Hello, My name is Shane, i live in Alexandria, LA im in a wheelchair with Muscular Distrophy, unable to move everything but my left hand. I would love to be able to play video games such as fallout3, halo, call of duty, and other such rpg's and fps's

Hey there, Shane. Welcome to AG!

So, as a rule, FPSs are typically one of the least accessible types of games for people with severe mobility impairment. It's not always the case, but more often than not the need for extremely quick reactions coupled with a lot of precision mouse control and managing a multitude of other buttons makes it quite a challenge.

If you have decent control of your left hand and can use it to control a mouse/trackball/joystick, though, then there's a good chance you could find assistive technology workarounds to handle any extra input you need. From my experience, there's almost nothing that can't be solved with the right combination of speech recognition software and a solid switch interface (and switches, of course). Do you have any experience with switches and/or speech rec software like Dragon NaturallySpeaking or Say2Play?

And FYI: one of the great things about Fallout 3 is that, even though it's an FPS, it doesn't have many of those shortcomings I mentioned. It's combat mechanic is unique, in that you can either play as a straight up FPS or as a first-person tactical shooter where time can be frozen while you decide where you want to place your shots.

<strong>Wheels of Hades wrote:</strong>


fallout is a good game...I have good use of my right hand use the palm of my left to play...I have trouble with fine in FPS games....

I am trying Say2play and having trouble configuring the voice commands. I can't figure out what the durations need to be set at. Are you familiar with this application? Do you recommend a specific joystick/trackball/or mouse. I have limited use of my left hand and no use of my right. Any game recommendations?

Thanks for your assistance,
Shane

<strong>Wheels of Hades wrote:</strong>



I have trouble with that to and also getting a control to work right on the pc for a fps.

Anyone else have input?

Shane,

There's an interesting article on tuning say2play at:

www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2339131,00.asp

In any case, thanks for bringing this product to our attention.
Now we gotta see if the games we make work with it.

John Bannick
www.7128.com

Hi. I am a brain cancer survivor and my right hand is pretty impaired. Well, everything is pretty much impaired but I play a lot of World Of Warcraft mostly without a mouse. Ex: when targeting an enemy use your Tab key instead of the mouse. I've found a lot of ways around things so I can play.

I don't personally endorse Say2Play, as I've never actually used it. I do understand the underlying architecture, though, and I've used similar products in the past, so I know it's potentially useful. Plus, it's been mentioned numerous times here before, so I think other AG community members have had success with it before. Maybe one of them might weigh in? *looks around*

I have used Dragon NaturallySpeaking as an input method for gaming, though. More to the point, I use it for nearly ALL my interaction with the computer, and gaming is no exception. You can create custom commands to trigger individual keypresses or more complex interactional sequences. The recognition accuracy is incredibly high, the response time quick, and the system resource load pretty decent. However, it's far more expensive than Say2Play, which makes the latter probably a better starting point to see if that method of interaction works for you.

Hi Shane,

I'm in a similar situation as you with limited ability and yes you can play certain fps and Fallout 3 is one of them. Say2play is a wonderful program that I use to play FPS games. I recommend you cut down on the number of commands, that helps with recognition. Also, although 3 is my friend, I disagree with using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for games, I think that's better left for programs that are meant to game.

I keep meaning to do the review on Say2play but life keeps getting in the way. I'll try to make that a priority for this week. In the meantime, tell me what you're interested in and I might be able to help.

one cool tip for playing first-person shooters: use the right mouse button as your forward-key.

Second tip: go to www.dwvac.com and give VAC a try. The program uses Microsoft speech API which in fact is a very powerful voice-recognition runtime. The speech API is part of Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Windows XP doesn't have it natively but it can be installed. The aforementioned website is also hosting a installation package for XP that contains the speech API. I tried say2play but I found it very clumsy and recognition was very poor for me. it can't have been a hardware issue because naturally speaking just works flawlessly.

I also don't recomment to use NaturallySpeaking with games. It's a resource hog and doesn't respond very good with games that are very demanding regarding processor power.

What to do if recognition is poor?

Don't forget to runthe voice recognition training of the speech API! It is necessary because the computer has to get used to your voice.

Get a good microphone that has noise cancellation. They aren't overly expensive. 15 to 20 dollars should be sufficient. Andrea are a good brand..

don't use single words as commands. The longer your command phrase is the better. If you have a command [ESCAPE] and [right], it is quite possible that you get a mix up of what you wanted because both words sound similar. So why not change the [ESCAPE] command into [push ESCAPE]?

a very useful command is [back to Windows] which activates alt+tab. That way you can play fullscreen.
Georg

<strong>Steve wrote:</strong>


I'd be interested to hear more about this. Although, maybe that would be better for another thread lest we take this too far off the original FPS-centric topic.

hey guys thought i'd put my 2 cents in. i'm a c4-5 quad, i can move my arms but no wrists or fingers and would say i'm not too bad at fps's, even getting top ranking in some.
i use voice controls for reload, sprint etc. my left arm is my wasd keys and my right is my shoot. head mouse for aiming.

that's my equipment that helps but.... the most help i've had is knowing what play style to use. playing a light agile class isn't going to work for me, so i choose big slow tough guys, firing 300 rounds in a sitting is always fun, a.k.a spray and pray.

hope that helps.

p.s this website rocks

Hey guys,

Name's Tatterr Ive been kind of MIA for awhile. I primarily play FPs titles. If you're ever on send me an invite. We can run private matches, pub matches, whatever I don't care about winning, i care about having a good time and some good laughs. My GT is Tatterr.

Welcome aboard!

Do you game on PC or console? If you're on the Xbox console, you should check out our Game Night and add your gamertag to our list.

are there titles for xbox/pc mixed matches? is that even possible? <-newb speaking

This might be a repost but here is a link for two contollers as well.
Ben Heck mod and there is one for a left handed controller as well. They also mention the access controller that has interchangeable parts to customize for your style but I believe is only works for PS3.

I love shooters as well and I just game with my right hand. I don't have a mod controller and I play better with one hand than I ever did with two. Let me know if you need a tip and I can tell you how I do it.

Nothing that will allow PC gamers to play with Xbox gamers ... not that I'm aware of, anyway.

that's a pity.
I wonder why there's no PC/PS3 or PC/Xbox360 interface that allows players to use their PC hardware as a controller for the aforementioned consoles. I absolutely would buy one or even both of the consoles if I could use them. I would even pay 150 bucks just for the interface. Now imagine to use VAC/keyboard/mouse/whatever to control PS3. That would be awesome!

something like this?

not exactly but I'm amazed that it obviously is not just theoretically possible. In my case I'd need VAC and mouse because I can't use keyboards. So I was rather thinking of a connection between PC and console that gives key presses and mouse movement from the computer to the console.
I could even imagine it as a product from Sony or Microsoft themselves, because it would bring many new customers.
I don't think there will be a company to develop this because we all know how rigid Microsoft and Sony behave when it comes to firmware changes in order to lock out certain devices just for the sake of greed. therefore I think it has to be their own product. besides I think it would be competition for their controllers and that's a reason why I believe we will not see this within the next hundred years. The only way out of this problem might be to restrict sellings of this interface to people who can prove they are disabled.

I would love to have 10 minutes of talk with Microsoft and Sony CEOs...

There's this xim3.com/
I don't think it's difficult to add an interface between this device and a computer if you present your situation to the forum of the site. The guy who created this might give us ideas. I think it's very possible and not that difficult. I wish I took some circuit classes in college for these kind of things

thanks for the info. I think I'm gonna contact them.

After hours of searching the Internet yesterday actually found a solution from Sony themselves which in conjunction with a Sony notebook does exactly what I want to. it seems to be possible to do this with other computers as well, so I am lucky not to have to afford a expensive notebook.