We would venture to guess that many MotorTrend readers find their happy place is behind the wheel of something like a Honda Civic Type R while going for a quick spin on a great road, or perhaps something a little more American is to your taste—a Camaro, maybe. Lack unlimited funds to cycle through various sports cars? There are always video games! Regardless, in this daydream, your mental exertion is likely entirely focused on the car you’d pick for the drive—not whether you can, you know, drive at all. It’s too easy to take the privilege for granted; people with low vision or who are completely blind can’t partake. But what if they could—if only virtually?
The team at Turn 10 Studios, the developer of Forza Motorsport decided to take on the task of making its Triple A racing simulator more accessible to those with lower vision levels. The Turn 10 team recruited Accessibility Consultant Brandon Cole to help open up Forza Motorsport‘s accessibility and create a playing experience for the blind that is as equivalent to the sighted as possible. “Most blind people have been in vehicles but have never driven one,” said Cole. “That’s who we have to design for.”
The solution is called “Blind Driving Assist” (BDA) and employs several features that are meant to provide different ways for a blind or low vision person to interact with the game. BDA works by providing audio cues to help low vision/no vision players navigate race tracks during gameplay. BDA also gives audible information to the player including their orientation on track, track position, approach and progress in turns, how how much to slow down, when to shift when using a manual car, and more.
The feature set also includes a feature called “One Touch Driving,” which allows players to chose their own combination of applying brakes, steering, and throttle to reduce the amount of simultaneous inputs for those who may have trouble pressing more than one button at at time. There is a screen narration feature which audibly “reads” all the information on the screen for the player and dynamic audio descriptions during cinematic scenes. To help low vision/no vision players communicate with others online there is a text-to-speech/speech-to-text feature available. There are many more features but the gist is there is now a demonstrable way for an entire new community to play one of the biggest racing games in the world.
Will other major racing franchises like Gran Turismo and Codemasters’ F1 games follow suit with their own accessibility features? If they aren’t already planning to do so, they may want to reconsider.
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