couldn't join in and contribute to some (possibly small) degree. It probably depends how easily frustrated you are and how fiercely independent. (ie probably not for me...)
I've always had the Playstation version and recently noticed that it had upgraded to the full java version and now has a built in narrator. However it is borderline useless. The voice is slow and wobbly which doesn't help. It reads out some of the menus OK, but not everything. Go to the store and it tells you it couldn't load because there was an error. But I can just about see that it's there. Once in the game it is just confusing and I couldn't tell what was going on. It reads some of the screens like inventory I think but I struggled to understand what it was trying to tell me. It's a strange one - I'm not sure why they would go to the bother of putting it in unless I am just too stupid to figure it out. Maybe it's the start of something bigger.
There are some accessibility modes on Windows but I couldn't find them on the PS4.
I'm on my 2nd playthrough of the last of us part 2 and it has given me a lot of hope that gaming is something I might still be able to do in the future. Has anyone found a good site for accessible gaming beyond Apple stuff? (I'd like AppleVis to have a non-Apple section because I've always had such a positive experience here.)
Anyway this post got a bit long so I've split it in two.... (yes this was only the first half)
Firstly, it integrates with Windows Narrator. It seems pretty good until you get into the game and then it all goes silent. However, there are some mods you can setup. One of them (Accessibility Plus I think) gives you constant spoken information about what you are looking it. E.g. "West, Stone" and so on. Not sure if this is with the numpad or speaking anyway but it seemed interesting. It also reads out inventory etc. The PS4 narrator did do some of this but it was pretty confusing. Another mod gives you ambient sound effects so you know if it's night (crickets), or what biome you are in.
There are also lots of option you can enable in the game to tweak the difficulty. For example, you can set it to keep all your gear if you die. I noticed there seemed to be some way to teleport which also looks invaluable as it is iso easy to get lost in Minecraft whether you can see or not. (I always used to create huge dirty columns to help me find my way around but that's not so useful if you can't see them.)
I also noticed on a previous Google that someone had made a blind/low vision texture pack. I presume that "blind" in this case means as in legally but you still need some vision (i.e. like me)
Sadly I couldn't find any of the above on the PS4 store and don't really fancy gaming on my Mac. (It's an iMac so not very easy to sit on the couch and play.)
I'm not sure if any of this makes it possible to actually enjoy Minecraft or get anything out of it bar contributing on a fairly basic level but I thought it was worth sharing.
So yeah, we have a community of folks that have been working on mods for it and editing already existing mods to allow you to play. Obviously this requires windows, and because it's a visual game even with the great accessibility we have now you're still going to be limited because of how visual it is. You can craft things, that's the easy part, but when you get into building houses and what not you'll basically be building boxes. But with practice I'd imagine you could get good. We obviously won't ever be able to build as good as sighted people and our builds will take more time, but if you want to give it a try you'll have fun.
It's a shame it's Windows only. I don't know the first thing about Minecraft modding, but being a shared Java codebase, is it possible for the mods to be compatible with the Mac as well?
I think as a totally blind gamer the best that could be hoped for would be to be able to collaborate with another player. I think what would be really helpful would be a way to have a "buddy" in the game (i.e. you nominate one other player) and then have a button that posts you I their direction (like autonav in TLOU2) or where that becomes difficult a teleport option. That way you could explore together ad contribute at least to simple structures together.
In my past experience of Minecraft, the things I enjoyed the most were building huge structures over time and then seeing them take shape. Never being able to see the end product would remove a lot of the incentive.
Comments
me too!
Me too, I hope so
do either of you understand
do either of you understand the concept of minecraft, basically its about using graphical blocks to build stuff in the game and create your own world I think anyone who even thinks this could be made accessible is in fantasy land, basically the hole concept is visual in nature from construction to finishing your stuff your building to interacting with it. its just not realistic to think it could be accessible without it being a totally different game. Its a nice dream but not going to happen.
building blocks
Well someone could make a game where building things are labeled and you can use them to make other things and text to inneract. I've always wished I could play Mind Craft as well when my kids were doing it.
A
Labeled blocks
I agree with that. They could label the blocks somehow, so you know what the blockss are. I know the blindfold games are out there, but… Not many people play them, because there’s not really many sound effects. The only one that’s closest, is the blindfold racer. Anyway, I hope they can come up with something. I would like to see more Apps/Games accessible for the blind.
There are games, but this one probably isn't it
There are lots of mainstream games which could theoretically be made accessible. Some would even require minimal work, while others would need a little more. Minecraft though is probably not one of those. Even if you labeled every single block, rendered the 3D workd in a way easily traversable by someone with no sight and made everything else somehow work, the amount of sheer tedium which would be required to actually play it would probably bore most sane people to tears. Imagine trying to keep track of hundreds of blocks over a vast space. The game's already a huge time sync as it is. It might not be the worst thing that it isn't accessible. Though as a mainstream gamer myself, the blind really do get shafted in the quality department. I'm sure some of what's out there is decent. There just isn't that much variety.
Crafting kingdom
hi.
I have two things to say.
1. Do you guys think that maybe if the same pluggin used for Crafting Kingdom could be used to make minecraft somehow playable with VoiceOver?
and 2. Perhaps a game similar to minecraft could be created to simulate something like minecraft.
Also, I've heard there are mods that somehow enhance minecraft's actions and how they affect the game. Perhaps an accessibility mod could be added?
Tunmi
Crafting kingdom
I tried playing crafting kingdom, but it really wasn’t my interest. However, if they added an extra build an accessibility feature for Minecraft, had a game similar to Minecraft, that would be terrific. I actually have a Minecraft shirt. And a lot of people have talked about it, from what I have heard.
Accessible Minecraft
I have some usable vision, and have played Minecraft in the past. I'm really not sure how a game like that could be made accessible. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be very tricky. and like a previous poster stated, the amount of information that would need to be conveyed would likely make things pretty tedious. Maybe once VR, haptic feedback, and other tech get further along...
If anything a 2D game like Terraria might be easier to represent. I haven't played it much because the visual UI is very small for the game, but it's kind of like a 2D Minecraft type game for consoles and PC.
Heck Yeah
I know that'd be super hard to pull off but it'd be amazing. Maybe do it as a 3d audio experience so you could listen and hear how things were layed out? I'd also like to see some kind of accessible game like The Sims. If sandbox games like this could be made accessible, they would be my absolute crap! I love creative freestyle things like that. also, Crafting Kingdom is nothing like Minecraft.
The only way for us to experience Minecraft
Honestly, I think the only way we can play any rendition of Minecraft would be the interactive movie Minecraft: Story Mode which is available, audio described and accessible on Netflix. It's basically an interactive narrative set in the Minecract universe. It's not what people here are looking for, but it's actually quite well done. I would actually love to see more of Telltale Games's narrative games like this brought over to Netflix, because they're all very good.
about blocks
i bet all that would have to happen is use direct touch and place blocks around the screen, then the user would drag a block to another to connect. I mean, it's possible, I don't really see what's so impossible Alex. sa
Someone please get the developer
Yes!!! I believe that it can be done. Look at this article and tell me it can’t be done!
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/the-last-of-us-part-ii-ps4/accessibility/
There are so many ways to add accessibility features to gaming platforms in 2020 there is no longer an excuse for lack of information. We now have the first ever fully accessible mainstream game for everyone. Inclusiveness for all!!!
The prospect, sadly, does not look bright.
I wrote this out before I realized how old this post was, but screw it, I poured my heart into it. Here goes.
As someone who played Minecraft for 6 years of my life, I want to say that I would love, love, love this to happen. It's my favorite game of all time because of what it's done for me. Long story short, I owe my technical skills, personality, and romantic relationship to Minecraft. It is an incredible game which has brought incalculable benefits to my life. That's why it breaks my heart to say that, no, we will likely never get to play this game without sight. First, I must add that I have not played Minecraft in over 3 years due to my vision, so my knowledge of the game will likely be laughably out of date. Basically, I'm a Minecraft boomer, but the base game probably hasn't changed too much. Second, this is a long post. I'm doing my best to condense a game with near-infinite potential into a few paragraphs of text. Minecraft's scope is far, far, far wider than most other games. It's not my intention to come across as passive-aggressive or hostile. I ask a lot of questions to try and communicate the breadth, depth, and variety of everything this game has to offer. Minecraft is not your typical FPS, RPG, RTS, or survival horror, or what have you. This game is so much more than that. Minecraft blurs the line between videogame and creativity tool. It is a three-dimensional canvas where the only limits are your imagination and your CPU. seriously, this thing is more resource-intensive than Chrome. If you don't want to read on, imagine Minecraft as a world built out of Lego blocks. You can arrange them however you like. You have as many blocks to play with as you could ever possibly want. You can defy gravity and physics. You can build simple circuits to push blocks around. You can construct automated storage systems and simple, functional calculators, if you like. Like I said, the possibilities are endless, and Microsoft is constantly updating the game with more and more and more content.
At its core, Minecraft is a 3D voxel sandbox. The world is built out of cubes which are grouped in chunks that are 16 blocks square and (when I last played), 256 blocks high. Most of that height is empty air with ground level at around layer 64. When I played, there were hundreds of blocks: grass, dirt, farmland, mycelium, smooth stone, cobblestone, mossy cobblestone, water, lava, multiple types of wood, chests, doors, fences, fence gates, pressure plates, levers, redstone to create circuits with Boolean logic, stairs which could be placed in almost any orientation and connect with adjacent stair blocks, half blocks which could be put towards the bottom or towards the top of a block space, crafting tables to create tools and weapons, furnaces to smelt ore and cook food, cauldrons to hold water, hoppers to feed items into chests or furnaces or other interactable blocks, brewing stands for potion making. That's not even considering passive and aggressive creatures. Imagine our world but made from giant, 1-meter, blocks. With enough patience, I have no doubt that a Minecraft world could be made accessible, but there are two huge hurdles: worlds are both procedurally generated and dynamic.
Every Minecraft world, single player and multi-player, is completely unique and unlike any other. Yes, people do create custom adventure maps, but these are almost always made by tiny teams, or even one single person. Most of the time, you won't be playing these. You'll probably be in a world on your own, with friends, or on a public server. Unless someone in your group is an MCedit wizard, that world will be procedurally generated from a hash. When you spawn, you might be on a beach, or in a forest, or in a swamp, or on a mountain. It's impossible to say which and even more impossible to say just how dense that forest is, how narrow or curved that beach is, or how tall or snowy that mountain might be. Start walking around, and you'll soon find yourself in a savannah, a desert, or a swamp. There are even ocean biomes. That's not even getting into there being multiple worlds, each with their own completely unique aesthetic and block types. This means that there would be absurd amounts of content that the game would have to describe. What block is your cursor pointed at? What blocks are around it? Perhaps you'd like to know the position of the sun or moon overhead to know when it will get dark or light out. Monsters spawn at night, which makes it dangerous to be out. Do you want the vista described? How does one describe a blocky hill with some blocky trees without overloading the player while still providing enough information to get around and not fall off a ledge? How about a subterranean ravine with waterfalls, narrow pathways way above, and pools of lava? Many of these are not laid out to follow the grid of the world and instead run diagonally, making the walls quite jagged and chunky. Perhaps there is a smooth floor with a single block missing. It would be really annoying to fall into that 1-block-deep hole and have to jump out. What if there's a coal ore block on the nearby? Does the player want to know about it? Maybe they're loaded to the brim with coal already? Perhaps they're coal-starved and looking for any scrap of fuel. How does one describe the vein of coal behind that block once mined? How does one communicate that there's a lake of lava directly above, and that you absolutely should not mine the ceiling, lest you want a quick death? How does one accurately describe the size, shape, and slope of a dark cave? A cave which has tiny passages that lead to other caves? Passages so small that sighted players must add markers or risk being stuck underground forever? What if you mine a wall and cause a chunk of gravel to come falling down? Gravel blocks have gravity. You can even get stuck underneath them in a cave-in and suffocate.
That's not even to mention all the creatures, or mobs as they're called. Some of them make plenty of noise like zombies. Others, like skeletons, stay at a far distance and snipe you with arrows. There's also the creeper, bane of every single survival player, which stays completely silent until it's too late. Creepers hiss for a bit and then blow up. There's a good chance they'll take your buildings, and your life, along with themselves. These mobs also leave behind items for you to pick up. Mining blocks also does this. You must get close enough to suck them up in your inventory. Should the game add audio beacons for dropped items? What if you died and left behind an inventory-full of stuff? That's going to be awfully loud and cacophonous. Maybe there's a wall or some blocks between you and the items. How best to go about communicating this and suggesting a viable path to get to said items? Oh yes, what about mobs like Endermen? Tall, slender, pitch-black creatures that are whipped into a rage simply because your crosshairs fall upon them. Oh, and they teleport and can pick up and move blocks. You're not the only one who can modify the world. Imagine you come across an abandoned mineshaft or stronghold? Perhaps, since these are pregenerated structures, they could be described with audio. What about when you decide to set up your base of operations in a stronghold? How is the game to know that the antechamber to the portal to "the end" world is now your dining room?
Speaking of player-created objects, how would the game be able to tell that a series of fence posts with wooden pressure plates stuck on top and some wooden stair blocks around it are meant to represent a table? Perhaps someone would like to add doors behind each stair block to make high-back chairs. I played, and later administrated, in a very popular Minecraft server. We had a custom, curated world that was designed to recreate the world of a popular cartoon? Maybe data can be added to naturally generated structures in a procedurally generated world so that the game can give basic descriptions of what you're looking at, but what about a world built from scratch by a human? The game won't be able to tell a mountain from a motorway. Creative mode can eliminate the problems of resource collection and hostile monsters, but that still leaves world description to tackle.
I haven't even talked about chat. Yes, text-to-speech can read out messages from other players, but keep in mind that that same text-to-speech is also being used to describe the world around you. This might be okay on a small server with a few friends, but what if you go on a popular server? What if the server has dozens or hundreds of players all vying for chat space? What if that server also has plugins which add roleplaying features such as classes, levels, and skills? Those messages could get completely lost in the sea of chatter. You would never know that you just leveled up or unlocked some crazy magic that would seriously help you out.
These are all serious hurdles to making Minecraft accessible. Could it be done in some rudimentary form? Maybe, if you simplified the maps, nerfed the mobs, and made other concessions and compromises. This could work for a while, but what if you decide to build a house and add furniture? What if you transform a cave into a house? What if you want to recreate a structure from another videogame? How will the game know that the collection of clay, iron blocks, glass, iron bars, and polished stone is supposed to represent a vault or a dungeon or a laboratory? What if your friend builds something and doesn't tell you about it? What happens if another player destroys your build and turns your house into something more akin to flaming Swiss cheese? If we simplify and simply instruct the game to list what materials are in front and near the player, then we end up with a list of items that has absolutely no meaning and will be outdated in a matter of seconds as the player walks or sprints around. That doesn't sound like fun at all to me. I didn't even mention mods, but the base game is so overstuffed with content that it's not even worth addressing the topic. Maybe limiting the player to a static, bird's-eye view of blocks could make it accessible, but you've now taken a world that is literal millions of cubic kilometers and forced it to become a 2.5D or even simply 2D plane of tiles on a touchscreen
Minecraft has done so much for me. I would not have discovered my true self, found a career path, or met a loving partner without it. Truthfully, I do not think I would be alive without Minecraft. I want nothing more than to play it again, but I just can't imagine a way we could experience it without sight. Nothing would bring me more joy than for Microsoft, Mojang, or a modder to prove me wrong and make it accessible. Hell, I'll take the Bedrock version. It doesn't need to be Java.
Make it a mud?
We could make a mud or multiplayer text adventure that is similar to minecraft?
unlikely
The appeal from Minecraft comes from the fact that you can create almost anything, so long as you can transform the contents of your imagination into blocks in the game. That means creative mode is a bust. Turning survival mode into a text-based adventure would strip Minecraft of its core gameplay mechanics, leaving it as simply a Minecraft-themed survival text adventure.
Reading my post again, I don't think I did Minecraft proper justice. The base game alone has near-infinite possibilities. Combine it with server plugins which require no modding on the player's side, and you can do basically anything, from an automated item sorter to entire fictional worlds, with enough people and dedication.
Turning Minecraft into a text game or MUD means you remove the creativity aspect. It can be done, but then it wouldn't really be Minecraft anymore. It would just be survival or perhaps an adventure with very limited world modification.
hey OMG! this post is so…
hey
OMG!
this post is so lovely that I want to play the game!
I'm not even a gamer. only game I play is rs games but this sounds amazing!
well, I think anything can happen.. if the people think about it, they can make anything accessible. all it takes is just a thought and imagination. but then again that's just me :) perhaps, some day wil come where mindcraft is more accessible.
We have one! It's infinite…
We have one! It's infinite story!
iOS and PC are NOW accessible
I’m not sure when it happened, but mojang Synergies has added accessibility and a self voicing screen reader to their game.
I am attempting to use it, but it is not intuitive. Some help would be greatly appreciated
No Way!
Could you please post the link for the IOS one? Whats it like?
its the actual minecraft…
its the actual minecraft game that has a screen reader built in. but I agree its not intuitive at all, they clearly didn't do any testing with blind users. I find that when I start the minecraft game a popup comes up saying that a screen reader has been enabled, but the popup then asks if you want to turn it on or leave it off, and flicking doesn't seem to move me between the turn on or turn off options, sometimes if I touch the screen I can touch the turn off or turn on options. But then if I double tap the screen reader simply reads out the dialogue again. any guidance how to navigate this dialogue would be appreciated, as I have tried tapping with various combinations of fingers both single and double and nothing seems to actually work. I did also enable VoiceOvers direct touch setting.
Link to iOS app
Here is the link, hopefully I’m replying to the right one. Accessibility wise, it’s not that great.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/minecraft/id479516143
well some how more by luck…
well some how more by luck that judgment I got minecraft to prompt me to use a microsoft account. but when I try to navigate the screen it just repeats the prompts. I suspect its a bit misleading to call this a screen reader in the VoiceOver sense of the word, I think literally all this accessibility does is read text on screen but doesn't provide true accessibility to controls. is there any indication this makes actual game play accessible, surely the hole concept of minecraft is fundamentally graphical in nature and so just wouldn't work with a screen reader. I think this could turn out to be useless unless people have vision to begin with. though if anyone has actually been able to progress with this screen reader on please do let us know.
PS4 accessibility features
I used to play Minecraft a few years ago when my sight was a lot better. I agree with the posts above that it is hard to imagine a blind gamer getting anything out of it - at least when playing on their own. However, as a multiplayer game I don't see why a blind gamer couldn't join in and contribute to some (possibly small) degree. It probably depends how easily frustrated you are and how fiercely independent. (ie probably not for me...)
I've always had the Playstation version and recently noticed that it had upgraded to the full java version and now has a built in narrator. However it is borderline useless. The voice is slow and wobbly which doesn't help. It reads out some of the menus OK, but not everything. Go to the store and it tells you it couldn't load because there was an error. But I can just about see that it's there. Once in the game it is just confusing and I couldn't tell what was going on. It reads some of the screens like inventory I think but I struggled to understand what it was trying to tell me. It's a strange one - I'm not sure why they would go to the bother of putting it in unless I am just too stupid to figure it out. Maybe it's the start of something bigger.
There are some accessibility modes on Windows but I couldn't find them on the PS4.
I'm on my 2nd playthrough of the last of us part 2 and it has given me a lot of hope that gaming is something I might still be able to do in the future. Has anyone found a good site for accessible gaming beyond Apple stuff? (I'd like AppleVis to have a non-Apple section because I've always had such a positive experience here.)
Anyway this post got a bit long so I've split it in two.... (yes this was only the first half)
Accessibility on Windows
So more likely to overlap with the Mac is the Windows version and this seems a lot more hopeful regarding accessibility.
I found a YouTube video (https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Uppas-Printing-Compatible-Filament-Christmas/dp/B07TQJWYSV/ref=sr_1_2_sspa?keywords=3doodler&qid=1637938278&sr=8-2-spons&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUFRVjg2SFBNTkM5M0wmZW5jcnlwdGVkSWQ9QTA5MTMzNDgzNEFPMkpZSEFPMFA1JmVuY3J5cHRlZEFkSWQ9QTA0MDQyNDAzMElWUEtIWEk0S1lQJndpZGdldE5hbWU9c3BfYXRmJmFjdGlvbj1jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ&th=1) which shows a blind gamer playing on Windows with various mods enabled which was pretty interesting.
Firstly, it integrates with Windows Narrator. It seems pretty good until you get into the game and then it all goes silent. However, there are some mods you can setup. One of them (Accessibility Plus I think) gives you constant spoken information about what you are looking it. E.g. "West, Stone" and so on. Not sure if this is with the numpad or speaking anyway but it seemed interesting. It also reads out inventory etc. The PS4 narrator did do some of this but it was pretty confusing. Another mod gives you ambient sound effects so you know if it's night (crickets), or what biome you are in.
There are also lots of option you can enable in the game to tweak the difficulty. For example, you can set it to keep all your gear if you die. I noticed there seemed to be some way to teleport which also looks invaluable as it is iso easy to get lost in Minecraft whether you can see or not. (I always used to create huge dirty columns to help me find my way around but that's not so useful if you can't see them.)
I also noticed on a previous Google that someone had made a blind/low vision texture pack. I presume that "blind" in this case means as in legally but you still need some vision (i.e. like me)
Sadly I couldn't find any of the above on the PS4 store and don't really fancy gaming on my Mac. (It's an iMac so not very easy to sit on the couch and play.)
I'm not sure if any of this makes it possible to actually enjoy Minecraft or get anything out of it bar contributing on a fairly basic level but I thought it was worth sharing.
Accessible Minecraft
So yeah, we have a community of folks that have been working on mods for it and editing already existing mods to allow you to play. Obviously this requires windows, and because it's a visual game even with the great accessibility we have now you're still going to be limited because of how visual it is. You can craft things, that's the easy part, but when you get into building houses and what not you'll basically be building boxes. But with practice I'd imagine you could get good. We obviously won't ever be able to build as good as sighted people and our builds will take more time, but if you want to give it a try you'll have fun.
What about iOS?
Hi,
What about the iOS version?
Can we use it with voiceover?
No. You can't.
No. You can't.
It's a shame it's Windows…
It's a shame it's Windows only. I don't know the first thing about Minecraft modding, but being a shared Java codebase, is it possible for the mods to be compatible with the Mac as well?
I think as a totally blind gamer the best that could be hoped for would be to be able to collaborate with another player. I think what would be really helpful would be a way to have a "buddy" in the game (i.e. you nominate one other player) and then have a button that posts you I their direction (like autonav in TLOU2) or where that becomes difficult a teleport option. That way you could explore together ad contribute at least to simple structures together.
In my past experience of Minecraft, the things I enjoyed the most were building huge structures over time and then seeing them take shape. Never being able to see the end product would remove a lot of the incentive.
I've got no idea how Minecraft works on iOS.