Hero System accessibility

[BlindGuyNW]

Hi All,

I'm a newbie to the Hero System, mostly intrigued by it as a contrast to more "light-weight," games, such as HeroQuest and Fate. I also happen to be totally blind, and thus depend primarily on my Mac and iOS devices for digesting rules and information in general.

 

I was wondering if any alternative formats for the character sheet, for instance, exist? MS Excel on the Mac is not accessible at all, and Numbers seems to dislike some of the formulas in the 6E sheet I downloaded from the resources section. Hero Designer is not accessible either. PDF, in general, produces a sub-par accessibility experience, certainly on OS X.

So I'm wondering how much work has been done to present the material in alternate formats? Something like a Word document would be ideal. I have a friend who has been willing to convert other RPG systems into formats I can handle, most recently GURPS, but Hero is large enough I'm hesitant to ask how much he'd charge.

Any thoughts on this general topic would be appreciated. Thanks much for input

 

[bluesguy]

Hi,

 

In Hero Designer there are a number of export templates available.  The ones you need have RTF in the name.  RTF stands for Rich Text Format, which will load into Word.  And if your Hero Designer license is current you can find other export templates that people have created.  You can find that information here http://www.herogames.com/hdExportFormats.htm

[BlindGuyNW]

Hi,

 

Thanks for this. The problem now is that Hero Designer itself presents major accessibility issues with my Mac screen reader. I realize it's supposed to be cross-platform, but for instance the menubar placement doesn't fit with what my program expects, and therefore I can't access menus reliably. This is a general OS X problem with Java apps. I realize Hero Designer is very popular around here, but it isn't working well for me at all.

 

This also doesn't address the accessibility issues in the Hero PDFs themselves. Is it at all possible to obtain Hero books in an alternate format?

 

Thanks much for your help.

[bigbywolfe]

You might need to message the company directly for this sort of request.  To my knowledge there is not another format readily available, but I could be wrong or they might have a relatively quick fix.

[TheQuestionMan]

Request someone copy and paste for you. 

 

Problem solved.

 

QM

[Tasha]

There's a Hero Designer container for Mac OS floating around the net somewhere. Using that should put the menus where expected. I don't use my mac as much as I used to or I would just upload the container. How it works, is that it appears to be an app. You right click it to open it up like a folder. Place the .jar file in the correct place within the container, and the program starts up and works like a mac. I dunno if it still works with the Oracle Javas or if it was something that only works with the Apple versions of Java. I don't have a new enough mac to test it.

[BlindGuyNW]

Request someone copy and paste for you. 

 

Problem solved.

 

QM

 

Not that easy, I'm afraid. Tables in particular often don't seem to copy and paste well out of PDF files. I don't just need the formatting to look right, I need some kind of markup to tell the program, "Hey, this is a table." I'll definitely look into contacting the company.

[BlindGuyNW]

There's a Hero Designer container for Mac OS floating around the net somewhere. Using that should put the menus where expected. I don't use my mac as much as I used to or I would just upload the container. How it works, is that it appears to be an app. You right click it to open it up like a folder. Place the .jar file in the correct place within the container, and the program starts up and works like a mac. I dunno if it still works with the Oracle Javas or if it was something that only works with the Apple versions of Java. I don't have a new enough mac to test it.

 

Thanks, this sounds like a good thing for me to Google. It probably won't solve some of the more general access issues, but a menu is a good starting place.

[PaycheckHero]

Not that easy, I'm afraid. Tables in particular often don't seem to copy and paste well out of PDF files. I don't just need the formatting to look right, I need some kind of markup to tell the program, "Hey, this is a table." I'll definitely look into contacting the company.

Most of my hero writeups were done with pure pencil and paper, so Hero Designer is *not* a necessity. It's a convenience, and while it is a very nice convenience it is one you can do without if you are OK with basic numbers and 4th grade math.

 

The fundamental problem here is going to be that the company isn't big enough to have much ability to customize for particular needs, and since we're talking about copyrighted material and code it isn't very amenable to a community solution. Unfortunate. However, I would think that there is a MS Word character sheet floating around somewhere on the web. If not, a character sheet should be quite easy to produce (and could be written as a community project and then put on the hero website), which would take care of one of your issues. Probably the least important one, but it's better than nothing.

 

That said, a spreadsheet would be better because it can do at least a little of the math for you and give you a little of the convenience of Hero Designer. It could be done in whatever the Mac's native spreadsheet is, but I'd think LibreOffice would make more sense as it's available on multiple platforms and might help more people. That's what I'd recommend--a libreoffice calc spreadsheet, put on the hero website when it's debugged so it's easy for others to find.

[Sean Waters]

I know nothing of these things, but welcome to the boards anyway.  Any problems with Hero can usually find an answer here.  There is no such thing as a stupid question...unless, apparently, i ask it

 

Sean