Ross Minor

Before You Read

You can watch the video version of my review here. I and other blind Diablo players have created a Discord and a Wiki to help those who want to give the game a go. If you would like to send Blizzard accessibility feedback, you can do so at accessibility@blizzard.com.

Background

Diablo has historically been one of those games blind gamers have gravitated toward for many reasons. First being its top down isometric perspective, which makes it easier for us to navigate: up moves up, left moves left, and so on. Next being the combat in conjunction with good sound design made blind players perfectly capable of taking on Hell alongside their sighted counterparts. Lastly, menus weren’t the most complicated when adjusting specific skills, so for some players they were manageable.

Of course, the design and features of Diablo alone only makes the games somewhat playable, but blind gamers still struggled with  fundamental tasks like reading and organizing gear, navigating complicated dungeons, and reading text on the screen. This didn’t stop blind gamers from coming up with creative workarounds, such as an NVDA addon that is meant for reading English subtitles in foreign media, that also proved to be handy reading text that appears in Diablo while playing. In my opinion, what Diablo really needs is text to speech that reads gear, notifications, menus, etc, as well as some form of navigation assistance to help blind gamers navigate dungeons more easily, instead of tediously and meticulously combing a dungeon until the correct path is found. There have been many outstanding accessibility accomplishments in Diablo IV, and some decisions that leave me scratching my head, so without further ado , here is my Diablo IV blind accessibility review!On startup, I had no feedback as to what was on the screen, just music in the background. Upon using OCR, I learned that it was a brightness adjustment screen. After skipping past that, I again, did not know what was on the screen, and a quick OCR revealed that it was the screen reader settings menu. Right away, I strongly encourage any developers that have games with TTS to let the player know how to turn it on, because otherwise, how are we suppose to navigate to the correct setting? Thankfully, all I had to do was literally press A (Xbox controller) and the screen reader turned on immediately. From there, I was able to browse all of the accessibility options, and there are quite a few. I’ll break down the ones that help blind gamers, but I wanted to give a shoutout to the inclusion of customizable subtitles, toggling of motion blur, toggling of strobe lights, and button remapping, to name a few.

Startup

On startup, I had no feedback as to what was on the screen, just music in the background. Upon using OCR, I learned that it was a brightness adjustment screen. After skipping past that, I again, did not know what was on the screen, and a quick OCR revealed that it was the screen reader settings menu. Right away, I strongly encourage any developers that have games with TTS to let the player know how to turn it on, because otherwise, how are we suppose to navigate to the correct setting? Thankfully, all I had to do was literally press A (Xbox controller) and the screen reader turned on immediately. From there, I was able to browse all of the accessibility options, and there are quite a few. I’ll break down the ones that help blind gamers, but I wanted to give a shoutout to the inclusion of customizable subtitles, toggling of motion blur, toggling of strobe lights, and button remapping, to name a few.

Screen Reader

I’ll cut right to the chase, the screen reader in Diablo IV in a lot of ways is the most customizable and robust screen reader in a game to date. My praise for it cannot be understated and I don’t even know where to begin. I’ll break it down into a simple pros and cons list.

Pros

First, the TTS reads just about everything in the game: menus, gear and their stats, items and enemies in the overworld, notifications, and more. Next, the screen reader is highly customizable, snappy, and allows the user to change the volume, voice, speaking rate, and even what it reads to begin with. You can hear what it sounds like below.

That last part is huge because Diablo is a fast pace game, so being able to hear information that is most important helps ease the cognitive load from hearing a screen reader announce nonessential information. For example, the screen reader has the ability to read items that are on the ground, but again, sometimes you may not want to have every single item read. The screen reader in Diablo IV can filter out the reading of items below  a specific rarity. So if you’re looking for a specific piece of rare gear, you can have the screen reader only read high rarity gear. Not only that, you can filter which chat channels are read. Having this level of detail in the screen reader is game changing and Blizzard should be proud of what they accomplished. Being able to customize the finer details in a screen reader means better performance and efficiency from blind gamers that choose to play, especially in groups.

Even then, there’s another detail that I just have to talk about. At the very bottom of the button remapping settings, there are three optional button mappings: skip next TTS, clear all TTS, and skip line with screen reader. I’m not sure what they exactly do because when I tried assigning a button press to “clear all TTS”, I figured it would possibly mute whatever the screen reader is saying, but it didn’t appear to do anything. However, assigning a button to skip screen reader line, does exactly what it sounds like and works perfectly. So perhaps the TTS settings aren’t for the screen reader specifically?

Lastly, Diablo IV also has a setting labeled “^third-party screen reader”. Many of us were excited about this and assumed it meant that screen readers like NVDA or JAWS could hook into the game; so far, this Thas not been the case for me. When I turn on the setting, my TTS stays the same and doesn’t switch over to the synthesizer I use with NVDA. The only noticeable difference I hear is that the TTS gets a little louder, and settings like speech rate and volume, can no longer be adjusted in the game. With that in mind, I believe this setting is intended for those who just want to use the TTS settings they already have configured in Windows settings. This would make sense because other games like Gears of War 5 and As Dusk Falls also pull from Windows TTS settings. I could be wrong and would love any feedback in the comments about this, and of course I’ll update if I learn anything new. Still, I would call this a clear pro for the screen reader.

Update: It turns out that the third-party screen reader does work as we originally intended, but it was not working on launch with NVDA because the files to work with NVDA were not included. You can download the NVDA DLLs here and put them in the main directory of your Diablo IV game and everything should work from there. It apparently works perfectly fine with JAWS.

Cons

There are a few downsides to the screen reader and many weird bugs, but none that I would consider game breaking. First, the screen reader just outright does not read character customization, not even if you are a male or female character. I would really like game studios to begin considering this, because many blind people want to customize their characters for various reasons. Some people want their character to look like them, some people want to create a fictional character they may have in their head, and some people want to design with a particular aesthetic in mind. At the end of the day, Diablo IV is a Role-Playing Game, and blind gamers want to be able to be part of the RPG experience in all of its aspects that inspire creativity and imagination for others to experience.

Other things the screen reader does not read include menu options with multiple choices. Instead of sliding left or right between options, you have to select the option, then move up and down. The options when you move up and down are not read, but once selected, the option you selected will be read. It’s a little clunky, but still technically usable. I also noticed a bug with the screen reader where, when first setting up the game, it did not read things like buttons being toggled on or off, or sliders and what level they were at. However, once you actually begin playing the game, the screen reader reads all of these things. So if you notice this when setting up your game, just keep that in mind. Another weird bug is that many times when viewing what you’re wearing, the screen reader won’t actually read what you’re wearing, unless you start from your head and move down. Still yet, another bug that I hope will get fixed is that the screen reader does not read what buttons are assigned to what in button remapping settings, which is incredibly important, given the remapping options for screen readers. Lastly, when turning on 3^rd-party screen reader, I noticed the screen reader is slightly delayed, compared to the built in screen reader. This is why I’ve decided to stick with the built in screen reader. Hopefully Blizzard fixes these issues in a future update.

Combat

Now let’s talk about combat! The combat itself is more or less what we’ve come to expect from a Diablo game, but the combat accessibility takes it a step further. Remember when I said that the screen reader reads enemies, well it’s a bit more precise than that. Whenever you lock onto an enemy, a feature I already love that Diablo has, the screen reader will read the name of the enemy. This is so useful because it leaves no doubt in the blind gamer’s mind that they are pointing in the right direction. Another aspect that is invaluable is that since it reads the different types of enemies, such as “skeleton” or “skeletal archer”, , many times it allows you to strategically pick off the ranged attackers first and then deal with the melee attackers. This type of combat strategizing hasn’t really been possible in Diablo until now. This could also result in blind players being more effective in groups as well. There is also the ability to assign different colored outlines for enemies, items, etc. My only immediate ask in terms of combat accessibility is having some sort of sound or TTS to indicate the health of the targeted enemy. There have been a couple encounters where I began to doubt I was doing any damage because I couldn’t see the enemy health. Speaking of health, whenever your character has low health, a distinct heartbeat sound will play, letting you know to heal soon and the addition of such a simple sound effect can make a world of difference when in a battle. Listen to it below:

Navigation

I wanted to talk about navigation last because what I talked about earlier gives context to my thoughts on traversing the world of Sanctuary. To start, Diablo IV has no navigation assistance at all, strictly speaking, but there are a few methods that help with navigation. First, there is a setting called “play audio on targeting objects”, and what it does is play a sound in stereo whenever a new item is focused.  This helps immensely to find items and is one of my favorite features of the game, but if you make a point to destroy ambient loot that hangs out in the overworld, you are able to tell which areas you have been to or not. Next, the screen reader, amongst its many features, also reads new zone announcements. Being able to know when you have changed zones is invaluable because it eliminates a lot of guesswork as to whether or not you’re making progress or heading in the right direction. Finally, Diablo IV has a map that allows you to fast travel. I’m excited to report that the screen reader reads when you hover over a location, as well as let you know when you are hovering over an unknown areas. It would be nice if the cursor snaps from location to location, but the cursor does make a dragging noise when it moves, which helps to know when the cursor is moving or if it has hit a border.

Now, it’s time for me to get on my soap box. I’m not a game developer, but I would imagine it would be a complex undertaking to design a navigation system that would be able to dynamically navigate a blind gamer through a world independently, especially in games without a fixed camera perspective. In no way was I expecting a fully functional navigation system to be present in this game, but I am surprised that there appears to be so little effort into navigation for gamers who are blind, especially given the level of attention to detail with the screen reader. For example, when tracking a quest, there is a visual marker that points in the direction you need to go; it would have been a no brainer to accompany that visual indicator with a stereo sound effect in the direction the player needs to go. A feature like this would have made navigating the overworld a much easier process. Then there are dungeons. While the screen reader reads when you are in front of a door, an extremely useful feature, it doesn’t tell you how to get to the door or play a sound indicating where it is. This makes exploring dungeons fun because you can tell you’re making progress when you open a door, but you cannot tell when you are beginning to walk in circles because the screen reader does not read when you have passed through a door you have already opened. Again, in no way was I expecting a fully-fledged navigation system, but some cleverly placed sound cues  could go a long way in making this large world more navigable. The Diablo IV developers already demonstrated their creative, intuitive, and intentional design with the screen reader, but that just doesn’t appear to be the case with navigation. I will say though, the narration of doors and even a specific point where I had to press “B” to duck, is very welcome and something I hope gets expanded upon a little more.

Other Findings

I quickly wanted to squeeze this in, but the skill tree menu is unfortunately cursor based. The screen reader still reads the skill when hovereing over it, but it makes learning the skill tree extremely tedious. I said it before and I’ll say it again, with all the detail put into the screen reader, I’m very surprised the skill tree is cursor based.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Diablo IV, in terms of accessibility, is a huge upgrade compared to Diablo III with its sound design and screen reader. I cannot emphasize enough how happy I am with how the screen reader turned out. Of course, it could always be improved, but that’s simply the case for accessibility in general and I hope Blizzard continues to improve upon it in this game, as well as future games. Navigation assistance leaves much to be desired and could benefit from something as complex as an entire navigation system, all the way down to simple sound cues for where to go, doorways, etc.

So is this game accessible to blind gamers? It is my opinion that Diablo IV is playable, but not completely accessible for gamers who are blind. Theoretically, with enough time, getting from one place to another, dungeon to dungeon, can be done, it will most likely be very tedious. Playing with a sighted friend or group of friends will be the most accessible experience. All in all, I would give Diablo IV a 7.5 / 10  for its blind accessibility. Thank you to Blizzard for providing the code and you can click here to contact me regarding my consultancy. You can also click here to send Blizzard accessibility feedback.

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