marius

I am a fully blind person and I occasionally record playing video games with my friends.

We will be playing and streaming Larian's upcoming RPG, Baldur's Gate 3 when it gets released, and I wanted to invite you all to join us. The setup includes me (fully blind) and my friend Vincent (fully sighted), who will be controlling the game, and giving descriptions of visuals. This should make it possible to follow both the story of BG3 as well as the more mechanical parts by listening only.

I thought this might be interesting to some of you. I myself played Baldur's Gate 1 as a kid when I could still see, and I'm super excited to be able to experience it now roughly 20 years later and see where the saga is going.

We will go live when the steam version can be downloaded, which, as far as we know, is on August 3rd, 8 AM Pacific time (5PM for GMT+2).

The twitch channel can be found here:

https://www.twitch.tv/hemakesmeplay_live

Actual play might start a little later, as we will have to download and install the game first. It also remains to be seen how smooth the release goes, since BG3 is a highly anticipated game. So maybe we will just look at steam error reports together - who knows.

Videos of the streams will afterwards be posted to the youtube channel, probably after a brief delay for light editing.

https://www.youtube.com/@hemakesmeplay

Thanks, hope to see you there!

I'll start.

My favorite performance is Jaheira, voiced by Heidi Shannon. That unique, eastern-european accent saying "Yes, oh omnipresent authority figure" is unbelievably iconic and also perfectly captures BG's slightly irreverent tone. It's emblematic of the series as a whole, and probably influenced a lot of fantasy RPG voice acting that came after it. For example, I am convinced that Laura Bailey's character Jester in the second season of critical roll was based on Shannon's performance, though admittedly the personalities of Jester and Jaheira are quite different.

And you know what's surprising? Heidi Shannon didn't go on to do anything else. Nothing that I'm aware of anyway. And I have no idea why. Makes me wonder if the voice actors back then knew that they were working on a very influential title, or if they just recorded those 2 minutes or so of voicework for that weird little game company just to pay some bills.

Hey I thought you guys might enjoy watching me and my friend try to play Baldur's Gate 1 enhanced iron man style, i.e. without ever reloading, except when we take a break and resume. So if our main character dies in a fight, we will delete the savegame and that run will be over. Likewise, if Imoen gets shredded by an unlucky crit, well we're just going to have to live with that.

We chose mage for our first run. Playing the enhanced edition so many years later after vanilla BG feels different. It's very strange to summon a familiar in candlekeep.

Anyways we will surely die. If anyone has advice for no reload runs, we would be glad to hear it. We are aware of some basic tricks like evermemory at friendly arm, and alginon's cloak and so on, but we also have some glaring holes in our knowledge of the game. Especially the parts in cloakwood with the bandits and the mine. I have like no recollection of that part, but I remember it being hard. We also know nothing about the EE npc quests, like dorn etc. Tips for these things would be very much appreciated.

So apparently http://rblind.com has been created as a lemmy instance by some refugees from r/blind, which is awesome. There is a lot of discussion already in the main sublemmy, so

[email protected]

or, alternatively

http://rblind.com/c/main

might be interesting to anyone who reads this. I think it's very exciting to have a blindness focused instance, so we can have subcommunities within the context of blindness.

I also want to mention that I originally created [email protected] because I wanted to discuss some screen reader issues, and there was no other place at the time. If the r/blind mods are interested in having mod access to this community, just give me a heads up.

So by default the feed on the home page auto-updates, suddenly making new posts appear. This causes various issues with screen readers. Here's a post explaining how to turn it off with a workaround.

https://lemmy.world/post/390268

So to tl;dr, what I had to do is: On the home page, (e.g. http://lemmy.world), select any of the sorting options (e.g. subscribed only) by tabbing into the radio select item and hitting space. This then changes the address bar to something like

https://lemmy.world/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/Subscribed/sort/Active/page/1

Changing the 1 at the end to a 0 will bring up the same page, without auto updating. I also found that honestly the URL is a more convenient interface to the sorting options, at least for me.

Hope anyone finds this useful.

So I just came over from reddit and I figure this would be a good place to accumulate some experiences with screen reader navigation on lemmy.

I myself use orca on arch linux. The site seems usable so far. Posts are level 5 headings, and though I wish they would have used the paragraph tag for navigating posts with p, I can use o to jump to large objects, which will read out posts.

The biggest problem I encountered so far was during community creation, where the language multi-select list did not indicate which languages were selected/deselected. Still trying to figure this out atm, as the edit community button also doesn't seem to be selectable with keyboard. This problem seems to repeat when making a post.

Selecting a community when making a post is also a little tricky. I was able to do it by clicking (with numpad) on 'Community', which opens a combo box with a list of many communities. I then hat to hit 'tab', orca will say 'Combo box collapsed', and I could type in 'blind'. The list of selections then changed to a list with only 2 options, this one and one other. Selecting 'blind' with the arrow keys and hitting enter selected the 'blind' community successfully. I think this could be much improved.

Anyways, I'll probably edit the post when more comes up. Would be glad to hear other's experiences. Both problems and workarounds.