Playing mainstream xbox games with a little help from our Mac

So, recently I've decided to vanish down the rabbit-hole of mainstream gaming. I know gaming is a hotly contested subject on here, My former self being rather negative about the possibility of being able to play as a gamer without sight, but it's feasible. Here is the setup I use:

• Mac running Catalina
• Xbox one S
• The experimental VOCR application
• The mac version of One-cast

I'm not going to go into the Ins and outs of actually playing specific titles, there are a big bunch of gamers out there who have far more of a clue such as Sightless Combat and Brandon Cole where you can find links to their articles and social media.

Firstly, xbox one has narrater on it which reads all menu elements, where it fails is in the games themselves however, that is getting better with games such as:

• Forzo Horizons 4
• Madden NFL 20
• Halo Master Collection
• Gears 5
• Sea Of Thieves

Having spoken menus in game. They don't make the game completely accessible but they do make it so you can play some of it, such as hoard in gears 5.

Another game that is accessible with some learning, is Mortal Combat 11, which sounds amazing and requires the player to be dead on with their stereo positioning and again, though not voiced by narrater, there are some spoken menus.

Where OCR comes in on the mac is when I want to read text that isn't voiced in games that are not yet working towards accessibility. For this I was suggested the aforementioned VOCR which allows me to work out menu structures and work out just what I'm pressing on.

This is all very suck it and see, a lot of frustrations and it's unlikely that any of us could simply get into a game, but it is certainly not impossible.

This is just a very quick overview and there are people on here with far more knowledge than me but these are all things that I've found out in my brief experimentation with mainstream gaming. It's certainly possible despite what I've said before and there is a great community over on twitter of people happy to give advice. Just check out some of Sightless Combat and Brandon's youtube videos and you'll understand that game play is possible and, more than that, fun.

I've found it very inspiring that people are willing to put in so much effort to make things work. Maybe we've been spoiled by the simplicity of apple where very little is required from us.

Maybe those of you with experiences finding ways to play mainstream games could describe your experiences here. The more people that are playing, the more the industry will work to increase accessibility. Only last year 3 massive titles were given speech in menus, xbox created a way of sharing control of a single character with two controllers and I can only guess what will be done in the next decade.

Dons fire retardant suit... Let the flame wars begin...