Tensoon the Kandra

Thank you for taking the time to respond to this. For me personally it is a bit more than just door detection. Some maps have a lot of twists and turns and it can get very tedious to try and navigate it. Having a tool that can give you accurate directions to a specific NPC you are looking for or a tree you can cut down is very helpful. There are so many events you can accidentally walk past because you cannot see the whole screen at once and you just happened not to bump into that specific square that has the Pokemon or NPC you should interact with to get a quest. It is not really fun playing with a walkthrough all the way, but it is also no fun knowing you are definitely missing things that are obvious to other players because you are not using a walkthrough. If you already have something in the works that is great. I just figured I already had a tool that works well and that could be implemented with minimal effort. Thanks for all the accessibility work that has been done thus far, it is much appreciated.

I wanted to make some suggestions to improve the existing accessibility options in Pokemon Reborn. When I started typing out the suggestions it occurred to me to rather post it here as opposed to the discord as it would be easier to find later. Suggestion for blindstep accessibility improvements: Background: I am completely blind and have been playing reborn for a week or two now. In game I am currently clearing the events just before the second gym. I have a good feel for the game and for what to expect going forward. Firstly I would like to bring a mod to the attention of the developers or any other modders who might be willing to assist in improving the navigation experience for blind players. A couple of years ago a mod was made to assist blind players in navigating the game: https://www.rebornevo.com/forums/topic/55210-accessibility-mod-pack-reborn/ I have been using this mod during my current playthrough and cannot imagine playing the game without it. Simply put this mod scans the area for an event or teleport tile nearby and then provides you with a list of results. The player can then choose from the list of results to get a directions guide on how to reach the selected location. Basically an item finder that can also find NPC's and doors all in one. Using this mod somewhat more closely simulates traversing the world as a sighted player character as opposed to a blind one and also brings the player experience for blind players closer to that of sighted players. The blindstep improvements and the addition of TTs support have done a great job in improving accessibility. However, as it stands, navigation simulates exploring unknown terrain with a white cane, i.e. you poke at things to figure out what they are. Although this makes traversing the world possible, it takes extremely long to progress the game. For example, finding Fern for the first time is like finding a needle in a haystack. Statistically speaking, if one considers every traversable tile prior to clearing the first gym, the odds of bumping into exactly Fern is a bit on the low side, even if you use a walkthrough and have a rough idea where to look. It took me two hours to find him even after consulting a walkthrough and while having the additional benefit of this mod which can locate nearby NPC's. I suggest that this mod be included in the base game and that it be activated when the blindstep password is used. Call it an all finder instead of an item finder or something. There are several issues with this mod and numerous improvements that can be made to make it function faster and better. I do not think that implementing any of these improvements will be too time consuming or difficult to implement. When looking a the current feature set all the parts are there, the mod just has to be modified and added on to a bit. Issues and improvements: 1) Currently, to bring up this mods unique menu the F6 key is used, this may conflict with the debug console. The input will likely have to be changed. 2) The range for scanning events is too short. It might not be ideal to scan for every NPC and item on a whole map all at once, but only having a short range scanner can make certain maps like Obsidia Park which is basically a maze, to me at least, on which you have to locate cuttable trees to progress an absolute nightmare to traverse. I suggest adding a separate long range event scanning option to the menu that will scan the entire map. The short range scanner should remain as it is quicker to scan nearby items when using a slower PC. My PC scans the whole map instantly, but I remember that it was not the case with my older PC back when this mod was first introduced. I used a 3rd gen i7 with 8GB RAM back then and scanning the whole map took about 3 seconds, so only having long range is not ideal for slow systems. 3) Then for further QOL, I would recommend that the coordinates of any option being selected be saved and should be recallable with a single key press. Let's say you wish to go from Jasper Stairway to Lower Peridot Ward, the directions are going to be long. If you run halfway there and want to check the directions again, the only way to do so is to scan the whole map again and scroll down the list and select Lower Peridot Ward again. Also, since most of the destinations are unnamed and only have coordinates, or even share the same name at times, it would go a long way to not have to remember to which one of the 20 items on the list you are actually heading towards. The mod does currently have a save and load option, but those options save and load your coordinates, it could easily be repurposed to automatically save a location when selected and then to load it at a press of a key and supply updated directions. This would just be a huge time saver. 4) My final suggestion would be to have some logical order to the results when scanning. It would be ideal if every result could have a name, but since I don't know why some locations have names and some do not and why none of the events ever have any names I would not even suggest anyone touch that as it might be a huge undertaking if everything actually has to be named. For what it is worth though, I noticed that the areas in Peridot mostly only have coordinates whereas nearly every building and map in Obsidian has names, so perhaps naming conventions adopted later on might already partially solve the issue with just an unorganised list being spat out when you scan. My suggested solution be that results just be sorted from largest to smallest Y-Axis coordinates. This would make the most sense, but since the X-axis coordinates are supplied first, it would probably be easier to sort it that way. I would just be happy to have a logical way in which to tackle possible destinations. Sometimes a scan picks up a hit or two it did not before, it is time consuming to go through the whole list of random items to figure out which are the new ones added. This task would be much easier to do if the hits were sorted logically. Just as a note, the mod package linked above contains two mods. The one was the navigation aid and the other was a mod that used sound files to indicate to the player how many steps they are away from any given event. The introduction of TTS support has made the latter mod redundant, however, its code is still contained in the script and might as well be removed. I am not sure who has been consulting with the developers regarding accessibility improvements and I am not sure whether they have been made aware of this mod. I stumbled into all the new support by accident when returning to the game after a long time away. I just figured that this mod helped me a lot and on the off chance that no one knows it exists I thought I should bring it up since it might help someone and that it might be improved on as the original developer went silent shortly after I suggested the above improvements years ago. I had a look at the code myself and some of the suggestions is really just copy paste stuff, but some of it is not. I am no programmer and the little bit of programming I know is of no help when reading this confusing as hell language. I can't even figure out what the purpose of half of the stuff in this script is. It is completely beyond my ability to improve, much less add on to.

@Molta10 in response to "Another question I have: Would it be better to show all map connections, without checking if it is accesable from the current location? The checking is currently enabled, because some indoor locations are on the same "indoor" map in the files. It would list exit coordinates from other buildings, which are of course, not reachable from the current player location. Another example would be a bridge, which can only be accesed if someone entered the map from a different direction. I wanted to avoid confusion why an exit can not be reached. Didn't thought I would create a hunt for the gym entry, my bad. Any suggestions?" This is a rather complicated issue. You were correct in making it clear with the path finder that a location cannot be reached, there is nothing wrong with that. The issue is that we can't see what a particular teleport zone/building is without actually going there. Unless there is an easy way to change the names displayed for the locations on the scan results I don't see an easy solution. You could perhaps keep the disclaimer that the a current location cannot currently be reached but give directions to it anyway? This would be kind of pointless though, this issue with the gym is kind of a unique one. I mean the only circumstance in which you would want to go to a building you cannot enter is if it is necessary to interact with the door to progress the story. This would happen naturally for a sighted player though because they would naturally search out the gym, that is logical pokemon player behaveour, but because we cannot see and we don't know what the different buildings are without going to them we won't even know we are missing, or don't have access to, the gym. All we know is there is a closed location we cannot go to. The reason why I wanted to "current coordinates" button was so that I could perhaps locate the gym myself and scan for clickable events nearby. That is assuming the gym is even a clickable event. Honestly I don't think logical progression will work for blind players in this game. As far as story event triggers and even pokemon locations go we will have to use a walkthrough. If you implement the changes I suggested I am sure I will be able to progress with the help of a walkthrough.

Hello again. I did some proper testing today and I can provide the following feedback: The only way for us to properly navigate as things are now is to make a list of all the teleport points and explore each of them one by one identifying them by their coordinates. Identifying them by any other means such as their place on the list is pointless as the list and list order constantly changes. This method has a lot of drawbacks though. Everyone says they are stuck after the rival battle. Using the 100% episode 17 guide in addition to simply going to each teleport point in Eastern part of the ward I identified the different spots as follows: Lower Peridot Ward (32; 11) Inkay info house Lower Peridot Ward (12; 15) (Seacrest's house (Garden Lower Peridot Ward (33; 46) No route Lower Peridot Ward (52; 11) Eviction house, nothing here. opal Ward (75; 11) South Peridot Alley (54; 7) Easy to find from eviction house Lower Peridot Ward (38; 54) Battle and lake/pool access. Peridot Ward (29; 6) route to North part of ward Lower Peridot Ward (20; 31) Name rater Lower Peridot Ward (33; 50) Pokesnacks house Lower Peridot Ward (33; 44) No route Lower Peridot Ward (19; 44) Old Rod house Peridot Pokemon Center (35; 33) Lower Peridot Ward (42; 24) TV and Ally Switch Info house, nothing here. Lower Peridot Ward (68; 9) Kricketot house Lower Peridot Ward (57; 52) No route Lower Peridot Ward (66; 78) Entrance to (Seacrest's (Garden only accessible via Seacrest's house I might have missed one or two places due to the options constantly changing due to the limited scanner. As you may have noticed, the gym is not on the list of places even though its the next story objective. The reason being, I suspect, is because there is no route to the gym's teleport tile as it is currently locked until you read the notice on the door and then do the necessary stuff in the northern part of the ward. I have no idea how to locate the gym, by using the guide I can make an educated guess of where it should be located, but I have no reliable way of getting there. I would have just done the same thing with clickable events until I found the sign but the range on that is much smaller and I would have to be close to the gym before the scanner will pick up the clickable sign. I have the following suggestions: 1) Add a "current coordinates" hotkey we can press to immediately show us where we are, that way we can still get close to places that has no route to see if there are clickable events nearby. 2) Extend the range of the clickable event scanner. Perhaps just double it in size. I don't know if there is a reason for the limited range besides the time used to scan, if so matter will have to stay as is. 3) There is also currently no way of knowing when you are in an area where you can encounter wild pokemon, being able to locate those would be helpful, same goes for fishing spots. If I was not using a walkthrough I would never have been able to find the fishing spot. Could not manage to catch any pokemon anyway though, I always just got "not even a nibble," not sure if I was doing something wrong, it has been a while since I have played a pokemon game. A "re-select previous destination" hotkey is what I want most though. Alternatively an auto walk function or something would be nice. I kept having to re-opoen the menu and count exactly how many times down I go to re-select the same place, however, because the list constantly changes it made for a very frustrating experience where I kept accidentally navigating back to places I have already been before noticing I misclicked and had to start over. 4) Since we essentially have to use coordinates to identify events and places it would also be helpful if they arranged themselves in a logical order determined by the coordinates such as ascending order based on Y-axis for example. That would make keeping track of different options popping in and out a lot easier. I kept pasting the options in a notepad, but I am still not sure I found all the teleport tiles in the area. I am experiencing some difficulty with other things that are a bit beyond the scope of this navigation mod, just in case anyone has any suggestions or perhaps know which options I have to change to make the experience a bit more pleasant. 1) I have no means of checking the enemy's HP as they only have a bar and not a number OCR can read... THis may make catching pokemon difficult later on. 2) In battle the moves pokemon use moves so quickly I can't see what was actually done. Is there a way to make battle slower so that the messages don't auto scroll? 3) My OCR does not work well with pokemon moves, I suspect that there is too much colour or something on the GUI, if I catch new pokemon it takes a while before I know which option is which and if I don't play for a while I have to relearn the order again. Any way to make OCR more accurate for that? I already deleted the fonts in the fonts folder to raise accuracy. 4) My OCR does not work with GameZ at all, it only works when I run the game.exe. I would like it to work with gameZ as it is much smoother and clearly runs better and faster. With my limited vision I have left I can tell the game's visuals do appear, but for some reason OCR does not see it at all. Anyone else experiencing the same? Thanks again for taking the time to make this mod.

Wow, this is amazing! It works very well. Unfortunately I can't play much during the week, but just by quickly testing I can already tell that this will make the game a lot more accessible. I definitely do not know the layout of this game's map and I managed to get to the starters with absolutely no problem. One possible addition I can recommend for a future update, assuming it is possible, is to add an option to the F6 menu to re-select the last selected location. Sometimes the directions would have a lot of steps, it would be nice to instantly recall them without going through the menus again. It is a luxury I can survive without though, this really looks fantastic. Thanks a lot for your effort. I will test some more during the week if I get the chance, otherwise I will test a lot during the weekend.

Hello, Another blind dude here. Just wanted to say thanks for endeavouring to make this. I tried doing something similar just before I went blind but my knowledge of programming was too limited. The best I could manage was to make tiles white or black and negative the text boxes' colour to make everything high contrast to make it easier for low vision players to see. It made the game ugly as hell, but at least one could navigate. Cool lookin' tiles kind of lose their value if even the Pokecentre appears to be a red blur to you, haha. This path finder idea looks amazing!