Guys, for those of you who like football manager games (where with football I mean soccer for the Americans), Champman 17 should be a dream to play. Unfortunately it's not accessible, even though the game concept would be perfect for a game that could be played using Voiceover. I mailed a couple of times the developers, and they just said that they would pass my messages to the relevant developing team. Why don't we all mail them? The address is: support_eu_ol@square-enix.com. I also suggest it to be the next Applevis campaign.
The link for Champman 17 on the Appstore is the following:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/championship-manager-17/id1094663982?mt=8.
Hope many of you will write to them, so that we can prove that there's a big interest within the blind community in having such a game made accessible.
Best.
Mauri
Comments
Hate to spoil the party
but in Championship Manager there are things like formations which would be quite tricky to make accessible. Therefore it's not so much tweaking the app as rewriting the app. that's where I think this idea runs into some trouble. Still, I applaud the principle and it would be ggreat to have this game, and other sports games, accessible. There's not a cricket game to be had, for example, and I wish there were.
Sorry to put a downer on it
If a game is currently 0% accessible, there's not much value in bugging the devs as there'll be nothing they can do about it. It will be built using a game engine that makes voiceover support impossible.
A game engine is a code framework that takes care of lots of the hard work of game development, from getting graphics onto the screen to network communications to publishing across multiple platforms (e.g. android & ios).
It's the engine developers, not the game developers, who need to address it. The most popular game engine used for iOS games is Unity (@unity3d on twitter). Until engine developers like Unity fix it, most requests to developers won't be achievable.
Screenreaders pick kup on the labels of interface elements, and developers usually give their interface element sensible labels. So if the engine was screenreader accessible you would already have some degree of accessibility in the game, and would just need to request a few tweaks.
As it is all you can ask of the developer is to scrap their game and built it again from scratch at much greater cost and multiple times for each platform, which isn't realistically possible.
Perhaps ask the game developers (and find individual people to speak to on twitter, don't ever bother emailing those main publisher support email addresses, the emails never make it through to the right people) to let the game engine developers know that it's something they want implemented.
To reply to both criticissms
Hi, I don't think setting a lineup or formation is a problem in itself. There's an online football game called Hattrick, for instance, where blind people can easily set their lineup and bench cause the game is accessible to screenreaders. On the other hand I see the objection concerning the game engine as a real problem. Will try to investigate which game engine Champ Man uses. However I keep thinking this is a type of game that in the future should and can be made accessible to blind users.
Unity and Accessibility
Just a note that someone is in the process of making a Unity plugin that will open up accessibility on mobile devices for this platform/framework. Here is her latest blog post on the project:
https://icodelikeagirl.com/2016/09/15/unity-accessibility-plugin-update-8-supported-ui-elements/
The problem is indeed that Unity 3D itself does not come out of the box with accessibility hooks. Though if a third party developer is able to create a plugin that does this, Unity itself should have these accessibility tools as part of their main platform.
So - it is possible for a developer to add accessibility hooks through Unity, it's just added work for them since Unity itself does not provide pre-built tools to do so.
football
Well in case you may not no but since you can't play this one then there's football chairman which is accessible. I don't know how different it is to this game.
Football chairman and championship manager
They are two very different games. Football Chairman lets you be the chair of a club, not the manager. It doesn't have real players and by no means the same amount of options and choices that Champ Man has. Good new the plug in for the game engine, hope it'll come out soon!
Hi. What we need is a light
Hi. What we need is a light version of the game and that should take the 3D stuff out of it. I can live with a text only game as I'm use to playing Football Chairman Pro. I did ask the dev of Football Chairman to include real name players in the current database but for legal reasons that isn't possible. I use to play Championship Manager on the PC back in the early 2000s but can no longer do that as my vision took a turn for the worse and it's not worth the bother with all that stressing and straining to see the text on the screen. I use to spend half of my time looking for the dam mouse pointer as this game couldn't be played without a mouse. I then moved on to playing LMA Manager on the playstation 2 but that game was discontinued a good few years ago. We just need a light version of one of these games and teams can be selected if check boxes are included in the squad list.
Plugin
That isn't actually how the plugin works. It doesn't provide any visibility to screenreaders, what she's actually doing is basically rebuilding and equivalent to voiceover from scratch inside the engine, which is a huge undertaking. It isn't finished and available yet.
"Unity itself should have these accessibility tools as part of their main platform."
Yes, this. And it should be far less work than she has had to put in, as they have access to how the output of the engine is rendered out, so can make it work with voiceover, instead of having to build huge workarounds.
They should take her on as a contractor to help make it happen.
There's a big disadvantage to a plug-in approach. It means developers are all starting from a place of zero accessibility, which firstly makes accidental accessibility completely impossible, but secondly being asked to start thinking about accessibility when you're currently at zero is really intimidating, plugin or no plugin.
If it's implemented at engine level, the labels that developers already use for their interface elements mean that there already starting from somewhere, the question is about how to take a game that's already partially accessible and optimise it further.
So that would be the dream for me personally, that her work can be s step towards getting it integrated at engine level.
Also regarding taking the 3d visuals out of the game, there aren't any. It's a pretty simple 2d interface.
Why don't we campaign for Unity to be accessible then?
Very helpful post by Ian to understand what the situation is. Why don't we try then to start a campaign with Unity to ask them to improve their engine as far as accessibility is concerned. I'm not even sure that Championship manager uses Unity as game engine. I've asked but they didn't reply. But anyway, as Unity is one of the best known and most used game engines, making it accessible with Voiceover would mean a great break through for us. Will try to get in touch with them and will share their contact details with you. And yes, the idea of hiring Michelle is a great one and totally agree on the fact that having a plug in is not the best way to go forward...
i used to love the
i used to love the championship manager games back when i could see their new line of football manager who are far more popular now are great games which i sadly cannot play any longer
I use Online Soccer Manager (OSM)
Hi guys,
Me and my blind friend use the App called Online Soccer Manager. OSM is used by over millions of players around the world. Teams with the real teammembers are there. The App get monthly updated to actualize the team members if they change theire teams.
Well, the accessibility isn't the best but it's usable. Since I stay with the FB-support from OSM many things have been changed. You can training your players buy new players and can handle easily the formation menue. Many things you are learning by doing in this app.
I hope I could help some fokes here. If you have any questions feel fre to ask.
Game Engine accessibility
I would love this game to be accessible just as much as everyone else, but I do understand what work this would include in order to rewrite the game from scratch to make it accessible, maybe if they release a 2018 version, and use a different game engine, there might be hope then, but at this moment I highly doubt anything in regards to this game can be done. Sorry to put a downer on things.
Online Socker Manager
I jus got the Online Soccer game manager game, and so far I have only one issue, when I get to play a match with my team, I can see a list of players, and I have a claim button next to each player, what do these buttons mean?
OSM-help
hi,
could you specify youquestion please. In which menue you are if you see this list?
thanks
OSM Help
I set up a friendly match between my team and another team, and was then [resented with a set of my starting set of players, next to each of them, was a claim button, which after pressing became dimmed, and once all were dimmed, the match started, I'm not really sure what these buttons do?
OSM-answer
Hi,
Now I know what you mean. This are buttons to chose the listet players. But to be honnnest if you want to make a friendly teammaatch you must drop this buttons to play it. Click on all players and the match starts automatically.