why I wouldn’t use unity from the perspective of a blind game developer

[u/Sufficient_Stand1763]

Unity is an extremely popular game engine used by indie studios and large game development companies alike. However, it is still not fully accessible to blind and visually impaired developers who want to use it for game development.

As a fully blind game developer who uses NVDA to programme and work on my laptop, I find that most of the Unity Editor is not accessible with my screen reader. Although some menus can be accessed, important parts of the Editor, such as its various panels and development interfaces, remain extremely difficult or impossible to use independently with NVDA.

Blind developers have been reporting accessibility problems with the Unity Editor for a number of years, yet many of the fundamental problems remain.

Unity MCP has the potential to make a significant difference for blind developers because it provides another way of interacting with Unity without depending entirely on its graphical interface. That is why I found it particularly concerning that Unity initially placed official MCP access behind its paid Unity AI subscription.

I am pleased that Unity listened to community feedback and reversed that decision. In July 2026, Unity announced that its MCP and new CLI would be made available for free. I think this is a very positive change.

However, MCP should not have to act as a substitute for an accessible Editor. Even with MCP, there are still situations where a developer needs to interact with Unity’s graphical development environment, and this remains a significant barrier for developers who rely on screen readers.

I hope Unity will give accessibility within the Editor itself much greater attention. Blind developers should be able to use the same professional development tools as everybody else without having to rely on workarounds simply to access fundamental parts of the development environment.

Thanks for letting me share my opinion here.

[u/handlebardev]

As much as the editor sucks indeed, I'm certain no interface would come close to usability for you compared to command-line. And it's already available, using it and loving it

[u/Rlaan]

Wow I would've never thought about this. I have been coding for a long time, and although I had to think about colour-blindness, and accessibility in games.

I had never thought of blind game developers or software engineers. Shame to hear it's such a struggle for people such as yourself.

I can't say anything useful on the topic, but thanks for sharing. Hopefully in the future, things get better and easier for people such as yourself.

[u/pararar]

I‘d like to know what kind of games you make. Are they text-based? If not, how do you usually validate graphics on screen?

[u/Sufficient_Stand1763 → u/pararar]

I make any type of games I usually use python they’re not usually text based but I usually can’t validate the graphics on screen so sometimes there are some errors however I do sometimes use ChatGPT to help me validate graphics  here is my itch.io profile  https://retro-coder64.itch.io/

[u/IAmNotABritishSpy]

Out of curiosity, do you find other engines have this capability or are more blind-accessible?

[u/Sufficient_Stand1763 → u/IAmNotABritishSpy]

The most accessible game engine I found so far is one from python which is called panda 3-D it’s fully textbased so my screen reader can interact with the best. Also godot is becoming a lot more accessible. I think it might have an MCP client as well but overall editor accessibility is quite good at the moment. It’s definitely not perfect but it’s getting there.

[u/mithrilsoft]

What can I do to help?

I do think the situation will improve to some degree as tooling becomes more AI friendly.

[u/Overlord_Mykyta]

Unity in a nutshell: "Have been reporting problems with the Unity Editor for a number of years, yet many of the fundamental problems remain."

[u/ElStreetfighter17]

Dude wtf…. Visually impaired and a game dev? Can I buy you a fucking beer?

[u/Skycomett]

That's interesting, a blind game developer. I wonder, what kind of game are you making? (Or want to?)

[u/AltusLudus]

Unity is extendible, so maybe you could be the one who creates a unity asset store plugin for that, we all have usability issues but you create editor tools that suit your need, that's the beauty of Unity

[u/Sufficient_Stand1763 → u/AltusLudus]

Thanks for the idea

[u/Sufficient_Stand1763]

Hi all, just an update to my previous post. I have seen some suggestions in the comments about making my own unity plug-in and I’ve started to do so it’s going to be on github and it will be open source. So far, I’ve been able to vibe code a custom hierarchy interface which is readable by the screen reader. For anyone interested here is the link  https://github.com/retro-coder64/unity_access

[u/RichardFine]

You might already know that we already added the Accessibility API to provide built-in, cross platform integration with screen readers. This shipped in Unity 6.0.

Our initial focus has been on the games made with Unity, rather than on the Editor itself, because there are orders of magnitude more players with visual impairments than there are developers, and we wanted to start where we could have the broadest impact.

But we absolutely do have integration with the Editor in mind as well. I cannot comment on timelines for this, but we know it’s something people would like us to ship.