Hey guys! This might be very random in the suburb it, and a little bit out of place, but I promise it’s relevant! Ha ha.

Just for a very brief rundown, I lost my vision back in 2021 due to a original genetic guy disability that robbed me of my last division I had left. I was always told throughout life by doctors that I would never go fully blind, but I guess here we are 😞 I used to enjoy playing video games quite a lot, and one of my favorite ones to play back in the day was terraria. All of my friends and I used to do at least one giant play through of the game every year, and that used to be our little Social game we would play with each other. It kept us close, and we all loved doing it.

The thing is, the game has virtually no accessibility features for people who are blind. There are some features in the game for low vision players, such as cursor highlighting, and UI scaling, but that’s about it. It’s been a good few years since I’ve been able to play the game, and I really have that urge to play it now, but of course it’s a lot more difficult now than it used to be in the past.

There are a couple of features in the game that would work to make it fairly accessible for me though, most notably being the smart cursor feature which automatically highlights blocks when you get near them. That paired with the automatic gaming of the gamepad, and also taking into consideration the fact that it’s a two dimensional game meaning it would be fairly difficult to actually get lost somewhere, makes it a decent candidate for some accessibility modification of some kind.

I want to try to learn how to program specifically so that I can try to make a modification to this game to make it playable for the blind community, myself included, and I noticed the game is programmed in C-sharp.

Since I know next to nothing about programming, and my brother programs and swift, I thought a great place to ask this question would be here! I know quite literally nothing about programming, but my desire to create tools to help make games more playable for myself and the rest of the blind community makes me want to learn. so I thought I would ask, how difficult would it be to add some form of rudimentary screen reading support to a game like terraria that doesn’t natively support screen reading, but publicly allows users to modify the source code?

There’s an incredibly large mod community for this title, so I’m hoping that it would be at least somewhat doable for someone who isn’t a veteran programmer, so I thought I would reach out here and get your opinions on the matter.

Even just having the ability to tell which button I’m currently on in the main menu, or which block is currently highlighted by the Smart curser feature would be enough to make the game at least somewhat playable. I am currently trying to play the game using something called OCR, but since the font in the game is very stylized, OCR has troubles actually Detecting the text properly. Thank you guys for any insight you can give me! I really appreciate the time you guys took to read this post. ❤️ As a sidenote, sorry for any typing errors! I’m using Siri to dictate this post since I’m not actually near a physical keyboard at the moment.