Editted to fix link. Please boost for reach if this kind of stuff interests you. Will post more on this later.

Once upon a time, there was a cool emulator frontend called Retroarch. This emulator wasn't accessible until I and a few other gamers went to them and asked about adding accessibility. An amazing person known as BarryR made it happen. Now, if you turn on accessibility mode in settings, or pass the "--accessibility" (or something like that) flag on the command line, you get spoken menus, including the emulator's pause menu, good for saving states and such. Then, using PIL and other image processing Python utilities, running a server and hooking into Retroarch, the script allowed players to move around the map, battle, talk to NPC's, ETC. The only problem was, no one wanted to test it. The blind gaming community pretty much spoke, saying that we want new games. We want cool new, easy accessibility. So that's what we have no, follow the beacon or get sighted help in the case of diablo and such. It's sad, but meh. It's what we wanted I guess. No Zelda for us. So, this is about as far as he got:

To expand on what devinprater was saying: I am working on an accessibility pack/service for Final Fantasy 1 for the NES (this was what was shown in the latest RetroArch update). The idea is similar to how Pokemon Crystal access works, but it's using the RetroArch AI Service interface to do so.
Right now, the FF1 access service is mostly done, but I need more testers to try it out and give me feedback on how it's working. Right now, you can get up to the point where you get the ship, but there's no code to deal with how the ship moves, so that still needs to be done. Likewise with the airship later on.
The service works the latest version of RetroArch, on linux and mac, but not windows. This is due to how nvda reads out the text and until the next major update to nvda (which will have a feature to fix this), it'll have to wait. If you have those, I (or maybe devinprater) can help you set it up on mac/linux to test out. The package itself is available at: (new link cause old one broke yesterday): dropbox.com/scl/fi/ggffl769fx6…
#accessibility #finalFantasy #RetroArch #blind #emulator #emulation #Python #ai #ML #MachineLearning