Introduction
A little context
Skullgirls is, arguably, the first truely accessible mainstream fighting game. This is because the developer, Mike Z, took the time to implement accessibility, as explained here.
This means that anyone, whether they have vision or not, can play on a relatively equal footing.
If you use NVDA, the process is, with patience and sometimes sighted help, relatively straightforward. However, there is one interesting conundrum that I came accross recently that I managed to solve in a fairly limited amount of time.
So what is this conundrum you’re saying about?
The problem I found was that whilst the game worked perfectly well, I couldn’t easily mute the speech from my screen reader, NVDA, without reaching over to my keyboard and pressing the control key. Whilst I don’t mind doing it every once in a while, the training mode practically forces you to do it multiple times to stop the screen reader from speaking the previous combo’s output. This is good say, if you’ve accidentally cancelled a combo too early and you want to just carry on your training session as quickly as possible.
So how did I solve this?
Whilst playing in training mode, I realised a crucial factor that might just, with the right level of adjustment, allow the muting process to be mapped to an action on the controller: the fact that the right analogue stick is not used.
Admittedly, this doesn’t account for controllers that don’t have a second analogue stick, but it’s probably safe to say that a lot of people playing skullgirls with a controller will be using one that has a pair of sticks. But How did we do it?
Joy2Key
I knew from previously using Joy2Key for other games that theoretically my solution of mapping the control key to the right analogue stick was possible, but wasn’t sure how to do it. After a while of digging through google, I couldn’t find what I needed. Not content with giving up, I eventually stumbled across
this instructibles.com page that explains how to do it, albeit for a different purpose.
So what do I have to do, and what will the process achieve?
I’ll answer the second question first. The following steps will enable you, if you’re playing with a screen reader, to mute it by pushing the right analogue stick in pretty much any direction. Below are the steps you should follow, and the tools you’re going to need.
The process
-
Download the
Joy2Key 7zip file
containing the necessary configurations as well as the Joy2Key program itself. -
Extract the folder using either 7Zip from
the 7-zip.org site
or any alternative program capable of opening *.7z files. - *note* There’s no specific place this folder needs to be stored, since this is a portable installation of Joy2Key. This means that it should even work on a flash drive as well which could be handy for those using other people’s PCs.
- Make sure skullgirls is running with clipreader enabled, then open Joy2Key. Once you’re in the game, try arrowing up and down and seeing if the screen reader is muted when you push the right analogue stick in a direction.
*note2*
The Joy2Key application must be open while skullgirls is running. If you close it, the functionality described, specifically the muting feature afforded by the right analogue stick, will not work.
You should now have the ability to mute your screen reader whenever it is speaking too much during skullgirls gameplay. If you wish for any help or have any other tips, please feel free to navigate your way to the contact form and
get in touch