Hearthstone Has a Blind Player Community, but It Is in Jeopardy

Did you know that Hearthstone is one of the few mainstream games that blind and low-vision players can play on an even playing ground with sighted players? Hearthstone does not have native accessibility features, but a third-party developer built and has maintained an unofficial patch that adds accessibility to the game as a hobby. Unfortunately, they can no longer keep maintaining it, and the Hearthstone blind player community is at risk of collapsing. Blizzard has announced that they are looking into building native accessibility into the game, but the schedule and extent of their commitment remain uncertain.

Hearthstone Access – A Custom Hearthstone Mod for Blind and Visually Impaired Players

On August 6, 2021, Guide Dev shared some wonderful news on Hearthstone Reddit. They had single-handedly built a custom mod for Hearthstone that made the constructed format of the game accessible for blind players on Windows. The mod adds a number of keyboard shortcuts for controls and support for screen readers to give the player full information about what is happening in the game, what cards they hold, and what is on the board. When you think about it, that’s all there is to Hearthstone. Sure, stuff happens in the game that would be hard to replicate with physical cards, but all of that happens automatically. What you really control and think about are the cards. Cards are text. The text translates into a play experience that can be experienced to its fullest with or without vision. It’s a remarkable fit that most other genres cannot achieve. They can adjust the experience, but it is not exactly the same. A card game experience can be nigh indistinguishable.

For more than a year, Guide Dev kept improving and maintaining Hearthstone Access. The mod needs to be updated for every Hearthstone patch, and those come in roughly every two weeks. To make matters worse, Hearthstone Access had to be implemented as a custom patch. It is not strictly speaking a mod that adds on top of Hearthstone, it actually changes the Hearthstone client itself. Yes, there are some potential terms of use issues here, but the Hearthstone developers saw the value of the mod and started to share patches with Guide Dev in advance so that they could update the mod as fast as possible. Even so, the process of decompiling Hearthstone, fixing the patch, and recompiling Hearthstone took a lot of time. Under-the-hood changes proved to be the most difficult of them all, especially patch 23.2, which took Guide Dev more than 30 hours of work to implement.

Guide Dev also added new features over time, most notably support for Battlegrounds. All in all, they spent more than 1000 hours working on Hearthstone Access. Eventually, this became untenable. Spending so much time on a hobby in addition to a regular full-time job and a family forced Guide Dev to sunset Hearthstone Access with patch 24.6 on November 4, 2022.

Is There a Market for Accessible Games?

As the population ages, loss of vision becomes more commonplace. While many issues are treatable and visual impairment is more common in poor countries where treatment is not easily available, the number of people with poor vision is significant and rising.

Globally, there are almost 40 million blind people and more than 200 million people with moderate to severe vision impairment. The numbers are rising and may even triple by 2050. In the United States alone, there are more than seven million people who have a visual disability.

Thinking in business terms – game companies are businesses, after all – this is a real market. It is a market that has been underserved in gaming, but that is about to change. We are now seeing new AAA games add tens of accessibility features. God of War Ragnarök and especially The Last of Us: Part 2 are some recent examples of where mainstream games are headed when it comes to accessibility.

Card games have superior potential to serve this market. Fundamentally, the information you need to receive to play the game and the controls you use are very simple. I realize this was not a high priority back in 2014, but as the definition of who can be a gamer has evolved, so have the requirements and opportunities.

Blizzard to the Rescue?

After Guide Dev announced the sunsetting of Hearthstone Access, the Hearthstone community sprang to action. Reddit posts made it to the front page of Hearthstone Reddit, petitions were started, and Youtube videos were published about the blight of the blind player community.

Blizzard was surprisingly quick to respond. First, Mike Ybarra, the President of Blizzard Entertainment, acknowledged the issue on Twitter.

Thanks for sharing this. Team is evaluating.

— Mike Ybarra ???????? (@Qwik) November 8, 2022

A little while later, Blizzard shared an official forum post about the matter. Crucially, Blizzard announced that they are now exploring implementing native accessibility into the game.

With HearthstoneAccess mod support ending, we’ve made the decision to shift our work in this area—instead of working on accessibility features that complement HearthstoneAccess, we’ll be exploring what it will take to implement native accessibility features that allow for our blind and low vision community to get back into the game. We’re incredibly appreciative of everything that GuideDev has done for our community and we’re very excited to continue expanding our game’s accessibility.

A project of this magnitude and importance will take time to complete. We’re very sorry to our friends and players who won’t have access to Hearthstone during this time.

These are promising signs.

However, it is worth noting that Blizzard is now “exploring” the matter and that there is no set timeline for returning accessibility support to the game. This is the best language we can hope for at this point: there is no way Blizzard could commit to something specific after just a few days of looking into it. At the same time, it means that the matter still needs more visibility and more support.

What Can I Do?

You can still show your support for native accessibility by signing the petition.

Furthermore, if you have the skills, time, and passion, you may be able to help maintain Hearthstone Access while Blizzard is working on native accessibility options. Hearthstone Access is written in C# and has been a demanding part-time job for its creator to maintain. In fact, Guide Dev wrote earlier that more than 20 people had offered to help over the past year, but they all ended up withdrawing after taking a good look at the sheer amount of work ahead. Nonetheless, the community members are hard at work self-organizing support for the mod that would enable them to play March of the Lich King. These efforts are coordinated in the Hearthstone Access Discord.

Hearthstone has an opportunity to become a forerunner in accessibility in gaming. I have high hopes that Blizzard will deliver, but continued support and vigilance are still needed to keep them on the right path.