Re: Madden 19: Evidence

by paysen55
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Madden 19: Great Start, But...

★ Novice

Let me start by saying how awesome I think it is that a large game development company is taking accessibility seriously.  What you have done thus far is phenomenal, and I am quite pleased.  I love football, so when I ran into the thread on another forum saying that Madden had incorporated accessibility features, I spent hours reading and watching videos.  I am totally blind, using a screen reader with my computer called Jaws for Windows, and sometimes I use NVDA.  I have tested the game for myself now on the PC, and what I see so far is great.  I do have a few suggestions and requests that apply to all platforms.
1.  Provide sounds to know when something in the settings is on or off.  From what I have read, this was originally there, but then EA removed it for some reason.  This feedback is quite helpful to us, and I do not understand why that would have been removed.
2.  Expand menu narration:  This one is absolutely huge.  I cannot stress enough how important this is.  Menus can be a bit tricky when there's no narration.  While it is possible to use OCR (optical character recognition) within Windows to read menus, it doesn't always read the best, sometimes returning text that is undecipherable or makes no sense, and sometimes it can get quite confusing.  It took me about 20 minutes just to adjust my graphics settings correctly the night I started tested things, because as it stands now, you have to constantly re-OCR the window over and over as you make adjustments to things, since OCR doesn't always give an indication of what's actually highlighted.  You've got to go to each setting, OCR the window, try to see if it provides you enough text to see that it's the setting you want, then back out of OCR, change the setting, and re-OCR to make sure the setting was changed, then back out of OCR, rinse and repeat.  And there are some places that OCR just doesn't read well at all.  I found this to be especially true within franchise mode.  There are places where you can adjust players, change rosters, etc., and I tried with OCR, but I see no way to do it.  I'd like to be able to adjust my player rosters.  I'd like to be able to pick the players I want to upgrade reliably.  In other words, I need to be able to determine what player is selected when looking at player upgrading/training and player rosters.  Given how inaccessible rosters are, I would imagine that ultimate team mode is totally inaccessible to us.  Same goes for playbooks.  I want to be able to look at my playbooks, to customize them, to customize my audibles the way I want them.  These are just a few examples that I have seen so far of why we need narration in everything.  If someone like Mr.
Coachman is unable or unwilling to narrate the menus, then you could always add narrator support.  The Narrator API allows you to pass text to it, and is built into both Xbox consoles and PCs.  In this way, we could change stuff in franchise mode much more easily, be able to use all of the modes of the game, etc.  The next feedback and suggestions are for in-game play.
3.  Play calling:  This one is also tied to text narration as well.  The screen where you pick plays on both offense and defense can be difficult to decipher with OCR.  I've gotten mixed results thus far.  In exhibition mode I turned off the play clock to allow myself time to navigate the screen with OCR, and yes, I can find formations and plays, but there are two huge drawbacks to this approach.  First, there is just not enough time to use OCR if you've got a play clock running.  I spent about 45 minutes yesterday looking inside of franchise mode settings, and there's no way to actually totally disable the play clock.  You can turn off the accelerated clock, but not the play clock.  So using OCR in a franchise game will not work.  Secondly, it is impossible to see which play matches to which key, so that you know what you're choosing.  So yes, I can find a list of run plays, but OCR doesn't display to me what key is assigned to which play on the screen.  And yes, I know that we can choose plays by type on offense, and we can always let the suggested play be chosen.  But we'd really like to be able to pick formations, plays, etc., just like people who can see.  Plus, as it stands now,, using the suggested play  is actually worse, since although we are told that a running or passing play was chosen by vibration feedback, we're not told what the play is, and we're not told in the case of a run whether it's a play that you would run to the left side of the field, up the middle, or to the right, so we don't know which way to run the ball, and end up not running the play correctly.  For passes, it tells us a pass was chosen, but no other information like number of receivers or which keys are assigned to those receivers.  Ideally, screens for play choosing should be narrated, either by a human, or by allowing narrator to read them.
4. Running the ball:  I'm not sure whether this is implemented, but we need some way to know when we need to elude defenders, and we need to know in what direction we're supposed to run the ball to follow our blockers.  when I pick a running play, or I'm carrying the ball on a kickoff return, completed pass, etc., perhaps the best way to do it would be to give haptic feedback.  For example, if I move to the left or right, when I feel no vibration, I know that I can run up the field, and if I feel vibration, I know that I need to move left or right to get out of the way of a defender.  That feedback would be like what you get to line up a field goal, but in this case it would mean that you could run, and when you feel vibration, you know you need to get out of the way before the defender tackles you.  Also, some sort of audio feedback to let us know that we're close to the sideline, so that we can keep from running out of bounds unless we choose to would be good.
5.  Passing:  The biggest issue with passing is two-fold.  First, knowing how many receivers are in a given play (I know a pass was chosen, but it doesn't tell me how many receivers are in the play), and secondly, actually knowing which receiver is open.  The first issue could be improved by allowing narration of play calling menus, so that we know exactly what formation and play are being chosen.  As for knowing what receiver is open, perhaps we could get this through haptic feedback.  For example, let's say that a pass play I chose has four eligible receivers.  So, after snap of the ball, if the receiver assigned to button A comes open, one tap vibration of the controller, two quick taps of the controller vibration for button B, three quick vibrations for receiver on X, and four for the receiver on Y, etc., so that we know who is open and where we can throw.  As it stands now, we know that we picked a pass, but everything after that is just guessing.  We can't tell which keys are actually assigned to receivers, and we cannot tell who is actually open.  I've thrown about 15 interceptions in 2 games, and I've been sacked (quarterback taken down without throwing) about ten times because I was trying to use a key that wasn't assigned to a receiver.
I hope that you are not offended by my feedback or suggestions.  I am merely hoping to make it easier for us to enjoy this game to its fullest potential.  If anyone on this forum knows of ways around the things I have posted, please let me know.  If EA ever needs assistance in testing accessibility functionality, I would be more than happy to do so at any time.  Keep up the awesome work.

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Madden 19: Evidence

★ Novice

I am not sure whether anyone is actually reading any of the posts here, as I have not gotten any response to my initial post, and I see other posts that were written a month or more ago with no response.  My post can be found here:

https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion/Madden-19-Great-Start-But/m-p/7144345#M94

This post is to provide evidence to support my claims about OCR in that post.  This is one screen that I tried to get OCR to read for me, and I got this nonsense:

8:45 35M
•CAR i 209 3RD
Ø\SPORTS
SIMULATION
CARO
HOU u L.MlUER4Ai 3RD 14:36

I have no way to decipher what any of that means.  Next, I will show what the upgrade player screen in franchise mode looks like, so that you can see how impossible it is to navigate without narration:

PLAYER UPGRADES
CHOOSE PLAYER TO UPGRADE
OVR
RT 80
DARYL
WILLIAMS
ZHLLIAMS
1 SKIL POINT VAILABLE
SELECT
PASS PRO CTOR
OVR
AGILE
OVR
E UPGRADE ALL PLAYERS BACK 1k SPORTS
POWE
83
OVR
SIGN INTO EA SERVERS F
NFL NEWS. —X SPORTS
SIGN INTO EA S
SAVING PROFILE-MADDEN

No way to choose different players that I can see, and no way to see who else is on the screen, and the player info is mixed in with a bunch of other stuff that makes no sense.  As you can see, this screen is pretty much impossible to navigate with OCR.  These are just two instances that I am posting, but I wanted to at least back up my claims with actual evidence in my original post.  I sincerely hope that these posts are still being read, and I look forward to receiving a response.

Message 2 of 3 (2,250 Views)

Re: Madden 19: Evidence

[ Edited ]
★ Apprentice

Hi, I read your comment which is very long lol, and I agree with you I like your suggestions I hope they will be taken into consideration.

 

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