Accessibility with screen reader for blind gamer

AlanTuring

Hi everyone, I am an Italian blind gamer, I am writing to you from Turin.
Fortunately, the world of gaming is also becoming accessible and inclusive, or at least we are trying.
But for RetroPie, where are we with support for screen readers, used by blind people?
I refer to reading aloud the graphical interface of the Retro Pie system.
Reading menus, options, dialogs, user messages, game settings, etc.
In the linux world there is a screen reader called Orca and a speech synthesis called espeak.
The screen reader speaks because it uses speech synthesis (TTS).
Both software are to be installed and configured.

Also, as far as game screens are concerned, a screen recognition feature can be configured in the Retro Arch project.
https://www.libretro.com/index.php/upcoming-retroarch-1-7-8-ai-service-machine-translation-ocr-text-to-speech/

Thank you very much.

mitu

@AlanTuring said in Accessibility with screen reader for blind gamer:

But for RetroPie, where are we with support for screen readers, used by blind people?

We don't have any explicit support for accessibility in the programs that are distributed by RetroPie.

I don't think the default front-end used by RetroPie (EmulationStation) can be deemed accessible since the main rendering method is via OpenGL textures. Maybe the Pegasus frontend would have better accessibility, since it's based on Qt ?
RetroPie setup scripts used to install/configure emulators are text based menus on dialog (https://invisible-island.net/dialog/dialog.html). I guess this part is better at accessibility since it's just text. If Orca is able to recognize text in a terminal window, it should work with RetroPie-Setup
The emulators/ports used to run games they're just bundled by RetroPie, so you'd have to see for each one what's their status. Note that most of the emulation options in RetroPie are based on RetroArch, so if RetroArch has good accessibility, then running games would benefit from it.

AlanTuring

@mitu Thanks for this first reply.
I personally prepared the sd memory with RetroPie from a windows pc equipped with screen reader NVDA.

I then configured the psw of my wifi network and I connect to the RetroPie distro directly via ssh, this is useful for loading the roms or possibly configure other settings.

At this point, the blind person should be able to configure RetroPie's accessibility features.
I imagine that via ssh you can connect to the Raspberry, which in the meantime has been started and connected to the network.
We should therefore prepare a script or automatic procedure for the configuration of Orca and espeak.
Of course, the RetroPie GUI needs to be manageable by the screen reader.

Screen readers can read everything textual, they cannot read what is rendered.

mitu

@AlanTuring said in Accessibility with screen reader for blind gamer:

We should therefore prepare a script or automatic procedure for the configuration of Orca and espeak.

RetroPie doesn't use a desktop environment on a Pi, so I don't know if Orca would work in a default Pi installation. I think Orca is present in a Debian distribution, so it can be installed via in RetroPie also with apt (sudo apt install orca) - but it won't help operating the default front-end (EmulationStation).

My suggestion would be to try out RetroPie - or rather the RetroPie components: the emulators and front-end - in a desktop environment before trying to go further. You can start with RetroArch installed on a desktop enabled RaspiOS installation (from the Raspberry Pi site) and see if it really works with Orca/ESpeak to run games.