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This post was originally intended for a Patreon audience.

Accessibility in Gender Dysphoria

I often have accessibility on my mind. One of the things that bothered me recently was that Gender Dysphoria, while a text-only game, is not accessible to blind players. I didn’t really put much thought to it though; I wasn’t sure what could be done about it and I had many other, more personal, things to worry about at the time.

I eventually forgot about it, at least until a blind game developer named Nolan joined a game development discord server I participate in. We talked briefly about how blind accessibility usually works and they even suggested some Unity plugins that would let me interface with the operating system’s screen reader so that the text could be read out loud.

Unfortunately, these solutions required paying for a plugin. This would not normally bother me; the prices of the plugin I wanted to use was reasonable and I would have no problem paying for it. However, I had already made the decision that I wanted the source code of Gender Dysphoria to be publicly viewable and this was incompatible with the license for a paid plugin. I couldn’t just include the source of licensed code in the publicly viewable code base and Unity doesn’t really have any capability for conditional compilation as far as I know.

I tried reaching out to the developer of the plugin to see if there was something we could work out, but I didn’t get a response. Meanwhile, a troublesome idea started to form; doing this research really reinvigorated my interest in making my game accessible to blind players. I feel like Gender Dysphoria is an experience anyone could really benefit from and I would be especially disappointed in myself if a transgender person who happened to be blind would not be able to play it.

I could always get the game fully voice-acted, I started to think. It is an expensive option, but I eventually decided that I was proud enough of what I made that I was willing to put in the money to do it. Besides, the voice acting would, I hope, make the experience better for blind and sighted players alike. In addition, I felt that leaving it to a robot to speak the entire narration would not be a very good experience for blind people anyway, especially since the game is so narrative-focused. It would be nice to have the story read with good voice acting. That’s what I was thinking. Ah, what a foolish person I am.

So, I put out a call for voice actors on Discord and Twitter. The response I got was overwhelming. At the time of writing this post, the casting call tweet I made for Gender Dysphoria has garnered 47 retweets and 65 likes, a massive number compared to the 7 retweets and 13 likes I got on my original tweet just announcing the game. I got a total of 53 queries from voice actors interested in the project with 44 of them either auditioning for a part or sending me a demo reel. There were so many that I had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of all of the applicants.

I was absolutely floored by the response… and I quickly found out that I wasn’t prepared at all to make a casting call. I had people asking me if they could audition, but I hadn’t put the scripts in a readable state and every speaker in my script was labeled as either ‘r’, ‘l’, or ‘c’ which doesn’t really tell you who is saying what. I also noticed that people specified their rates in terms of words or lines, and I had no idea how many words or lines I had!

I spent some time updating the scripts to have proper labels for all of the speakers. I also wrote a tool to count up the words and lines for each character, label each level with which speakers were in them, and generate a markdown document with that information. I spent a few hours listening to every single demo reel or audition that was sent to me.

It was a lot of work. It didn’t really seem like much, but I immediately started to have anxiety. I worried about whether or not I was being unfairly biased in my selection of voice actors. I worried about whether or not I would be satisfied with the delivered voice over. I worried about whether or not the all the voice over would sound natural after it was all put together. I worried about the almost certain reality that I would be in the red for this project. I worried about being responsive to the people I was working with. I worried about a lot of things.

This worrying made selecting voice actors difficult, especially when at one point I had offered a role to someone who then declined the offer — after I had decided to send rejection letters to everyone else who applied. Whoops!

In the end, I think this is a positive learning experience for me. I know a lot more about how putting out a casting call works (I didn’t even know it was called a casting call to begin with) and I understand better the mechanics of how negotiating this kind of work is done. Now, all I need to do is wait for the voice over to be delivered before I can do the meticulous work of cutting up each voice sample for each line and integrating it into the game, a task which will likely take me several evenings.

All this, because I wanted to make my game more accessible. Next time, I promise to be more prepared.