Authors! Designers! Developers! Lend me your eyes! Now that you’ve got no eyes, think about that project of yours - can you still play it? Nowadays, there are many devices to play IF in, and many players who want to play your game. But those devices may have limitations, and some of your players -…

My thoughts were one of “your turn.” “what now.” or “what next.” I thought of rotating them randomly but that might be more annoying than consistency.

I’m not sure the type of command prompt matters. The default is fine for me. I think the only danger of having text would be that some new players may not realize they don’t have to listen to the whole prompt. Short might be better, but the difference in time to read out “greater” or “what next” or …

I’ve made a small extension out of the code I posted earlier and posted it on github. It’s called “Spelling for Screenreaders.” You can find it here: github.com/i7/extensions/blob/m … eaders.i7x

After thinking about this some more, I wondered if something more flexible than my previous code would be potentially more useful. I’m thinking of code that would allow the player to request the spelling of any visible thing. Like this: [code]A thing has a number called a spelling reference number…

This would be useful when the author isn’t sure which words are going to be a problem. It also has the advantage of reading aloud punctuation. The verbosity of screen readers can be adjusted, and some players may not have them set to read aloud marks like hyphens or apostrophes. At low verbosity, wo…

Thanks Neil! I’ve made a small extension out of this code as well, called “Simple Spelling,” and put it on Github for now.

Screen reader support is something I have considered for TAVERN , although details are not currently defined. It is my intention that with this, control character 22 and the SPEECH.SYN lump can be used to control the speech synthesizer in text output, and that the FEATURE? opcode (when given the corr…

Is there a footnote style which is preferable for screen readers? For instance, is one of these three styles preferred over the others? Asterisks: [code]ELIXIR OF LIFE Study Aid Can’t stay awake in class? Spent half the night studying for an exam? Forget about setting an alarm! Simply throw an EL…

I tried the quotes in NVDA. I’m not an expert so you should seek more reports. For what it’s worth, with my configuration, NVDA reads asterisks (*) as “star”. The other symbols, cross and vertical double-cross († ‡) were not vocalised. I found “star” versus “star star” less easy to distinguish than…

The screen reader JAWZ does read out the symbols, but I think it is always safest to assume some readers won’t. I like the numbered footnotes, and they are probably the safest to use because all readers recognize numbers (but not necessarily as superscript; parentheses are okay). My reader won’t an…

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Accessibility and Usability: notes for authors

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