I know MUDs are a great way for the blind to play games. I’ve heard they can install sound packs so when a door opens in game, they can hear the woosh of futuristic doors or the creaking of an old door. Lasers being fired. Footsteps. People talking in the back ground for a pub atmosphere, etc.
But are any IF game makers created so the blind can easily access the materials to create their own worlds or stories? I’m not sure how it would be handled. A lot of code or online prompts a reader would have to spit out to the listener normally.
Not sure if saying “create room”, “name room”, “write script”, etc. into a microphone would be sufficient. Or if there are ways to make it easier. Or if there is even a demand or already products out there for this already. Thank you.
I know this isn’t as helpful, but I remembered that a blind author named Mike Gerwat (who was a piano tuner for several celebrity musicians) wrote several Inform 7 games a few years back.
One of his games’s help text describes his experience. I thought he’d say how he did it, but it looks like he got someone with sight to help him code. Here’s the game page:
The quote about a helper is (mild profanity):
I am making no money out of it and I’ve written it because, in the days when I could hear. I loved my work as a piano tuner. This is for any customers that may have known me. If you recognise your names, it’s merely coincidental. I can never thank Al Golden enough, who coded the game for me and drew the maps. His work is outstanding. I would also like to thank Toby Ott, my long-suffering tester who’s’much more clever than I am at solving adventure games. You can read more about me in the about author section. Enjoy the game and be prepared to be “buggered” as they say in the UK. It isn’t an easy game and you’ll be turning the air blue before you solve it all.
I can’t speak for any IF oriented programming languages, but since source code is usually just plain text files, source code is generally pretty easy for a screen reader to read, though one might wish to increase punctuation verbosity when reading code versus when reading prose. That said, as someone who went blind about halfway through his journey to obtaining a BS in computer science, I do miss things like syntax highlighting, being able to see the overall structure of my code via indentation, and it does take me longer to parse code I’ve written than when I could see… and I find Python’s use of whitespace to delimit code blocks more irritating than tracking down a misplaced curly brace, and is probably the biggest reason I haven’t learned any python beyond the little that was included in the programming module of a bioinfomatics seminar I attended during my time at uni.
Hit post before I was ready, deleted previous and re-posted, and then realized I could have just undeleted and edited. Apologies for the noise.
Hi, I’m a seeing impaired. I’ve not encountered any languages specifically designed to be accessible to the blind, but as @Mewtamer says, you’re mostly working with plain text, so you have many options for text editors and screen readers which work with them. Most documentation is online or comes packaged with the tools. Some knowledge of the command line may be required depending on the language, the IDE, or the OS. I’ve worked most with Inform 6 and 7, and I’m currently trying to get my head around Dialog again, inspired by recent developments with that system. I really need to get back to TADS, if I can do everything from the command line then I can get around the challenges of its IDE. I’ve yet to publish anything written in any of these languages, but they’re not to blame.
I usually don’t do this, and I’m forever tripping over unbalanced quotes and brackets. There’s just something about having to parse the names of punctuation that distracts me from the rest of what I’m trying to hear. I’ve been blind since birth, though, and so learned Braille from an early age. physically reading my code on an external Braille display can help sometimes.
(Tangential, but on the off chance another screen reader user comes across this and finds indents irritating, some screen readers have the ability to audibly indicate indent level either through speech (“4 spaces”, “2 tabs”) or a pitched tone. The settings for this are often found with other verbosity options like punctuation. Indented code used to be the very bane of my existence until I discovered this. Now I can hear the width of an indent from the pitch of a beep (higher is wider).)
Probably worth noting, but my Braille touch reading is glacial(Though, back when I had a working eye, I could sight read it like it was just a different typeface) and I don’t have access to a Braille display.
And yeah, I know how to shift punctuation level in espeakup on the fly, but I’m not sure any of the presets are perfect for any particular purpose… and while there’s a hotkey for indentation in espeakup, it just givesthe column number of the first non-whitespace character on the selected line and it makes no distinction between tabs and space reading character-by-character. There’s probably some config file somewhere I could tweak to customize things to make things better, but I haven’t found the relavent information when I’ve gone googling so far… If I’m honest, I have a bad habit of getting used to the default behavior of a program and only go searching for customizations beyond the main settings window when the need becomes pressing and only learning tips when they get brought up on a mailing list instead of seeking them out(took me like a decade of being blind before learning ctrl+left/right arrow would move the insertion point by word in a lot of programs, which is a godsend when editing text).
I’ve not encountered any languages specifically designed to be accessible to the blind, but as