Virtual D&D and the Hearing Impaired.

[Hussar]

Is using VoIP a priority? How are your typing skills?

My advice would be to go completely text. You don't need the voice chat at all. Maptools has a framework for 4e that has all the conditions pre-programmed, and they show up on the tokens as needed.

I know my group has no interest in voice chat, so, I'm totally used to quiet gaming.

 

[Milagroso]

Wow! Thank you all for your great suggestions and timely responses.

A few things I should have made clearer.

1.) We will not be using Web Cams at all. This is a personal choice by some members of the game, including me.

2.) None of us know ASL (sign-language).

3.) The distinction between deaf and hearing impaired might make some difference, but to be honest I am not sure if she is deaf, hard of hearing, or what. I only know that she cannot use audio applications because of a physical impairment.

4.) Although she is a fast typist, and so am I, the other members of the group are not.

5.) Barring that, typing out the adventure just isn't going to work for me. I've tried that before and didn't like it. I can prepare the materials ahead of time, sure. But I can't continuously type out every nuance of the battle, the scene, etc. VoIP is the method that we have chosen because we are so use to doing it already all the time. It just seems to make sense to do it that way.

I hope this helps and again thanks to everyone for their ideas.

 

[Vicente]

I have seen in many Microsoft conferences how they subtitle what their speakers are saying automatically (with pretty good results). I'm pretty sure it's part of the SAPI, but I can't find good documentation about it (SAPI has .NET bindings, so it should be easy to do a small app for this in theory).

Some info:

Microsoft Speech API - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://www.microsoft.com/speech/developers.aspx

I'll try to see if I find more info about this...

 

[Jdvn1]

In theory, you could use a TDD/TTY service (at least, they used to be free in Texas), but that might be an abuse of the service.

 

[Umbran]

1.) We will not be using Web Cams at all. This is a personal choice by some members of the game, including me.

4.) Although she is a fast typist, and so am I, the other members of the group are not.

Well, if typing is out, there are two basic technologies that can assist you: webcams and speech-to-text software.

Dragon Naturally Speaking is reportedly very good speech to text - kind of the industry standard.

I may be incorrect, but I don't think you can shift the burden to her end - all of you talking, and her hooking up an instance of DNS to turn it to text on her end. I don't believe the software accepts arbitrary audio streams as input (though I could be wrong there), and I even more doubt that it would be able to differentiate speakers - you'd all be one "person" to it, so she couldn't tell who was saying what, in general, and the software's ability to "train" to recognize your personal speech patterns will fail if you have several people talking to it at once, limiting its accuracy.

The other option would be for each player to have DNS, and feed its results into a chat program for her. But that'll cost you about $100 per person for the software.

I don't know the basis of your personal decision to not use webcams, but they are pretty darned cheap - probably cheaper than the speech-to-text option.

 

[Milagroso]

The other option would be for each player to have DNS, and feed its results into a chat program for her. But that'll cost you about $100 per person for the software.

I don't know the basis of your personal decision to not use webcams, but they are pretty darned cheap - probably cheaper than the speech-to-text option.

Based on this knowledge, we will revisit the idea of possibly using Webcams. Thank you.