Hero Designer Accessibility

[jaseoffire]

Now, I doubt this will be a question easily answered, but I shall ask anyways. You see, I'm blind and use a screen reader to access stuff. How screen reader friendly is the hero designer? Considering it's Java, I'm guessing that I'd be buying a digital paperweight, but maybe not.

[Simon]

Honestly, I'm not sure. I haven't coded anything in either direction for that, and I'm not really familiar with the requirements.

[Ndreare]

The text is very small in a 27" monitor. I have not found a way to adjust it.

 

But Windows Narrator seems able to read the heading off the window. But not the actual tabs, labels,  or selected text.  

 

Unless you have some other narrator that is more robust you would not get much use out of the software. 

Edited September 15, 2023 by Ndreare

[Simon]

Thanks for that check.

 

A note that likely won’t help OP: you can adjust the font size in HD, you just need to do it at the command line (since Windows is a bit of a pain with passing along font scaling info to Java).  
 

java -jar HD6.jar [font size]
 

e.g.  “java -jar HD6.jar 18” will set an 18 pt font size throughout

[Khymeria]

On 9/14/2023 at 3:57 PM, jaseoffire said:

Now, I doubt this will be a question easily answered, but I shall ask anyways. You see, I'm blind and use a screen reader to access stuff. How screen reader friendly is the hero designer? Considering it's Java, I'm guessing that I'd be buying a digital paperweight, but maybe not.

I have a player in my online game that is blind and we can't send him hdc files but instead convert everything to documents for him. I am not fully aware of all the particulars but as I understand it, he cannot use Hero Designer and has a whole different set up for character creation. Hope this helps and if you have more specific questions just message me and I can ask him or try to put you in touch. 

[jaseoffire]

@Khymeria Actually, it would be nice to know how exactly your blind player handles Hero system.

[Khymeria]

4 hours ago, jaseoffire said:

@Khymeria Actually, it would be nice to know how exactly your blind player handles Hero system.

Well I will put up a link to this thread for him so if he wants to answer that question, he can. We play online and he has a really good grasp of the rules and tactics and is an excellent listener who usually understands what the positions are for the characters. I like that as a GM, he forces me to up my description game. For my other players I can show a token or piece of art and that is that, but for him I need to describe things. Usually my home games have written out descriptions just like any published adventure you would buy, and I am a fair to decent writer so that works well. We put all documents in text format for him usually and just throw up the hdc files for the other players and he posts his stuff in text. Honestly, he is one of the best players I have ever had the pleasure to share a "table" with and we would all be lucky to have a roleplayer with the attention and engagement that he has.

[jaseoffire]

You know, I might give this a stab. @Simon would you be interested in trying to implement accessibility? I've got the time to do some digging through docs depending on what you're using for GUIs.

[Simon]

I have no issue with anyone taking a stab at any mods that they're interested in -- that's why the source code for HD is offered.

 

Integrating any modifications into the main application codebase would be dependent on the nature of the mods themselves and (particularly) how they would impact ongoing maintenance and updates.