In the competitive world of professional gaming, one gifted player goes by the username Rattlehead.
At the tournaments he attends in the US, his opponents quickly spot that he, real name Carlos Vasquez, is, by his own description, “completely blind”.
They then let their guard down, wrongly thinking that they are set for an easy game of popular fighting series Mortal Kombat. And he often beats them.
Instead of being able to see the game, Carlos instead relies upon hearing it to make his attacking and defensive moves. “I’m able to pick up on the specific sounds of the characters,” he says.
From Houston, Texas, Carlos started playing video games at the age of six in 1992. But when he was 11 he was diagnosed with a type of glaucoma, an eye condition that slowly took away his sight
“It wasn’t an overnight situation,” says Carlos, now 37. “[For the first years] I was still able to see rough outlines of objects, but not fully detailed anymore.
“But over time my vision became worse and worse, to the point where I was around 24-years-old and completely blind.”
At the time he found that most mainstream games were almost impossible to play. Features that help people with a sight impairment to play, known as gaming accessibility, were not around.
Such features include screen readers, where the game verbally describes what is happening.
Back in his 20s, Carlos was able to play some fighting games, and in particular Mortal Kombat.
“It wasn’t because Mortal Kombat had accessibility features [at the time],” he says. “It was just because players like myself were able to pick up on the [distinct] sounds. It allowed us to play the game as much as possible.”
For example, he recognised that the character who started on the right side of the screen would grunt at a slightly higher pitch than the one on the left. This allowed him to work out which character he was playing.
Fast forward to 2023, and a growing number of games have accessibility features, including Forza Motorsport, Diablo 4, The Last of Us, Hearthstone, Street Fighter 6, and the latest edition of Mortal Kombat.
Forza Motorsport has a function called Blind Driving Assists whereby the visually impaired are verbally told of forthcoming bends on the track and their sharpness. Various noises or audio cues indicate things such as a car’s speed, whether it is facing the wrong way, or when to change gear.
For Mortal Kombat a whole host of additional audio feedback is now available, such as letting you know the distance between fighters, or if an opponent ducks.
Forza Motorsport also includes the latest development in games accessibility – the increased use of a technology called spatial audio.
This uses specifically directed sound to significantly help visually impaired players work out their precise location on the screen.
Prof Brian Smith, an expert in the field, explains how it works: “When you hear a sound [in real life], such as person speaking from a certain location around you, the physical waveform of the sound reaches your two different ears at slightly different times, at slightly different volumes.
“Then the sound will go through your head to reach the other ear, and so that signal is also slightly transformed. Your brain is very good at getting those signals at different timings and saying: ‘Oh, that means the sound is coming from this location, and it’s a single sound’.”
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Prof Brian Smith, an expert in the field, explains how it works: “When you hear a sound [in real life], such as person speaking from a certain location around you, the physical waveform of the sound reaches your two different ears at slightly different times, at slightly different volumes.
