Making UE4 accessible for the blind

Development Programming & Scripting
1

(This was originally sent to help@epicgames.com but I was told to post my question on UE Answerhub)

Good afternoon,

I am a Computer Science student from Spain. I am conducting a research for my bachelor thesis about making a game engine accessible for the blind. In order not to reinvent the wheel and to focus on the HCI/UX/accessibility part, I have decided to add an accessibility layer on top of an already built game engine that is widely used on the videogame industry.

I thought on Unreal Engine due to its popularity and powerful graphical capabilities. Given the evaluation criteria of my bachelor thesis, I have to justify my decision, for which I need to know some things about Unreal Engine:

  1. Provided I will release the code of my interface for free, would it be possible that it was actually incorporated to the editor on the near future? What criteria is used to include new functionality on the editor (apart from following the coding standards described on the webpage)? This is an important point as one of the goals of the research is to develop a software that can actually help blind users develop games, either as a hobby or professionally.
  2. Does Epic Games know how many videogames have been published using this game engine, and how many employees are working on the development of UE4? This has to do with the popularity/stability criterion stated on my bachelor thesis guidelines.
  3. Are all features of the engine available through the documentation, or some part of it can only be found on comments on the source code / readme files / etc? This has to do with accessibility criteria.
  4. Is there any economical data about Epic Games that is publicly available (like net worth or PNV across several years)? My thesis evaluation committee requires me to also base my decisions on economical data. I have tried to search on economical databases offered by my university but Epic Games does not appear because the DB only features companies which shares are quoted on the stock exchange. I also tried to look up data on this webpage, but most of the data is only available after paying a fee.

Best regards,

Alvaro Caceres

2

Hi there,
I’m a partially blind Computer Science student and I’ve been working in Unreal Engine for about a year and a half now. My vision has been slowly getting worse so I’d like to go ahead and add screen reader support of some kind to UE4 to make it easier to make games/use editor features.

I’m curious about how far you got in the project? I’m currently doing research about this whole thing, but I have NO idea how to even begin this undertaking.