[BlindGuyNW]

Hello,

My name is Zack Kline, and I've been a fan of OOTP off and on for several years. I've purchased multiple versions on Steam. I am totally blind, and use a screen reader program, which can interact with the game to a certain extent, though it isn't ideal. I want to figure out ways we can improve the situation. The game is already so close to being playable, the limitations I experience are just in interacting with the program.

The core problem is that the game does not expose information to a screen reader, though the accessibility DLLs appear to be loaded. I thus am limited to using OCR, optical character recognition, which breaks down on complex screens, and does not reliably expose some information at all. The problem is one of knowing how to interact, i.e. click this button to open the actions menu, or leave the game. OOTP obviously maintains an internal model of what the GUI looks like at any time, which would make this easier to deal with.
At the same time, I can already access a lot of information because of the built-in HTMl export functionality. This reads very well in general, but breaks the connection between the game and the output. For instance, I can look at a list of candidates to hire but in order to do so I have to go back to OCR, click on the person I want, find the offer contract button which may or may not be found by the screen reader and so on. A slight wrinkle is the advent of LLMs, some of which offer the capability to interpret screenshots I supply, always subject to the potential for hallucination.

The game uses a database to track all important information. I could, in principle, create a tool to navigate through the data and make changes in the proper tables, the structure is already documented. But this isn't playing the game as intended, because obviously I miss out on the actual simulation, and it's far from ideal when the actual interaction model could be made accessible.

So basically I want to find a way to avoid depending on OCR to interact with the game. I would like to be able to navigate the UI the same as anybody else, make decisions about whom to hire, what to emphasize, and so on, without having to spend ten minutes looking for a button which would be perfectly obvious if I were able to see it.

I am an accessibility professional and more than willing to help test, provide more detailed guidance on how best to do this, or generally discuss this question. The game is already 95% there.

Thanks for reading