Blizzard gave us the first iteration of the Audio Assist features recently and I’ve had a chance to play with them a bit now and my general thoughts are “This is not enough and honestly feels like a slap in the face to those of us who require audio assist for disability reasons”
First up is the audio assist that is attached to the CD Manager - currently only SPELLS can have audio triggers added to them, this has to be expanded to our buffs and debufs as well because otherwise all we get for audio assist with CD Manager is sound effects on spells being off/on cd or Windows Dave/Zira voice saying the spells name. The choices for sound effects are great the number of voice options is something to improve upon and making sure that we can do audio cues on buffs and debuffs too.
Second is the lack of integration for audio assist with boss warnings and timeline. This has to change as well for accessibility reasons. You added the timeline and boss warnings for accessibility reasons as well, this falls into the same category since there are people who play this game who have visual impairments. Audio cues are how they resolve those impairments and still play this game. Give us options to have sound and voice assist alerts related to boss spells and events.
Third are the already established options - These are really kind of rudimentary and just downright head scratchers to me. You have one for combat start/end which sort of makes sense and then you have one for reading out player and target health percents with a frequency control setting as well as at what % you want the voice lines to start. I think I understand why Blizzard would go with these but often times what we are using sound cues for in terms of accessibility is to notify us of game events which are hard to see due to visual clutter coupled with disability.
As an example I’ll use something like a buff proc from your spec, we would typically assign a sound cue to that since making our screens flash or having a bigger health bar are (or were) ways to get around visually struggling to see our player or target health bars. These settings as they exist now exclusively help those that are almost fully blind and yet the nearly fully blind WoW players won’t be able to do much of anything as they won’t have access to tools like addons which enable echo-location or read out player position. If you are intending to provide all of these things please let us know so that we don’t spam you guys with complaints!
General feedback on the audio assist feature:
The TTS voice can lag behind, for example with Ret Paladin Wake of Ashes it not only reads out Wake of Ashes name when you have it set to go off when the spell comes off CD but it will then automatically call out Hammer of Light (if you take Templar) as well since it is attached to Wake of Ashes albeit having no CD Manager tracker to set an audio cue option for. The fact that it does this with Wake of Ashes causes the voice to lag behind by several seconds sometimes in its call outs which can lead to confusion for the player or even overlapping voices/sound effects.
It would be really cool if we could adjust the sound of each individual audio cue we set that way we can prioritize sounds by importance to us as well!