Accessibility layer for blind players — working implementation of the roadmap's Accessibility options

[piapenia]

Hi! I'm a blind, IAAP-certified digital accessibility specialist (WCAG 2.2) and a native screen reader user (NVDA). Together with an AI coding agent working under my direction and QA, I built the accessibility layer in this PR on top of your dev branch: it makes the game playable without sight, implementing the "Accessibility options" item from your roadmap. (Your repo has issues disabled, so I'm introducing myself here — happy to move the conversation to Discord.)

What this PR adds (tested by me, playing your Testing_Core map blind)

• Proximity sonar: spatialized semantic sounds from the nearest reachable interactable — doors knock on wood, pickable items chime — parking-sensor cadence, wall occlusion (no sonar through walls), double beat in interaction range, plus an on-demand area scan (pitch encodes each target's height, TLOU-style).
• Object navigation (KOTOR-style): Q/E cycle targets with spoken type, distance and relative direction ("Door, 4 meters, ahead-right, 1 of 3"); Enter auto-walks and interacts; manual input always cancels.
• Mouse-free camera: smooth turn keys, announced 45-degree snap turns, 180-degree turn, spoken compass. Pitch deliberately unmapped (never drifts without a mouse).
• NVDA output via the official NVDA Controller Client (LGPL 2.1): room announcements ("You entered: Light Containment Zone") powered by your own RoomInstance system, scene descriptions (including alt text I wrote for the menu artwork), health/sanity/crouch announcements, target callouts, on-demand status report, a pause-time audio cue glossary, and a UI reader ready for your future menus.
• Safety net: fall announcements + auto-rescue to last safe ground (I fell off the edge of the test map in total silence — that incident is this feature's origin story), ledge warnings, stuck detection, on-demand rescue key.
• Gamepad support incl. DualSense: d-pad navigation, L3 scan, R3 compass, and purposeful haptics (subtle tick on wall contact, damage rumble scaled by hit size).

Engineering notes

• Fully additive: one new feature folder (Assets/_Project/_Features/Accessibility/, following your conventions) + CC0 sounds in StreamingAssets/A11y; zero edits to your scripts, scenes, prefabs or input asset. Player components attach at runtime through Core.Player.
• 60+ batchmode smoke tests (-executeMethod AccessibilitySmokeTest.Run); licensing table included (CC0 audio, LGPL 2.1 NVDA client distributed unmodified with its license).
• Full documentation, guideline mapping (gameaccessibilityguidelines.com) and accessibility-friendly engineering recommendations for your remaining roadmap items (each grounded in something we actually hit): see ACCESSIBILITY.md in this PR.
• If you'd rather ship accessibility as a mod once your Lua modding API matures, I'm happy to go that route instead — let's discuss which events/interfaces the API should expose (IInteractable and your Core facade already made most of this possible).
• Bonus finding: FMOD for Unity's bank copy (BuildStatusWatcher) never fires in -batchmode CLI builds; we work around it by calling EventManager.CopyToStreamingAssets explicitly in our build script — may be worth documenting for contributors.

I do accessibility reviews professionally; consider me a standing QA resource for anything sound/navigation related. Contact: here on GitHub, or find me on any social network as @blindaudiogamer.

— María Pía Peña Foissac (@blindaudiogamer)