marius

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF
 

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!

[–] marius 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's awesome. I originally played BG2 in german, which also had great voice acting, but I just relistened to irenicus voice lines on youtube, and it is actually quite different. The english performance feels almost shakespearean. It's really great. I also wasn't familiar with hogfather, guess that will go on my to-watch list.

 

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.

[–] marius 13 points 1 year ago

Wow thanks for posting. I wasn't aware of this. I guess I'm not the only one who thinks morrowind is the best elder scrolls game.

[–] marius 2 points 1 year ago

Yep. Those are really great ones. I use seeing AI pretty much every day to tell identically shaped cans of corn/beans/coconut milk apart, or sort through mail etc. Still waiting for the day where I have a need for be my eyes, but it's cool that it's an option.

[–] marius 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Nice! Thanks for posting this. Stuff like door detection sounds super interesting to me. It's great to see a big company like apple tackle such extremely specific accessibility problems. It remains to be seen how usable it actually is, but I will definitely try this stuff out. I guess it's an exciting time to be blind lol.

 

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.

[–] marius 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for making a community for this great game. I hope BG3 will inspire many people to play BG1 and 2. I think they totally hold up.

 

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.

[–] marius 18 points 1 year ago

There would have been so many ways to make this movie suck. IMO they avoided all of them. I loved it.

Many people are saying that it was faithful to DND mechanics, but I personally don't care about that so much. I loved how it captured the feel of an evening of dnd at the table with my friends. The lightheartedness, the nonsensical stunts, the banter. It even makes fun of insane DM puzzles at some point. You can really tell the writers have some love for DND.

6
submitted 1 year ago by marius to c/blind
 

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.

5
submitted 1 year ago by marius to c/blind
 

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.