Rain and Terrain: How Animal Crossing’s Audio Design Helps Even the Totally Blind
Note: This post is a reblog of a post I wrote for the Audiokinetic Blog, and was published on June 17, 2020.
Animal Crossing is playable by the totally blind! These words have shocked many people to whom they have been spoken, and they even shocked me the first time I heard them. I couldn’t fathom how the blind could play this kind of game. I had certainly never played anything like it before. Nevertheless, now that I had heard it was possible, I had to find out how, and of course I had to try it myself. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to you, dear reader, that the primary reason Animal Crossing New Horizons is playable is its audio design. What may surprise you, however, is just how good it actually is. Sit back, relax, and I shall explain it all to you.
For any game the blind can play, we need a lot of auditory information. We need to know where things are so we can find them, or in some cases just use them as landmarks. Animal Crossing does this very, very well. Not [...]