Dw and the Blind: Voice Commands and audio feedback?

[BlindGuyNW]

Hi All,

I was reading about submarine simulations again tonight, and stumbled on the fact that DW has some voice commands which seem to enable quite a bit of the game to be played vocally.

What I'm wondering about is how much audio feedback is provided to accompany them. A few years back, there was a big fuss in the blind gaming community, when it turned out that certain mods enabled Microsoft Flight Simulator to be playable, or at least a good portion of it.

While this is hardly the same game, I'm wondering if anything might be done to make DW likewise at least partially playable. I ask this as someone who doesn't yet have the game, so I don't know what the interface or menu structure looks like to my screen reading programs.

Does anybody have thoughts on this sort of thing? I'm willing to provide more information as necessary.

[rentacow]

First of all, welcome to subsim!

Now to answer your question:

Audio feedback in the game is too limited in my opinion. Voice commands are limited to setting your own ships speed, depth/altitude, course and turning some sensors on and off. There may be other commands but the quality of voice recognition is so terrible there isn't much point. Information you receive over audio feedback is limited to initial detection of a brand new contact, damage reports or warnings and a few other events. For a brand new contact your crew will tell you the bearing only once. If the sensor can determine range also (radar and maybe active sonar) you will hear the range estimate as well. You cannot set-up, fire or guide torpedoes, operate the sonar, etc. using just voice commands.

However, if you were to assume the role of captain in a multiplayer cooperative game, you could surely just ask your crew mates for the information or descriptions you need. You would not even need to be connected to the game at all for that matter. A push to talk button would be the only control you need to operate. I would gladly join your crew! Also, the nature of submarine warfare could even give someone like you a unique advantage. You will never be slowed down by the need to pull up the map to help you visualize the battle space.

[BlindGuyNW]

I was rather afraid this would be the answer. I've never really considered participating in multiplayer games of the sort before, but it's definitely an intriguing possibility. I presume something like TeamSpeak would be used to coordinate.

Thank you for the welcome. I hope to learn more about the possibilities, as I've always had a soft spot for submarines, admittedly fueled by far too much Tom Clancy as a kid.

[speed150mph]

I have no problems playing dw with voice commands. As long as you have a good mic that doesn't feed back or echo, it will follow my commands 95% of the time. As rentacow pointed out, you cannot give complex orders, but most of your orders are going to be maneuvering orders anyway.

When I play, I just give TMA and acoustic intercept to auto crew, pretty well keep my page locked on the sonar position, checking the plot every now and then, and popping in to fire control to update my weapon settings in case I need to make a snap shot. Everything else I can handle with voice.

But it is a lot of fun playing as part of a crew in multiplayer