Blind Shadowrun, Any blind players or GMs out there? Options

[cx2]

I'm blind and considering getting into SR4, but was wondering if anyone here had any experience to offer on the matter. How do you keep track of characters, on computer or notetaker? Anything like that.

I know there are blind people who play D&D, and I've even found references to Games Workshop's Inquisitor being played by the blind... and a blind GM. I know roleplay games are played by others with sight loss, but Shadowrun has the right feel for me. I prefer the prospect of shorter missions compared to D&D's longer campaigns, at least to begin with, and don't like the ultra goth setting of Games Workshop's Inquisitor.

Thanks, cx2

By the way, this is *NOT* a wind up

[Ancient History]

I haven't run into many players with visual impairment on the level it affects play, but I suppose the biggest challenge would be reading material from the sourcebooks. You should be able to export any SR4 .pdf to a Braille embosser or to a suitable text format to be read back over audio.

[cx2]

Ancient History:
Thanks. I'm not so concerned about that. Adobe has made big changes to Acrobat Reader, especially version 7. Along with my screen reader I can probably handle it, or as you suggest export it to text if the new processing system in reader 7 doesn't get the order right.

I'm also lucky enough to have a suitable PDA, unfortunately which is not PDF friendly, but the text conversion will cover that easily.

You obviously know a few things about the specialist technology, grin. Very reassuring that my first message wasn't a WTF ;)

My current instincts on character record sheets are tokeep them electronic and either communicate them by email, or carry them on a pen drive. Pen drive could be fun; from my reading on the fiction sections it sounds like a credstick ;)

[Fortune]

Why would you think anyone here would automatically say 'WTF'?

[PBTHHHHT]

WTF?
I kid, I kid. :silly:

[Aku]

[Fortune]

As far as forums go, Dumpshock is pretty tame in comparison to most I have seen.

[blakkie]

One issue with 4th edition could be the number of dice. You can expect an average of 20% more dice rolled, although the number of rolls you make is likely to be noticable lower.

Even with pipped six siders, reading like inverted braille, i can see it being cumbersome to roll and determine the number of hits and whether a Glitch occured. I've played D&D with a blind person. Totally blind including seeing eye dog. I believe he used a enlarged 10 sider with tactile sides to determine numbers by touch and and a second die to determine high/low. I don't remember offhand what he used for d6, but the nice thing about D&D is that you rarely have more than a couple dice on the table at once.

Perhaps a dice roller program with voice audio capabilities running on the laptop might make things a lot easir?

[Shanshu Freeman]

Original poster: "Wind up?"

[TheNarrator]

[cx2]

Sorry for any offence by expecting WTF, I am just aware that blind people popping up on internet forums tends to confuse a lot of peo[ple. Most people aren't aware blind people can use computers, obviously roleplayers have had more contact than that.

There's already a dice roller program, www.gmagames.com, it even lets you roll multiple dice at once. I'm mostly worried about keeping track of stats and the like.

As for my slang, I apologise for any confusion. Wind up is still in common use here in Britain, I didn't know it was out of use elsewhere. Alright, maybe not in common use, but often enough that everyone understands it over here.

Thanks for the responses anyway. An awful lot of responses in such a short time, grin.

[Fortune]

[NightRain]

How accessable to you are regular windows GUI programs like excel spreadsheets, access databases etc? There are a few character sheets made in excel out there that might do the job if you can manage your way around them...

[Shadow_Prophet]

[Nyxll]

I have a few questions for you cx2...

How do you record and retrieve notes and data normally? Ie, I can leave a note on the fridge to remind me of something, and I often write reminders on my hand. How do you record that so that you can retrieve the data on your own?

Do you have a laptop or other computers available at the gaming table?

Do you have headphones so that way the others cannot hear your notes and stats you have read back to you?

How easy it is to use programs like excel, or the character generator that mcmackie wrote?

:edit:
I just checked out the gma dice roller.... although it is great that it happens to have a speech roller.... it adds all of the dice up together, which is no good for shadowrun. In shadowrun you need to count the number of successes for a target number... ie ... roll 5 d 6 with a target number of 5. if you roll 5 or 6 you have a success.

[cx2]

Programs which use standard Windows controls are usually quite accessible. I'll have a look at some of the Excel sheets, thanks for the suggestion. I don't know if it will work if they use the form controls though, I'll certainly try.

Most of the time if it looks like a standard Windows dialog, or something you could write with the standard controls in Visual Basic, it will work fine. Excel works fairly well because of special scripts, the only other issue being that it is possible to get "lost" in the sheet.

Again, thanks for so many responses

Edit:Nyxll,
Just spottefd your post. Normally I either use notepad on my PC, it takes less system resources than Word, or I use a pocket PC. The pocket pc is a bit bigger than normal ones for a good size keyboard, but I can attach a single earphone - the sort which only goes in one ear. I haven't played as yet though, I don't know if there's a group nearby or if I might be able to put something together online through people I know but aren't geographically convenient.

Thanks for checking out the GMA dice roller. I happen to know though that if you press up or down it goes through the individual dice rolls, getting around that particular issue. I know there's an online D&D group which uses it, I tried contacting one of them for general hints but haven't had a response (he had a D&D page, and I asked if he'd consider putting up roleplay game tips).

[Nyxll]

cx2, I noticed when using the dice roller that you can scroll through them and also mark a die for rerolling, the problem is at the end, it keeps repeating the last die, instead of telling you it is at the end. Also there is only an increasing sort instead of a decrease.

There are some other dice roller utilities, which might not be as user friendly for you, but have some other functionality advances which could work.

The onmihedron is one I keep plugging and really like.
www.divnull.com/omnihedron

Please keep us informed with utlities and tools you find and how they work for you.

Can your PDA work with pdf forms? I heard there are some really great things that
can be programmed into those for the visually impaired.

[cx2]

Thanks, I'll keep you posted and give that util a try.

Unfortunately the Pocket PC Acrobat Reader won't even install on my PDA, and even if it did I suspect it lacks the extra features in Acrobat Reader on the PC. It is possible to "structure" a PDF so they read in the right order, but most companies don't even know this exists and so don't use it. Before Acrobat Reader 7 PDFs were like the web - they could work great if the designer knew blind people would be using it and took a minute or two to make things work, but since most people aren't aware of this they were usually very awkward. With version 7 the processing options are a good step forward, but still aren't perfect (and aren't likely to be if the designer didn't structure the PDF).

I'm currently in the middle of Paypal sign up, confirming bank account, which will take about a week. Then it's another week to get the money into the Paypal system before I can buy it. I don't have any credit cards, just debit and they're not accepted in the US so this is my only option. I'm going for Battlecorps anyway because the other company puts your name on the PDF. I don't object to this for protection, I just don't need any more clutter in the PDF.

I have tried reader 7 with some of Games Workshop's free PDF rulebooks for their non-core games, it works well with a couple of exceptions. Complex tables sometimes cause problems, and they have a habit of trying to keep the rules "tidy" by putting notes in boxes in the margins of the page. I certainly hope Fan Pro haven't put lots of margin notes in Shadowrun, even with reader 7's processing it still gets in the way.

[blakkie]

Sorry to say there are actually a lot of rules in sidebars. Some are optional rules, some are explaining terminology, some are giving overviews. Given how selecting text with the mouse works, I am guessing the text for these side bars is located in the file after the main text on the page.

Also i bet you'll be entirely annoyed by the tab at the side of most pages that gives the name of the chapter you are in. It is the name of the chapter followed by a trail of periods. Most of the tab is graphics, but the name and periods are actual text characters. :(

[Nyxll]

So you are able to have a pc available for gaming ... that is awesome, I guess it would help with the dice rolling, would you store the character sheets in there?

Does the PDA version support the excel character sheet? With all of the character generators, there should be a portable format that we can use to open on your pc at least. It is possible to use HTML and XML stylesheets to format the data into something that your reader could pick up easily.

And should be very efficient. I have some experience working with labels and formatting things for readers, and would actually love to use this more and get better feedback to better learn how to design things for assisted reading.

What would the rest of the group use? Are all other members of your group blind as well?

[lml]

I am also blind, and have played Shadowrun. I've only played twice so far, but I'll give you what help I can. As of now, I've had someone help fill out my info on a character sheet, and keep track of it during the game. Although, I've found that to be something that is not ideal for me. Next time I play, I plan to use a note-taker to keep track of my character. I'm not going to use a computer, because I don't have a laptop. And since the note-takers most likely don't support the format of an actual character sheet, I intend to take the information off of one, and input it into my note-taker. As far as everything else goes, it has worked fine, and I don't see any issues that could come up. Hope that he
lps.

[Critias]

[nezumi]

You tried playing online? There are several sites with lots of shadowrun games, and those should be just fine for you.

(Is it in bad taste to joke that he'll get more out of SR4 than the rest of us, since he doesn't have to look at the cover art every time he gets out the book?)

[PBTHHHHT]

[cx2]

I'll certainly give the Excel sheets a shot, with both Excel 2000 on PC and Pocket Excel. No guarantees with the latter though. Thanks for all the help.

I've tried Omnihedron, the one issue is that the buttons aren't labelled for text. My software has an automatic graphics labeller, but this relies on tooltip text. I've sent a message to the designers asking if they could include tooltip text.

I'm thinking online would probably work pretty well. I'll have to see what I can dig up.

As for the art, lol, I really couldn't comment not knowing what it's like. I'm sure my imagination can think of something worse though... Ugly female runner looking like she's about to give birth? Or else come to some sort of "sticky" situation? grin.

Thanks for all the help, I'll definitely keep everyone posted.

Edit:
I've tried the chargen sheet in Blackie's sig, seems not to be too difficult. I've found a few areas about the place. I'll have to check it out more when I get the "BBB" as people seem to call it for some reason.

Thanks for the comments about the layout of the document as well. I'll have to do a bit of copying and pasting from the sounds of things. Still I was expecting to need some editing, I have a package designed for OCR that can create bookmarks and output the file as an HTML document with the bookmarks as a table of contents using "jump to" style links and I wanted the easier navigation.