Update Aug 8: We previously incorrectly referred to Stirlock and Superblindman as being the same person. They're not - they're friends! Article has been updated.

Guide Dev has created a modification that gives Hearthstone accessibility so blind and visually impaired individuals can play the game! This is an awesome project and are happy to see accessibility in games improving, even if it comes from the community instead of developers. Although not related, Guide Dev's reddit thread announcing the project comes a week and a half after Stirlock asked if Hearthstone could be played by someone who was blind. The timing is great and Stirlock's friend, Superblindman on Twitch, was able to try the game out during his 3-year streamoversary event today.

Although the mod is not yet complete, only supporting the tutorial, and practice games, Guide Dev states the desire to add more to the game, including creating your own decks, player vs player matches, and solo adventures support.

How does it all work? The mod injects custom code into the game so that it runs inside the game itself. Once patched, you launch your game as normal and can make use of hotkeys to navigate through the game. You can learn more about the mod over on the official page which includes the hotkey reference.

Disclaimer: Patching your game is done at your own risk and we will not be held responsible. Mods are never supported by Blizzard though in this case we do believe they'd be shooting themselves in the foot if anyone was going to be banned for it.

Quote From Hearthstone Access

Hearthstone is a popular free-to-play online digital card game developed by Blizzard Entertainment. The game is a turn-based card game between two opponents and features characters and elements from the Warcraft series. Hearthstone was first released in 2014 and still has millions of players all around the world.

Hearthstone Access is a custom Hearthstone mod built by Guide Dev that makes Hearthstone accessible for visually impaired screen-reader users who wouldn't otherwise be able to enjoy the game. For the time being, you can:

  • Play through a fully accessible tutorial composed of 6 games to learn how to play
  • Play practice games against AI opponents in order to unlock all 10 classes and their basic decks
  • Use any of the 10 different classes in practice games to unlock all basic cards as you level up
  • Unlock expert-level AI opponents by defeating all normal opponents
  • Play practice games against expert-level AI opponents to get familiar with all the classes and game mechanics

Once you've gone through all of this, you'll probably want to move on to other things such as building your own decks, playing against other players or going through Hearthstone's solo adventures to learn more about the lore of Warcraft. While these things aren't available yet, I do intend to work on them if there's enough interest.

For the time being, you can only play Hearthstone Access if you're using Windows and if you install the english version of Hearthstone - preferably American english - as other languages aren't supported. Note that while most popular screen readers should be compatible, Hearthstone Access was fully developed and tested using NVDA. If the game is unable to detect your screenreader for some reason, it will fall back to using Microsoft's Speech API.

You can see the mod in action inside of a practice game down below or watch 2 hours of gameplay from Superblindman. Comments on the mod should be directed over to Guide's reddit thread.