Guild Wars 2

I’m the blind player. I just wanted to thank Anet and the extremely helpful player community for aiding me in playing this game.

Some feedback on the wintersday stuff. This is coming from the perspective of someone with only one eye, and even then I only have the lower left corner of my peripheral vision in that eye that’s badly damaged (the rest of the eye is blind).

Toypocalypse was crazy fun and ridiculously accessible. I just ran around with a rifle, shot toys and smashed buildings for stuff to set near the dolyaks. The pacing of toypocalypse combined with your ability to set up turrets makes this the most accessible component of Wintersday.

The Snowball Mayhem thingy was pretty easy to work with. I just announced to my team that I’m blind and they really helped with the target calling and combat support. As for the skills, I just chose randomly until I settled with option number two as it was the easiest to learn without vision.

The bell choir was surprisingly doable. With my particular brand of vision impairment, I maintain light sensitivity and peripheral vision is adapted to pick up mtion. While my field of vision is very limited (I can’t see all 8 notes simultaneously) I just focused on the left 4 notes occasionally seeing notes 5 and 6. The brightness of motion of the notes is actually very accessible. After LOTS of trial and error I finally got the timing down. While this took me forever to do, I finally got the achievements. So yes, blind players can get the bell choir done.

The jumping puzzle is impossible. One suggestion is to add bright visual cues to the platforms as visually impaired players are still light sensitive. The only way you lack light sensitivity is if you are totally blind and have completely non-funcition eyes, optic nerves, and/or ocular lobes. Even then, the timing of the jump puzzle makes it next to impossible. I can do jumping puzzles still in Tyria (well a good number of them not all), as long as I have the time to kitten the next jump.

Overall, I’m not sure if this was intentional but the visual contrasting of most content in this game makes it surprisingly seeable (not really but I at least stand a chance). The biggest thing is the array of audio cues. Its this characteristic that allows me to continue playing GW2 (I have been playing for 2.5 years before I lost my vision so the other half is memory).

Not sure why I’m posting this, just excited that I can still do new content still in this game without having to sit back knowing everyone else is having all the fun.

TL;DR:
Random stuff about playing this game blind and thanking anet for making it accessible and thanking the community for helping along the way.

Congratulations. : )

What is in the bag?

newbihack.7180:

What is in the bag?

Your choice of one of the original wintersday toy minis (charr soldier, princess doll, plush griffin, toy golem, wooden ventari) or 100 presents.

That’s amazing! And inspiring. One of my great fears is losing my vision as everything I do depends upon it. I can’t imagine what it was like to lose your eyes. Congratulations on not letting it stop you.

Thank you! You’ll be surprised how much you can still do without vision. I was recently told about an artist (mainly painting) who is completely blind.

Congratulations !

Hearty congratulations and merry Wintersday!

Congratz. Merry Christmas!

merry Christmas and may all your games be good ones.

Congratulations.

So sorry to hear about your situation, it must be extremely challenging to deal with.

Really good to hear that you can still enjoy (most of) the game, though.

Hopefully, they can look into making all parts more, potentially, accessible for people with sight problems, in future.

Especially if small changes/additions would help a lot.

Happy Wintersday, OP, and congratulations on your accomplishment. It’s an inspiring thing to read.

Happy holidays! Congratulations! :)

Congratulations! Inspiring and motivating! Just to ask, have you ever tried sweet fx and the like to enhance colors/contrasts/brightness/etc to your needs? Merry christmas, and I wish you a lot of future successes!

Congratulations to you for your dedication and victory over this achievement!
And huge hugs to the community for being awesome!
Well done! =)

2 things that scare me, the idea of losing my hands, or going blind. You inspire me. Makes ya think of the things you have, while you have them, rather than when you no longer. hugs

MyPuppy.8970:

Congratulations! Inspiring and motivating! Just to ask, have you ever tried sweet fx and the like to enhance colors/contrasts/brightness/etc to your needs? Merry christmas, and I wish you a lot of future successes!

I’m interested in finding out more about this. I hadn’t made any adjustments. is Sweet Effects a program to help with that?

I haven’t used it myself but from what I’ve seen in posts and in comments from friends it can be used to really add contrast and enhance colors, possibly even to garish levels. Which you might need in order to see them at all. It apparently takes some guidance to use as it has a lot of complicated settings.

I hope you don’t get a sore neck and back from twisting to get things into your minimal line of sight