42 replies to this topic

[Acerbt]

Hello. I'm a blind lover of pinball and just got VP running on my system, mainly to run some of my favorite tables. I know pinball is usually a game that relies very much on site, but was wondering if it would be possible to add some sort of thing to visual pinball that has extended audio cues (for balls roling on flippers and other such things like that), as well as possibly make it possible to have a slower overall movement speed for someone like me who can't see to hear what exactly the ball(s) are doing on the field. This would be helped with more stereo audio for the ball and table objects, but I do understand that this type of thing may not be very easy to implement. Would it at least be possible to try something like this? I ask because audio driven pinball as a consept isn't actually that recent of a thing, it's just that Blind gamers like myself don't have that many options, and even fewer that are actually good enough to think of playing more than a few times. If this topic will be explored, I'd love to provide info/ resources about the audio pinball games that I have played to help out.

[wiesshund]

VPX already does these things.
It has positional audio
a table can be made to give audio cues etc

But in all honesty that will not do much good with the typical table
as the table itself is not designed to work around the concept.
The cues will be much too vague, you need a table designed with this in mind.

But if you could design one, VPX would run it in proper fashion

[Acerbt]

I would try designing one, but unfortunatly, the editor doesn't work well with the screen reader program I use to make my computer accessible without seeing the screen. I've heard the positional sounnd while playing tables, but most objects appear to come from the middle of the stereo field anyway. The kind of audio cue I'm talking about hear could actually be applied to many tables. Put simply, I want the system to play a sound constantly during the time that a ball is touching a flipper, so I don't just end up pressing the flippers aimlessly to keep a ball in play. It may seem complex to sited people who do see the action with their eyes, but it's an idea that has been used for years to make things in general accessible for blind people. The thought is to have some sort of impulss (a particular sound, a vibration or feeling, etc) happen to either give the person information or tell them to take an action, like push a button. This has been aplied to the idea of pinball. More spesific positional audio along with a simple concept like this can actually make the simple idea of playing pinball something a blind person could do. As I said earlier, there are resources that I can provide to give a more clear picture of what might be able to be done.

[xenonph]

You might try checking the Sound Manager for "fx_rubber_flipper" sound effect. (Or other Flipper hit sound effects)

You could add your own sound effect, and when ball hits flipper you would hear it clearly.

 

I added a Tron footstep sound effect to flipper rubber on my TRON Classic table.

Perhaps this method will help you to hear a sound effect of your choosing.

(Not all tables have this sound effect named the same.)

 

To get to the Sound Manager...

For example I will use TRON Classic as example..

Open table in Editor and click Table tab at top, then click Sound Manager.

Scroll down list to see if there is a file named fx_rubber_flipper.

 

 

Make sure your new sound effect has same file name as old sound effect.

Click Import and browse to your new sound effect and import it.

Test table by playing.

If you like it, Save the table when exiting.

 

Or for other tables you can look for a Flipper sub script and look for a hit or collision script. There will be a play sound effect command in script, so you will know what the name of the sound effect is in the Sound Manager that needs to be editted.

Or look in the Hit sounds or Collision sound effects script, these will usually be towards the end of table script.

 

 

So anytime the flipper is hit, it will play your sound effect.

 

Hope this helps.

[Acerbt]

I see how I could edit the table to add a new sound for the flipper being hit. The issue is that because I have to use a screen reader program to read what I'm interacting with on the computer, and the editor is unfortunatly not usable with this program, I can't actually make the changes. Even if I could, How would I be able to tell what flipper the ball hits? The positional sound only is really good enough to tell me that the ball is plunged from the right side, but not much else. Pretty much everything on the field is always played in the direct center, accept for a few particular sounds. This makes the positional audio pretty much useless for me to rely on. Positional audio has to be widely spaced enough for me to tell much of anything because if available, it's really the only thing that I can used to get info about position. For a good example of how this works, find my let's play of ESP Pinball Classic on youtube and listen to it. It's not ment to have visuals, and uses more advanced positioned sounds. It also has a concept called a scan that involves the ball rolling around as normal until it comes in contact with a flipper and once it does, it sticks and a group of sounds start playing from one side to the other to show what   is in direct view of the flipper that it stuck to. The scanning mechanic was made more interesting in the newer version (ESP Pinball Xtreme) such that instead of it always being the same like it is in classic, it all depends on the angle the ball was going in before sticking on the flipper, as well as the position that the ball hit the flipper at to start with.

Edited by Acerbt, 09 February 2023 - 03:33 AM.

[charley]

i dont know your situation.

what about an OrCam and Cochlear implants just to name a few.

what did your insurance say?

Edited by charley, 09 February 2023 - 03:56 AM.

[Gravy]

I find this topic really interesting and have had a few ideas over the years related to people with vision issues (not so much for pinball but other things).

I don't personally run SSF (surround sound feedback) but wondering if it is currently accurate enough for a blind user to be able to feel where the ball might be rolling on the playfield?

Failing that, perhaps the entire playfield could be covered in a matrix of floor triggers and playback positional clicks so that the user could determine position? Ball distance could be determined by click volume and then left/right position by stereo positioning? or maybe triggers aren't even needed and the sounds could just be based on reported ball position.

A few years back I had an idea for a headmounted unit containing a lidar scanner that would create a 3D positional audio representation of whatever was in front of the user (basically an audio depth map). It would then convert the 3D real world scene into what I can only describe as a form of positional audio static so the wearer could determine the scene in front of them. The wearer would hear a series of rapid clicks in 3D positional space with each click attached to a certain element of the scene. My thinking was the clicks would start out slowly at first and the brain was trained to determine position in a lower resolution, after months of training the clicks would become more rapid in frequency (higher resolution) eventually becoming almost like white noise that represented the 3D scene. Whether or not the brain could achieve this I don't know.

Have you heard of anything like that Acerbt? I pitched the idea to a university professor here in Australia whose students were doing projects for the blind but they assumed it was too difficult to achieve I think. I know that some blind people are able to "see" their surrounds by making clicks with their voice and listening to the echo from surrounding objects so feel this would be somewhat similar but using technology to achieve it.


This is Acer-BT's youtube audio "video" he mentioned

Acerbt, you may also want to have a listen to this video which talks about SSF (surround sound feedback).



 

Edited by Gravy, 09 February 2023 - 04:40 AM.

[charley]

gravey#7

 like any research money and funding will decide if it moves forward.

its always the money. 

[Acerbt]

I find this topic really interesting and have had a few ideas over the years related to people with vision issues (not so much for pinball but other things).

I don't personally run SSF (surround sound feedback) but wondering if it is currently accurate enough for a blind user to be able to feel where the ball might be rolling on the playfield?

Failing that, perhaps the entire playfield could be covered in a matrix of floor triggers and playback positional clicks so that the user could determine position? Ball distance could be determined by click volume and then left/right position by stereo positioning? or maybe triggers aren't even needed and the sounds could just be based on reported ball position.

A few years back I had an idea for a headmounted unit containing a lidar scanner that would create a 3D positional audio representation of whatever was in front of the user. It would then convert the 3D real world scene into what I can only describe as a form of positional audio static so the wearer could determine the scene in front of them. The wearer would hear a series of rapid clicks in 3D positional space with each click attached to a certain element of the scene. My thinking was the clicks would start out slowly at first and the brain was trained to determine position in a lower resolution, after months of training the clicks would become more rapid in frequency (higher resolution) eventually becoming almost like white noise that represented the 3D scene. Whether or not the brain could achieve this I don't know.

Have you heard of anything like that Acerbt? I pitched the idea to a university professor here in Australia whose students were doing projects for the blind but they assumed it was too difficult to achieve I think. I know that some blind people are able to "see" their surrounds by making clicks with their voice and listening to the echo from surrounding objects so feel this would be somewhat similar but using technology to achieve it.


This is Acer-BT's youtube audio "video" he mentioned

Acerbt, you may also want to have a listen to this video which talks about SSF (surround sound feedback).



 

 

That's not a bad idea at all. For those of us in the blind world like me who have had many years of only experiencing the world with sounds, feels, and smells, the idea of clicking or sound for positioning is great. Just look up audio games on google or go to audiogames.net. Audio games, as the term would suggest, are games that use audio as the primary or only source of info, and this includes stereo/ 3d audio. Some games even have virtual 3d surround for stereo headphones. One such example is not a pinball game, but an adventure set many years in the past with fully voiced characters and rich sounds, all played to the user using binorle audio. The pinball game in my youtube video is a game that uses stereo, and that also goes for the expanded version of that one. The adventure game I mentioned is called The Vale, and it was so good that big companies in the video game market helped the devs with it. And now that I bring up video games, even some of those have stereo or surround audio that makes them playable. My favorite game for the Nintendo Wii just happens to have menus with panning sounds, so as you point or move to objects, the menu sounds are panned, but also every major different type of menu item in that game has some sort of sound to destingwish it from others. There are other examples of games that have very richly designed sounds for menus as well. This thing with games is a huge rabit hole that is ready to be explored for those who are interested, so I'm not going to say more here so as not to get to off topic. The main point of this is that yes, you actually could show the position info of the ball (probably with the game's phisical actions slowed down) using noise (or a constant ball rolling loop), and then  different patterns of beeps for the cases where it may be close to a drain, on a flipper, etc. This very idea was explored in virtual suround in a project from late 2020 called pingball that sadly nobody can find much about. There's a few written pages about it if you search pinball for blind on google, along with a video demoing the game, but nothing else. That idea of sound only pinball is actually more real than any others before it, so it would have been cool if the mobile app that was made had actually made it to app stores. Heck, it was even premoted as an audio only pinball game, but for everyone with and without vision. 

Edited by Acerbt, 09 February 2023 - 05:07 AM.

[wiesshund]

I would try designing one, but unfortunatly, the editor doesn't work well with the screen reader program I use to make my computer accessible without seeing the screen. I've heard the positional sounnd while playing tables, but most objects appear to come from the middle of the stereo field anyway. The kind of audio cue I'm talking about hear could actually be applied to many tables. Put simply, I want the system to play a sound constantly during the time that a ball is touching a flipper, so I don't just end up pressing the flippers aimlessly to keep a ball in play. It may seem complex to sited people who do see the action with their eyes, but it's an idea that has been used for years to make things in general accessible for blind people. The thought is to have some sort of impulss (a particular sound, a vibration or feeling, etc) happen to either give the person information or tell them to take an action, like push a button. This has been aplied to the idea of pinball. More spesific positional audio along with a simple concept like this can actually make the simple idea of playing pinball something a blind person could do. As I said earlier, there are resources that I can provide to give a more clear picture of what might be able to be done.

 

You can do what you want
But you have to do several things

1, you need exaggerated audio objects in the playfield (not visible and not collidable)
so when you hit an object and the table does playsoundAT, it plays the sound at the locator instead of the actual object, so you can shift the sound more, to exaggerate it's separation.

 

2. You need triggers.
Ball Hitting flippers is no good, because that only makes a sound when the ball hits them hard, and only on impact
so you need some triggers along the flippers, maybe even an arc of triggers, so you have an idea, by sound, where the ball is approximately, in the arc of the flippers

 

You can also use triggers to give clues about other areas of the table

 

3. You need a table that is 100% designed for your intended purpose
Proper dimensions do not matter, the size does not matter, actually a LARGE table would probably be very good, large as in oversized to the point that gameplay seems kind of slow to sighted people.

 

Obviously you need a sighted person to help build from your directions, because you cant really voice assist lay out table objects and such. 

[Gravy]

That's not a bad idea at all. For those of us in the blind world like me who have had many years of only experiencing the world with sounds, feels, and smells, the idea of clicking or sound for positioning is great. Just look up audio games on google or go to audiogames.net. Audio games, as the term would suggest, are games that use audio as the primary or only source of info, and this includes stereo/ 3d audio. Some games even have virtual 3d surround for stereo headphones. One such example is not a pinball game, but an adventure set many years in the past with fully voiced characters and rich sounds, all played to the user using binorle audio. 

 

In my bookshelf I've got a little black book with ideas I wrote down in the past, I just had a quick flip through and there's one idea from around 1994 for an adventure game for the blind which I envisaged would be called "Second Sight", it was basically a Zork style game but purely narration and audio based rather than text, with audio clues as to what is going on in the scene rather than full narration. Funnily enough there was a game made a few years back called Second Sight, although quite different from this idea I think.

[Gravy]

gravey#7

 like any research money and funding will decide if it moves forward.

its always the money. 

Yep... although in the case of the university the professor put the idea to his students to see if any of them wanted to take it on, and I don't think any wanted to take on the challenge as probably had their own projects already underway. If I remember correctly they were working on other tech for the blind which is how I came to contact them in the first place (I think it was Adelaide Uni).

[toxie]

Here my uneducated thoughts on what may(!) be possible rather easily:

1) Slowing down ball speed. This could easily become a global option. Are the video preferences readable/settable with your screen reader program?

2) Giving explicit sound hints for balls on/near flippers. There you would have to help me out though, as even after listening to the video i cannot fully get which hints are for what. The 'ticking' sounds (and there are even multiple ones), when are these triggered exactly (maybe you could point to exact time stamps in the video and describe what happens then)? And how is the frequency, etc. dependent on the exact ball movement then? You said the ball is also kinda stuck on the flipper then as it touches it? I wonder if one could do the following: As the ball touches the flipper, one slows down the simulation speed even more for that time. But what then? If the ball rolls down the inlane and then afterwards onto the flipper, i could imagine to just have this 'ticking' sound with increasing pitch as it nears the end of the flipper as the audio. But what if it comes from the middle of the playfield and then just touches it/bounces of it afterwards? One would have to do a different ticking sound as the ball comes nearer to the flipper. Also with additional slowdown of simulation speed??

3) A global ball rolling sound with wide stereo, independent of the contact/material the ball does have (i.e. it will not have separate sounds for playfield, ramps, or the like, just one sound for everything).

[Acerbt]

Here my uneducated thoughts on what may(!) be possible rather easily:

1) Slowing down ball speed. This could easily become a global option. Are the video preferences readable/settable with your screen reader program?

2) Giving explicit sound hints for balls on/near flippers. There you would have to help me out though, as even after listening to the video i cannot fully get which hints are for what. The 'ticking' sounds (and there are even multiple ones), when are these triggered exactly (maybe you could point to exact time stamps in the video and describe what happens then)? And how is the frequency, etc. dependent on the exact ball movement then? You said the ball is also kinda stuck on the flipper then as it touches it? I wonder if one could do the following: As the ball touches the flipper, one slows down the simulation speed even more for that time. But what then? If the ball rolls down the inlane and then afterwards onto the flipper, i could imagine to just have this 'ticking' sound with increasing pitch as it nears the end of the flipper as the audio. But what if it comes from the middle of the playfield and then just touches it/bounces of it afterwards? One would have to do a different ticking sound as the ball comes nearer to the flipper. Also with additional slowdown of simulation speed??

3) A global ball rolling sound with wide stereo, independent of the contact/material the ball does have (i.e. it will not have separate sounds for playfield, ramps, or the like, just one sound for everything).

You're on the right track with those ideas. The concept of scanning is hard to take apart point by point unless you actually try playing the ESP Pinball tables, so it's hard to explain. Some people even have trouble with it after playing the game for a while, but that's usually for sited people who try it out. The ideas are explained the ESP Pinball Xtreme players guide, witch I will quote here, though keep in mide that the phizicks aren't nearly as advanced in classic, so not everything applies. "Once the ball is safely stuck to the flipper, it's time to scan.

Scanning will go from either left to right, or right to left, depending on the attributes or location of the flipper that the ball has stuck to. In most cases, the direction of the scan will make some kind of logical sense.

Scans are quite dynamic, and are based on the physical location of the ball on the flipper. Hence, a scan where the ball has stuck to the far left edge of an eight inch flipper may appear somewhat different than a scan from that same flipper when the ball has stuck to the far right edge, the center, or some other part of the flipper.

All scans are given from the perspective of the ball itself. While a scan is going, try to imagine that your head has shrunk to the size of a pinball, (don't worry, no one need know that you are imagining this. It'll be our little secret), and that you are facing the direction that the flipper faces.

For example, if a flipper is facing toward the top of the table, (that is, the side furthest away from you), and the scan moves from left to right, then objects are being scanned on the table from the table's left edge to its right.

On the other hand, if the flipper faces the opposite direction, (that is, toward the bottom or nearest side of the table to you), a scan that is going from left to right from the ball's perspective, is in reality going from the right edge to the left on the table.

Did that confuse you? Don't worry. After you play for a while, you'll intuitively begin to understand this concept and it will become second nature to you. Even if you don't, you'll still have fun playing the tables, and you can just forget all about this scanning perspective that we spent all this time explaining to you. If you are, however, not confused, then this will help empower you to rack up high scores and better understand what's happening on the table, as well as how the table is laid out.

When the object you want to whack the ball at comes up in the scan, press that flipper's assigned key to release the ball and send it flying at high speed toward it.

Since ESP Pinball Xtreme uses very complex and realistic physics to control the ball's movements, you may sometimes experience better results my releasing the ball just before or just after the object is scanned. Experimentation with each table will serve you well.

Note: In most cases, scans are a complete 180 degree sweep from left to right, or right to left. This means that the scan will range from 90 degrees to the ball's left side, all the way around to 90 degrees to the ball's right side on a left-to-right scan. This is not a hard and fast rule, however. Some scans on custom tables may work differently, or have a less than 180 degree span." The auditory part of scanning is made of a consistently timed click with sounds overlayed on top at each position if there is an object in direct view of the ball in the direction the ball faces during the scan. The thing with scans is also that when one happens, the ball sticks to the flipper until the user presses that flipper to send it off, so the scan will loop back to the start point once it reaches it's end, assuming it wasn't stopped by sending the ball in a direction by flipping it. The idea of slowing ball speeds down during flipper contact would be nice and helpful, as well as an over all slower speed of motion for the game in general. I think about 3 or 4 pitched sounds could be played during the balls travel tword or away from a flipper would be nice. These would be 1 shot sounds, so you'd define 4 different ranges of distence from the flipper and play the sound for that range upon the ball entering. For example, say we work with a 10 unit virtical space with the flipper at the bottum, YOu might place range points at 10, 8, 6, 4, and 2 units from the flipper, each with a sound descending in pitch based on the previous one. You'd then send a ball down there, and as it roles closser to the flipper, it will play those descending sounds as it enters the effective area of those ranges. The opposit would be true for the upward movement, the sounds would play in ascending pitch instead as the ball goes in the direction of the top of the table. This consept was actually used in a mobile pinball game for blind people. In that example, they used 1 set of fast spoken numbers from 3 to 1 for the left flipper, and another fast set of spoken numbers (in a different voice) for the right. This type of thing could probably be adapted to work with different kinds of tones or clicks.

I would recommend using some sort of constant wave form, like a basic puls wave, that pans to follow the balls position on the flipper, but also changes pitch as the ball comes closer to the end. This would best be done in an upward direction, meaning that the tone would start low pitched closer to the starting point of a flipper and get higher as the ball on flipper movement progresses tword the end. A timed beep of a different sort would be good to warn of the possibility of draining the ball. The faster the beeps, the closer the ball is to a drain. The constant unchanging rolling ball sound would also be useful, as long as the stereo/ surround panning is fine enough. I think these cues should be independently controllable, for those who may only need 1 or a few of them rather than all, though adding an enable all button would help those who would like them all on. I can navigate settings dialog boxes with my screen reader's object movement controls, so those are technically usable, however, a lot, if not all, of the dialog boxes don't allow use of simple system level keyboard commands to focus on different objects/ settings. This means that using the simple standard keys of Tab, Shift+Tab, arrow keys, space, and enter does not work to interact with the settings controls, leaving me no choice but to use the screen reader's virtual navigation commands. What makes this so unusual is that most times when I use the screen reader or mouse click to press something rather than the system commands, the system's standard keyboard focus moves to that item as if I could have tabbed to it, but the keyboard commands still won't do anything. This wasn't as much of a problem in earlier versions of VPX but has become more of one recently. If anything else needs clarification, just ask.

Edited by Acerbt, 09 February 2023 - 03:42 PM.

[toxie]

Okay, i will try to let that sink in and maybe come up with a prototype on the weekend (have some hours spare time then).

I think it will work best if we ping-pong this, so i'll just change things based on your feedback.

 

The most interesting part will be how much i can slow down the simulation without things falling apart overall.

And how to tackle balls coming back via the middle of the playfield so that one is able to react based on sound cues.

 

I guess also interesting then will be to simply be able to turn off all (most?) visualization to allow to be less hardware hungry.

 

As for scores, etc: I have no clue how these could be made audible on modern machines. For old machines with reels, there could be some kind of wizardry, but new ones that just display it??

Some machines allow to read out the score via NVRAM, but this is specific to each machine, so nothing that can be generalized.  :/

[Acerbt]

Okay, i will try to let that sink in and maybe come up with a prototype on the weekend (have some hours spare time then).

I think it will work best if we ping-pong this, so i'll just change things based on your feedback.

 

The most interesting part will be how much i can slow down the simulation without things falling apart overall.

And how to tackle balls coming back via the middle of the playfield so that one is able to react based on sound cues.

 

I guess also interesting then will be to simply be able to turn off all (most?) visualization to allow to be less hardware hungry.

 

As for scores, etc: I have no clue how these could be made audible on modern machines. For old machines with reels, there could be some kind of wizardry, but new ones that just display it??

Some machines allow to read out the score via NVRAM, but this is specific to each machine, so nothing that can be generalized.  :/

You could try implementing some sort of OCR tool to scan a part of the game window for text. This is the kind of thing I use in the screen reader to see if an inaccessible app has text that can be recognised so I can interact with it. Also, I just thought about the ball sound idea again, and the thought of multiball came up. To make that work, each ball would have to have it's own character of sound so that they could each be located at the same time while the multiball mode is active. If each ball sounded the same, it would be difficult if not impossible to find any given ball on the field this way. Also, balls coming down the center would be easy to spot, because if it's in the direct center or near it, the sound of the moving ball would be panned accordingly, and that would be good enough. The drain warning cues would also aid with this.

Edited by Acerbt, 09 February 2023 - 07:27 PM.

[Gravy]

Okay, i will try to let that sink in and maybe come up with a prototype on the weekend (have some hours spare time then).

I think it will work best if we ping-pong this, so i'll just change things based on your feedback.

I love the fact that you are willing to give this a shot Toxie, my thinking is that there might be specific tables developed for this system rather than trying to shoehorn it into existing tables in which case the score narration might be easier? Is that what you envisage Acerbt?

[xenonph]

I love the fact that you are willing to give this a shot Toxie, my thinking is that there might be specific tables developed for this system rather than trying to shoehorn it into existing tables in which case the score narration might be easier? Is that what you envisage Acerbt?

 

 

Toxie has always tried to help those who are visually impaired play pinball.

Check here..

https://www.vpforums...632#entry494993

 

He is a great role model for this community.

[wiesshund]

 

Okay, i will try to let that sink in and maybe come up with a prototype on the weekend (have some hours spare time then).

I think it will work best if we ping-pong this, so i'll just change things based on your feedback.

I love the fact that you are willing to give this a shot Toxie, my thinking is that there might be specific tables developed for this system rather than trying to shoehorn it into existing tables in which case the score narration might be easier? Is that what you envisage Acerbt?

 

 

Atari Hercules, modified, would make a great candidate for a mod base
Large ball, slow table, doesnt have 10,000 complicated things going on

I think if i was setting something up for sight impaired, with custom made tables
I would use a full 5.1 theater system
I would encode all NORMAL backglass audio to play from center channel only, so that they can automatically identify that spacial area as of 0 importance
as far as table position goes (when i say normal, i dont mean mindless noise us sighted people have going on, music etc, but like position non specific call outs, like BONUS! etc)

and then set the front right and left, and side surrounds, around their player position
set up for a wide space, rather than the typical narrow front used in home theater.

 

Then if you use SSF to grossly exaggerate sound positions to better cue them as to where a thing is going on at

Add to that some special audio cues, maybe calling out the ball entering a relative area for example
those could also be properly encoded, using standard 5.1 channel mapping and be played as BG sounds
and they would play in the correct location.
That would be useful for generic locational awareness that does not need specific location type precision.

VPX can do a lot audio wise, if one just asks it to, and takes the time to assembled the proper media.

I imagine that one could design a special cab also, that uses DOF, on custom tables
to provide a different kind of feed back, one that is not after the fact feedback, but preemptive

[Acerbt]

 

Okay, i will try to let that sink in and maybe come up with a prototype on the weekend (have some hours spare time then).

I think it will work best if we ping-pong this, so i'll just change things based on your feedback.

I love the fact that you are willing to give this a shot Toxie, my thinking is that there might be specific tables developed for this system rather than trying to shoehorn it into existing tables in which case the score narration might be easier? Is that what you envisage Acerbt?

 

This accessibility system could and should be taken advantage of in custom tables. It's one of those instences where I want to play new stuff, but I also want to play the classicks. I'm not looking for every feature to be supported in every table, I'm just looking for the accessibility to be there to at least have a better shot at playing the tables somewhat well. The score really doesn't matter as much. For current tables that could directly read the score, it would be an added bonus to have it spoken, but then again, for tables that don't, some form of OCR (optical character recognition) could be used on a part of the game window to allow the player to attempt to read the score.