Apple demos its new accessibility plugin for Unity games

My former employer worked to develop a game for iOS. The original game was set to be coded up in Unity using a Unity Accessibility Plugin or UAP as the primary means of making it accessible. The UAP was a third party effort and not native to Unity, so support was spotty. Apple taking the reins on this is good news for accessibility and gaming in general as most of the great games such as Candy Crush and Angry Birds are developed in Unity instead of Swift.

We abandoned Unity as the development platform because VoiceOver support was subpar. The rotor couldn't be activated and navigating the screen took too many swipes. Hopefully Apple has addressed some of these issues with their own APIs, but don't expect arcade-level support with VoiceOver as Unity is designed as a visual platform first. There is some work being done with 3D audio engines in Unity which is really cool, but AA developers often treat sound as an afterthought rather than the basis of their games.

I hope that. the live text in the in IOS 16 can help the blind people to play video games much easier

First off, yes. Unity seems to be a favourite among people developing visual stuff. However, it vexes me when I see text based games are inaccessible due to unity being used. Tin man games, or whatever that developer is called, uses unity for all their textbased games. It's also why BitLife became temporarily inaccessible. Hopefully, this will be a game changer.

I'm just curious to know if they're reinventing the wheel or if it's better than what is already available with the accessibility plugin.

I'm asking this because I'm no programmer, merely curious.

Hi I would love to see a audio and vishuel game where you are able to play with others and have support for voice and vidio chat along with the game wile playing. so that you could play woith friends and stuff on line. I have seen these types of things on games like call of dudey or other games that are not accessible to us as blind people. I would also like to see things happen with vr for blind people. I am a big fan of fps games and have always wanted to play a fps game over the pc or i phone and have the abillidey to chat with people using voice chat wile playing and so we can all play together. that is the type of games that i would like to see apple or other develipers makeing.

If Apple is taking the lead on redeveloping the frameworks and APIs around Unity accessibility, it will be better than whatever the third party plugin was able to achieve. I'm slowly making my way through the WWDC sessions and it sounds like Swift is being tooled for interoperability with a vast host of frameworks and languages. If this is the case and Swift can recognize Unity objects, we're off to the races in terms of accessibility.

Most developers will use Unity because it ports to game consoles, Steam, mobile devices, laptops and desktops really easily. Apple appears to be forging a path in gaming. Let's see what they come up with.

We certainly live in interesting times.

If they can utilise the screen readers in gaming consoles, not just on iOS devices, don't forget the Xbox and Playstation 5 both now have screen readers.

If games are available for all those platforms, you should in theory have accessible games right out of the box.

I'm not sure how you'd make open world games accessible without doing something like The Last of Us 2 did, but that's probably for another thread entirely.

This is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

Unity isn't the only engine out there, Unreal is another popular one.

I wonder if there are any plans to do something with that one eventually.

Mortal Kombat for example uses the Unreal engine.

I guess you can only do one engine at a time.

Still, this is worth keeping an eye on.

Yes, the announcment sounds perfect, we were hooked from the very first posting, but reality shows other sides. We are currently testing the new plug-ins and we can tell you, not even the included demo files from apple do work. Unfortunately it produces unfullfilled hopes of Accessibilty, CoreHaptics and PHASE Spatial sound to be easily integrated, but reality shows more errors, than benefits. There is no contact from apple's side to adress the issues, besides a general feedback site, so it will take a long road to get there, what the announcement already promised to be there.

I hope this is cross-platform. What sets this apart from the plugin created by the Crafting Kingdom developer?

I mean, that's to be expected. We're not even a week out from the first beta being released to the public.

The plugin from Michelle and Crafting Kingdom people is still the only working accessibility plug-in. Apple refused to give access to the core features of VoiceOver for a very long time, what created all the difficulties of necessary work arounds to make accessibility possible out of Unity. But it is working.