Introducing the Alternate UI for EVE Online
In the last two weeks, I worked with Zachary Kline (@BLindGuyNW) to help blind people play the video game EVE Online and make the game client more accessible.
One of the results of this collaboration is an alternate UI for EVE Online. The alternate UI renders the contents of the regular game client into an HTML document. The HTML based representation enables better access to screen readers. The information there is on the same level of detail as available to bots, supporting in-game activities as diverse as ratting or mission running. Usually, this kind of structured information is not readily available from the game client in such detail; there is no supported API for this level of detail from the game developer CCP. By using memory-reading on the game client process, we get this information without depending on image processing.
You can read more about the evolution of the alternate EVE Online UI at Using Bots for Eve Accessibility
A guide on how to set up and use the new tool is located in the Sanderling repository at https://github.com/Arcitectus/Sanderling/tree/master/implement/alternate-ui