Accessible Game Review - Skyrim

1/5

Skyrim looks like a good game, and gets great reviews, but if you can't use a keyboard, forget it. The developers desire to have a nice immersive experience with no window clutter means that it is relentlessly keyboard focused. That wouldn't be so bad, except that even in windowed mode it captures the mouse within the game window. This means of course, that you can't use the onscreen keyboard at all. It won't even accept ALT-TAB commands from X Mouse Button Control, not that that would help, anyway.

You can bind the forward movement to the footswitch to move around, but that doesn't help you to open boxes, look at your inventory, or perform a hundred other keyboard based functions.

I do wish that developers would implement standard windows behavior.The standards are there for a reason y'know.

In a word, avoid.

In-Game Key Bindings

move forward - MB3

To make sense of the ratings look here.

Accessible Game Review - Diablo III

5/5

Diablo III is a great game for people with disabilities, as long as you can move the mouse effectively. Given that moving, attacking, speaking to NPC's and picking things up are all done with the left mouse button, you could play pretty effectively with just a single input, such as a switch. However, it's handy to have the secondary ability and the action bar bound to the foot pedals too.

It has a nice flexible key binding system too, so that you don't even have to set up a layer in X-Mouse Button Control, just bind the keys in-game.

Disclaimer: I have only played a Wizard, other classes may be less playable.

Mouse Bindings

left button - Same as default profile
right button - Same as default profile
middle button - Same as default profile

In-Game Key Bindings

move / primary skill / interact - left button
secondary skill - right button
action bar skill 1 - MBWHEELDOWN

To make sense of the ratings look here.

Accessible Game Review - Eve Online

5/5

Eve Online is sometimes criticized for having endless drop-down menus and generally being a bit of a click fest. However, from my perspective this is absolutely fine. Combined with the fact that even Player vs Player combat is strategic, rather than twitchy, this makes Eve one of the easiest games to play. At least in a physical sense :)

It has one quirk, though. The double click speed is fixed and not set to the speed set in the operating system. This matters because that's too fast for me to double click with my feet, and it's how  you manoeuvre in game. This is easily fixed by binding double click to the third button.

Mouse Bindings

left button - Same as default profile
right button - Same as default profile
middle button - double click

To make sense of the ratings look here.

Accessible Game Review - Ultima Online

2/5

This venerable MMO suffers from one major flaw. It loses focus when you click outside the game window. This makes it impossible to use the onscreen keyboard. You can't even log in. There is a workaround using Dasher, but it's clunky. You need to position Dasher to the right of the game window and click to make it active, then click the input box in the game before moving the mouse back over Dasher without clicking. Dasher can then put the text in.

Since a lot of common commands ingame require text input this makes it hard. The game does have a sophisticated macro system which ameliorates this somewhat, but it requires setting up. Even then, communications are difficult, and inputting numbers in particular can be a problem.

Mouse Bindings

left button - Same as default profile
right button - Same as default profile
middle button - double click

To make sense of the ratings look here.

Accessible Game Review - Master of Magic

5/5

A fine old strategy game which runs in a DOS box. It only uses the normal left and right buttons, which is no problem with the footswitch, but switching out of DOS is a pain without a keyboard, so I've bound the middle button to ALT-TAB.

Mouse Bindings

left button - Same as default profile
right button - Same as default profile
middle button - ALT-TAB

To make sense of the ratings look here.

Accessible Game Review - Star Wars The Old Republic

3/5

The only major problem I have is that my targeting speed is a bit slow, since I can't tab target. I also have a slight issue with jumping, which requires me to pull up the onscreen keyboard and click the space bar while running forwards. Lastly, whilst the game will automatically target an enemy who attacks you, it won't move the camera round so that you can actually see what you're fighting.

Mouse Bindings

left button - Same as default profile
right button - Same as default profile
middle button - No change (do not intercept)
In game middle button - Move forward

To make sense of the ratings look here.

Gaming with ALS

For my sins, I am afflicted with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or Motor Neurone Disease (MND) as we call it on this side of the pond. We like to be different. Stephen Hawking is probably the best known sufferer of this condition. He has the form of the disease which allows you to breathe and eat after you are paralyzed. That's not the kind that I have.

Still, one thing that we have in common is that we don't wish the disease to define us. Hawking has said that he's not very interested in his disease, and I'm not either. He likes pondering on the deep questions of the universe, I like playing games. Gaming is a good pastime for the disabled. Pondering doesn't need much specialist equipment, though, whilst most gamers never shut up about theirs. So here's a discussion about mine.

My Current Limitations

At present. I can move a mouse, but I can't click it easily as my fingers are too clumsy. I can use a keyboard only with great difficulty. I can move my legs and head. My speech is slow but mostly comprehensible.

Hardware

USB footswitch with 3 foot pedals. I got mine off eBay for about a tenner.

This is useful because I can still move my feet and even though feet aren't very dexterous (by definition) they are fine for pressing pedals. I use this to simulate mouse clicks.

Software for controlling games

The footswitch can be bound to various keys depending on the application, so you can have different bindings for each game. You can do this with the supplied application, but it's a bit limited, not to mention Chinese. What I have done is to simply bind the pedals to mouse buttons 1, 2, and 3 as you can see in the screenshot below (this is binding pedal 1).

The ability to bind the pedals flexibly comes from a free application called X-Mouse Button Control, which will intercept mouse clicks and map them to any keyboard keys I choose. So far I've stuck to pedals 1 and 2 as left and right mouse clicks. But the third pedal is more interesting. By default I have that pedal bound to Page Down, so that I can read eBooks and surf the web easily, but in games or other applications I have it available.

Software for communication 

This is in a separate section because not all games need it, but if you're playing online, especially MMO's then communication is important.

For text input, I use Dasher, another piece of free software, which allows you to input text by navigating through words just using the mouse. With practice you can get up to 30 words per minute. There's a Google TechTalks video showing why it's such an efficient method of text entry here. However, it's awkward for corrections and the function keys so I use the onscreen keyboard as well.

I don't currently play any games in which I use voice comms,and my voice is still comprehensible, but if necessary, Dasher can be set to speak the text I've written, which could in turn be routed to a microphone. I haven't tried it yet though.

Future Plans

Since mine is a progressive condition, I need to consider the end game, namely how I'll control games when I'm completely paralyzed. MND doesn't usually affect the eyes, so I should be able to use eye gaze to move the mouse. However, eye gaze is not ideal for making quick selections. Normally eye gaze systems use dwell clicking, where you need to hold your gaze over the area for a second or two before it clicks. That's a bit slow for MMO's, though it might be okay for strategy games.

So I'll need a better means of clicking. It's likely that I'll have a few muscles working which can be attached to input switches, but if not, I'll still have my brain. I have an Emotiv Epoc, which is a commercially available brainwave reader. It allows up to 4 different brain states to be mapped to keystrokes via the supplied Emokey application. Then, I can use X-Mouse button Control as at present. Moving with my eyes and clicking with my brain. Sorted.

Game Reviews

I'm going to give brief reviews for the games that I've played. I'm not going to review the games themselves, only how easy I have found them to play using this setup. Games are rated out of 5, losing a point for each major infelicity that I come across.