Unity & screenreaders - progress

By Ian Hamilton, 2 July, 2019

Forum
iOS and iPadOS Gaming

Hey, there are two parts to this. Firstly some Unity staff put together a prototype of screenreader support during a hackathon last week:

https://twitter.com/Superpig/status/1145381804389666976

Secondly, a week before that Unity put out a call for input from developers on what Unity could do 1. to make the editor more accessible to disabled devs and 2. help devs make games that are accessible to disabled developers:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/accessibility-and-inclusion.694477/

The feedback thread is for developers rather than gamers, so please don't post there yourself unless you're a developer. But if you've ever spoken with a developer who wanted to make their game accessible but couldn't because Unity didn't support it, please please get in touch with them again and ask them to post on that Unity forum thread. Showing them the link to the prototype tweet might help show them that asking Unity to implement screenreader support is now something realistic to shoot for.

Feedback from devs is important. The screenreader support is only a quick prototype with no guarantee of making it to release, so any demonstrable demand from developers can only help its chances.

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Comments

By Kristen on Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - 00:13

I've been following this over on AudioGames.net and was surprised how few replies there are to this.

It's shocking that the first forum post came to my attention the day after I was feeling really bummed about the release of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and how left out I feel again, same as I did with Pokemon Go, and how many games use Unity but don't have any accessibility prospects.

My only wonder regarding this is - will this make things accessible out of the box? Will games like Pokemon Go have to 'update' their version of Unity or patch it or something? (I'm assuming so, which may have some pushback from the game devs ... as I'm sure there'd be growing pains.)

There aws a developer of the Dresden Files cooperative card game that was interested in accessibility, but they use Unity, as well. I'll see if I can find my support post and link them to the forum.