Hi,
Okay. If you’re in Ontario, Canada, give me a call, and I’ll buy you a bbeer. I know where your view is coming from, but I may fall into the “new schoolers” camp. I do value a good story over just about everything else (I couldn’t get involved in either Zork or A Change in the Weather for this reason). But I also have some classic style leanings. To me, IF should spark cerebral activity and not involve just flipping pages. I certainly could not write a game without puzzles, but it would be, and my wip is, more verbose than pre-Millennium IF.
I do get a bit of a taste of what trying to read highlighted text is like when I playe game with hyperlinks, eg games made wih Twine. I obviously don’t know how the screen appears, but my reader announces each link on its own line. This can be annoying, especially with many links, which interrupts the flow of sentences. I can easily skip to the next line, but if it too has a link, it too is truncated. It can be a very choppy experience. I can read the whole “page” at once, but then I need to go back to hunt for the links.
If game writers want to highlight important objects in the text, consider adding an option that will mark the words with, say, an asterisk. It is the only way that I can think of to ensure visually-impaired players, regardless of what screen reader they use, will pick it up without the need to press shortcut keys on individual words to find out if the font has changed. This may be distracting, in a different way than is highlighted text to sighted people, but I think players would get used to it pretty quickly. I know for Inform 7 at least that adding such an option isn’t tough to do.
Neil