My apologies if this is in the wrong category or not. Six months ago, I created a fork of JDAAD that included the required changes to make DAAD games playable with screen readers in the browser. (I probably need to update it, seeing as JDAAD is constantly being updated, but I digress).
However, I must point out that there is currently (aside from said JDAAD fork) no screen reader accessible way to play DAAD games on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.
One of the only ways that exists to play DAAD games is through the Zesarux ZX Spectrum emulator, using the emulator’s built-in text-to-speech output functions. However, not all DAAD games are available for the Speccy, and not everyone is going to want to launch a complete system emulator to play an adventure.
Speaking of emulators, It was previously that a blind player, using dosemu, dosemu2, or a special talking version of Dosbox (or Dosbox-X), could play DAAD adventures released for DOS, although (once again) in an emulated environment. However, that was before PCDAAD became the default interpreter for DAAD games created with DRC and (naturally) DAADReady. Because of the way PCDAAD works, text is not printed to the screen in traditional bios mode in DOS, meaning screen readers (either within DOS or in Linux via dosemu/dosemu2) cannot read the text.
This is also true for the experimental windows interpreter, which uses a similar process to play DAAD games on windows, as does JDAAD (which is why I had to create said fork).
There is one other way to play DAAD games in an accessible manner, and that is via the original DAAD PC interpreters in an accessible emulated DOS environment, but due to most new DAAD games using Maluva, this isn’t ideal.
I did a quick comparison of your jdaad.js and the one I’ve used in the past… and realised how out of date the version of jdaad I was using was! If I ever get around to making a new game then I really must catch up with what’s been happening with DAAD.
Mind you, I much prefer just writing something for the ZX Spectrum. So much easier to target an old platform set in stone.
Zesarux isn’t my day-to-day Spectrum emulator of choice. However, it has all sorts of unusual features, including many integrations with old text adventure systems, which make it well worth checking out. I’m glad to hear it makes some of our old text adventures more accessible.
It really does. I’ve been able to play so many classic adventures because Zesarux uses character trap routines to determine what text is printed to the emulated Speccy screen, before passing them to a TTS program (ESpeak, Festival, Etc.). This also means that retro software like the Quill, GAC and PAW are also accessible on the platform. The same is true with the BBC Micro and BeebEm, which uses a different method but opens up just as many adventures to us. Now, if only I could convince someone to do the same for a Commodore 64 emulator, I’d be golden.