I feel like the game Among Us would be easy to make accessible

By Zoe Victoria, 27 December, 2020

Forum
iOS and iPadOS Gaming

Maybe tone down the graphical aspects of it and make it a bit more textbased. If anyone were willing to do this I would be super happy because the game sounds super fun and I'd love to try it if possible.

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Comments

By Khushi on Tuesday, December 22, 2020 - 07:04

my sis plays it and.. it sounds fun and it'll be great if it could be made accessible. but not being a gamer, I'm happy with RS games :)

By WellF on Friday, January 22, 2021 - 07:04

It doesn't need to be text based, we just need voiceover support, sound clues, simple stuff like that. I mean that's not hard.

By Khushi on Friday, January 22, 2021 - 07:04

In reply to by WellF

exactly

By bonerobot on Friday, January 22, 2021 - 07:04

Hi guys,

People around me, family members, coworkers and favorite Youtubers are playing Among us. So I'm also interested to play it.

All about a team onboard of a spaceship and someone is the murder and tries to kill all the crew members, before the crew gets him and vote him out. All teammades, including the murder, are represented by colours, and are moving from place to place to do their tasks.
I could imagine, to get it accessible on PC, or mac, for example like Swamp by Aprone, but how do you think it'd get accessible for VO users on the iPhone?
Has Voiceover the necessary commponents to get involved in Among us?
I'm open for suggestions.

With direct touch on, the dev would only need to create simple gestures for doing stuff, which I suppose the game already has. Different collours can be represented by different sound, varying on pitch, timber, volume, etc.

By bonerobot on Friday, January 22, 2021 - 07:04

In reply to by WellF

Interesting suggestion.
Is there a way to gget in contact with the developers of Among us, to describe them the situation?
It sounds a little bit difficult to implement an accessible solution, but it'd be very exciting how the developers would react to it.

By Khushi on Friday, January 22, 2021 - 07:04

yes
if someone finds the contact info of the developer and decides to contact them, do direct them to this thread.. they might find it useful :)

By Kristen on Friday, January 22, 2021 - 07:04

As much as I'd like this to be accessible, this might be one of those that would be extremely difficult or impossible to retro-fit accessibility onto.

I've listened to streams of this game and my sighted husband has played it, so I have some ideas of the sort of nuances/information needed to be able to tell who is the impostor or to hide from being detected as the impostor.

While I think it is technically feasible to make it possible to do the jobs/tasks accessibly, as well as moving around the ship (maybe some sort of navigation assist and/or drop-down menu that lists your tasks, etc.), the core of the game relies on a lot of visual deception that, as a developer and blind person myself, I'd find difficult to translate to audio effectively.

Some stuff I've noted that people use to detect an impostor:
* Where did they see <color> person last?
* Was <color> person neaar <other color> person when they were killed?
* When you see <color> person in an area, is his task meter actually filling up or is he just "pretending" to do his tasks?
* Where/when was the body found?
* General notations of where you see specific people as you wander around doing your tasks, and general "gut" feelings.

This would need some sort of text-based game log that the screen reader could read out, but said text log may not even exist, or the system they've built may not even be setup to build a game log. You'd be stuck reading things like "Pink just entered the Reactor Room." but having more nuance than that may be difficult and spammy.

In regards to being the impostor, some stumbling blocks may be:
* How to effectively "sneak" up on someone?
* How can you pretend to do a task when you have no idea where the actual station is to do said task? (I get the feeling they will walk up to it and kind of look like they're doing it, but not actually interact with it, so this would be difficult to even know if your ruse worked.) Yes, I know "audio alerts", but if we're suggesting audio alerts for everything from each <color> person having a unique one to navigational ones, this will get overwhelming fast.
* Who saw you come in?
* Is <color> person you are trying to kill alone?
* If you are working together with another impostor, how do you coordinate with them if they are sighted and you are not?
* How do you navigate through the ductwork effectively? (I think this is something yo ucan do as an impostor.)

Let's be clear, I'd be absolutely over the moon if I could play Among Us, but I'm trying to be realistic that this would be a difficult one to adapt unless it already has a text game log to pull from. Even then, it'd be hard to be on a level playing field with other sighted users. You'd probably be killed by the time you got to find anything by manual touch on the iPhone screen.