Could it be possible for a blind user to play Visual Novels?

I confess to not knowing much about the medium as I can't look at screen shots or the like because I have extremely low vision. But seeing how Visual Novels are something of a Spiritual Successor of Choose your Own Adventure and Interactive fiction, it's got me curious. Basically, the main point of the interface is reading texts and choosing your options, music and some animations aside. Which is something a good summary can get past anyway. I can use a screen reader to read text and capture a still of a screen and read the viewable text as a text document, so I think I could get around the limitations. To make an end to my supposition, could any troper let me know if I'm on to something here, or is it just something a visually impaired gamer can't work with.

Thanks in advance.

If you can get through all of the guide stuff, I think Interactive Text Hooker can help you out. Basically, it automatically captures text from a visual novel as you're reading, pasting it into a dialog box. That should make the idea you're going for work pretty well; ITH is usually used for auto-translating Japanese visual novels in lieu of a translation, and it's a lot easier to use than the old Anime Game Text Hooker.

In particular, if anyone knows how to play Katawa Shoujo, I'd really appreciate it.

I've tried AGTH once, though I don't remember exactly how it worked. I do remember that it sometimes had problems with choices as the text in those came from a different output stream than the normal text. No idea if that's also an issue with ITH.

But otherwise I found it relatively easy to use. IIRC, you opened it with a command line so it linked properly with the game, and then selected one of many output streams you wanted, and that was basically it, translation aside. You might need to do some stuff with the text reader, since I don't know how that works. There was a function to auto-paste the text to the clipboard, which could then be used for automatic translations. I'd imagine the text reader can be used in a similar way.

I do recall a similar anecdote. Back when I was playing Achaea, one player turned out to be blind. Naturally, people on the forums started to question why he played Achaea, of all games, since it's a text-based MUD. But then, what else would he play? A Visual Novel should be fine, as long as you manage to navigate the interface.

edited 29th Dec '12 5:26:59 PM by AnotherDuck

Voice-assisted version of Ace Attorney would be ridiculously brilliant.

They've already begun doing voicing for important lines in Ace Attorney (and even more in vs Professor Layton), so I can see them eventually going to full voicing

edited 7th Apr '16 6:26:37 AM by Enlong

I couldn't get AGTH or ITH to work with Katawa Shoujo. =/ Apparently Ren'py do things differently, so these text hookers don't work with them. I am looking for a workaround atm.

These programs might work for different games, though. Is there any other game you are interested, darkabomination? If they are easy to get I might be able to test them out.

EDIT:Wait a minute, this is a ridiculously old thread!

edited 10th Apr '16 4:31:43 PM by Heatth

In case anyone was wondering, I actually created a custom, text-only port of KS that is more accessible. If you want the link, feel free to PM me.

Unfortunately, that is time intensive and not at all a general solution.

edited 30th May '16 2:57:01 PM by storyyeller

I think it could be possible to play a visual novel if you're blind. Maybe if someone were there with you reading the text, I think it could be possible.

That's trivially true and impractical. The real issue is how to make V Ns accessible.