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

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.

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

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

WTF?
I kid, I kid.

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

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?

Original poster: "Wind up?"

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.

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...

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?)

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.

I don't know if Autarkis originally intended for that Excel file to also be used to maintain a character while it is played, but when I set out to improve it I did not have that as a design goal. I intended to use it to create a character, print the character off, and then maintain the character in pencil. I'm a luddite that way.

So you might find it doesn't work as well for ongoing use.

Also it uses conditional formating for a number of warnings. For example when you have exceeded your BP limit the total used BP turns from black on white text to red on yellow text. That isn't too bad as you can just go up to the total BP used.

But on the Cyberware-Bioware tab it uses custom cell formating to let the user visually know whether or not a rating is expected. If the ware does not have different ratings the rating column changes to a hatched background and any text in it turns red to indicate an error. If you don't remove the rating the cost of the cyberware will be multiplied by the rating.

BTW I am curious if your software allows you to see the contents of the dropdown lists such in the B1 cell of the first sheet where you select the metahuman type?

Thanks for the heads up. It turns out the drop downs work, only it doesn't let me know where they are... so I have to know it's a drop down before I can use it.

I think I'd better give a few other set ups floating around a try.

cx2-- this discussion is prompting me to ask a question. I'm writing (slowly) a program in flash for vehicle design, and i'll admit i'm somewhat of a newb flash person, so i was wondering a few things...

1) is that a utility that you, as someone visually impaired, would use (ignoring the fact of whether or not you actually PLAY riggers, but more along the lines of "ok, i dont have to plod through the books, as much to crunch numbers)

2)Are you aware if or of anything that i could do to make the flash program more user friendly, still with in the lines of this discussion?

I'm sure I'd happily use such a vehicle editor. I noticed your thread before, my response to Macromedia was "EEK!".

Not to intimidate you. It is possible to make macromedia flash usable, but I don't know how easy it is. Try
www.macromedia.com/accessibility

I believe they have resources there, but if it's too complex I understand. I know nothing of flash, save memories of previously using it visually and my current mixed experiences. Hope this helps.

Just in case you're wondering the generic term for "usable by persons with disabilities or other difficulties" is "accessibility". A lot of companies have sections on it, with the most widely unknown being Adobe and Macromedia much to the blind community's frustration. Not ranting, but if you need info on a particular development tool's usefulness search their main site for "accessibility" and if there's anything it will come up.

Edit:
I suspect even for non-riggers vehicles have some relevance. I can't imagine a shadowrunner asking their team to come by their place and pick them up, this could easily be risky later. Knowing where you live should really be priviliged information. I don't think walking to a rendezvous would work very well either because it's time consuming, reduces the practical distance you can move from your residence and I suspect is quite dangerous. I'd guess at least basic bike or car driving would be a must for most runners.

Thanks for the info on games here at DS, and the origins of BBB. Much appreciated.

I admit on the vehicle front I was being a little too generalised. I think my style would certainly be to have some way of getting about independently, but it's true that this isn't always the case.

No problem.

To be fair, you did pick up on the acronym's meaning much faster than most.

While it's true i think pretty much EVERYONE should have some sort of vehicle (even if it's just a foldable scoot to get to a randevous quicker, the need for an actual creator for those people is a bit sketchy.

It's similar to real life. There are people (like me) who use a vehicle to get from point a to point b. For these people, even the customization of a Scion is of questionable value. THen, there are people that.. "take it to the next level". For these people, if they're not the ones doing the work themselves by hand, then the mods are of questionable value. I'm sure, to these people, someone in a Scion looks like a poser.

Adam has created a new sticky post at the top of the Community Projects board for people to announce what is out there. Also if you look down through that board you'll find threads for a couple besides the one i've worked on.

This thread is proving very informative for me. I have a genetically acquired condition called "macular degeneration." My great-grandfather had it, and was blind by the time he turned 20. I can tell my vision is getting worse, but I haven't been able to afford a visit to the optometrist to see if it's still correctable, or if I'm just going to lose my sight one day soon.

It won't be easy, if I do. I rely on my computer so much for my daily entertainment and work... I'm not sure how I'd adjust.

Hi cx2,

Though it's not my job, I do a bit of web programming, and I'm interested in creating accessible pages through cascading style sheets. I might be interested in doing an on-line shadowrun character sheet that I can make accessible as an experiment. I could even try doing something like a categorized keystroke menu that lets you navigate to a particular stat more easily. Right now, I'm not sure what all is possible as I've never attempted anything like that before.

Let me know if this is something you're interested in:
thoffen [at] gmail.com

I have some experience in this field.

I found that the aDesigner from ibm was a huge help in making pages accessible,
and showing me shortcomings with my site layout for people with low vision.

Little things like labels and id tags really help a great deal.

I also try and use the Page reader bar, to see if a page will read as it should.

Another trick is to turn off pictures and see if the pages still make sense. Alternatively it's a small matter to pull down a demo version of the software and try using the page with that. If you're testing the speech only access with a demo version of the software it's a good idea to turn off your monitor once the demo's up and running, and it sounds obvious but for speech only don't use the mouse. Make sure pictures use the "alt" attribute, especially link graphics.

Low vision's a different matter altogether, things to watch for are distance between links, positioning of items (so users don't get lost or miss things), and contrast. No red on green or vice versa, in case someone has difficulty with colours. These are common examples of things to watch for really.

Hmm.. ko. a few thoughts...
i bit of tech out there you might want to look at. the OQO is a super small computer. I'v been wanting one to strap to my left arm. I play adepts, but i'm a chip head at heart lol. It might be able to bring the abilities you need to the table. voiced dice rolls ect...

as for your chaircter sheet. I think I'd print up a sheet with all the brail lables on it and then maby short hand the stats.

something like this

body { 1111 } which would be body 4

i think you can get you skills, pools, and atributes like this.
i don't know though. I'm probly not saying anything too usefull. good luck.

Thanks for the suggestion, I already have a portable device though. It has speech out of the box in all apps, called a "Pac Mate" with the page at www.freedomscientific.com, under hardware>Pac Mate>QX400 model.

I appreciate the suggestion about Braille, unfortunately I'm in odd circumstances. I only started losing my sight around 16, and had virtually none by the time I was 19. This means I went to a normal school, where I didn't learn Braille. So far I've been told learning Braille during higher ed courses is a bad idea because of the time required, but I'll bear it in mind. I hope to learn Braille at some point anyway, but then there's the cost of the "embosser", and the noise resulting from it. Think a dot matrix but a dozen or two times louder and you're pretty close. I can imagine the fun if I ever tried to GM...

"I'm just going to run this off in Braille," GM says and departs...
Strange sound from the next room
"Everybody down!!!"
GM returns and looks puzzled when he falls over the players sprawled all over the floor

brail is not all to hard to learn. i was taught some a few years ago. i've forgotten most of it though, but i can still read elevators!

At any rate. I'm assuming you voice emulate all you text. you can order a .pdf version of the rule book off http://www.drivethrurpg.com/catalog/index....p?cPath=205_206
try this. get the comp to read out the text from the book. get a double male audio jack. plug your speaker into your mic. record the chapter in .mp3 format. now you can listen to them at you leisure with an mp3 player. your going to have to learn the rules better than most because spot reference will be harder, but that's not a bad thing.

dice rolling should be not big deal.

keeping up with you character will be the big trick.
I think Access will be your friend there. you can attach sound files to it. it'll take a bit of work but you could make a nice database that is searchable for you character.

Regarding Braille, I was only going on what I had been told. The display is tricky, I'd rather start learning Braille without first and get one when I have some idea of it. Part of the reason is the cheapest one I've seen is £1500, and I can't affiord that at present. I can read moon, but I have no way of producing it.

Thaniks for the suggestion though, and you have encouraged me about how hard, or not, Braille is to learn.