I feel like giving Zork to a casual gamer who’s never heard of IF before would be like introducing them to Mario with The Lost Levels or action RPGs with a Souls-like. Unless they’re looking for a hard challenge that is arguably unfair at times, they’re probably going to bounce off and go do something else, especially in this modern age of there being more free content on the internet than anyone could ever consume in their life time… Back in the 70s and 80s, computer games in general where kind of niche and the technical limitations of the day meant challenge was often the only way to get any longevity out of games with a defined ending, plus, if you had a home computer and could afford to own games, that was already a sizeable investment, and playing a different game or doing something non-game related usually meant another significant investment… if you were lucky, you might have access to a public library or have cable TV or a local Arcade where if you didn’t like one game, you were only out a quarter and could try a different game for just a quarter, but even those are limited compared to the contents of just one site like IFDB, IFArchive, Project Gutenberg, YouTube, etc. never mind the parts of the Internet the big corporations wish didn’t exist.
As for Hal’s questions:
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I use Orca in the GUI and espeakup in the linux console. I use the default British English espeak-ng voice with both, including rate and pitch. Not sure what values Orca uses for these pitch and rate settings, but espeakup has hotkeys for changing volume, rate, and pitch on the fly and identifies the settings I use as pitch 5 and rate 2. If I had to guess, these pitch settings roughly correspond to a human tenor and a normal conversational rate of speech.
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I haven’t played much choice, but pre-blindness, I mostly played games using gamepad style contrls, and would have no objections to trying a game built for gamepad.
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No game comes to mind in this regard.
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Orca has a large number of navigational hotkeys that, when browsing a web page, will jump between html elements of a particular type. It varies greatly from site to site, and some times between different pages on the same site, but a lot of it comes down to memorizing some details about how a given page is laid out and using that to effectively jump to where I want to be on the page. Last time I used NVDA or JAWS, they had most of the same navigational hotkeys, though admittedly, that was back around 2018 and I used NVDA more than JAWS back then.
Amaong Orca’s navigational hotkeys are
h for headings
1-6 on the number row for headings at specific levels.
e for text entries
r for radio buttons
b for buttons
x for check boxes
c for comboboxes,
l for lists
i for list items
t for tables
s for sperators
q for block quotes
g for graphics
k for links
u for unvisited links
v for visited links
a for javascript clickables.
and shifting to move backwards through the page and I believe alt+shifting brings up a list of all elements of that type on the current page.
Orca+a will switch between browse and focus modes, the orca key defaulting to insert in desktop layout mode and caps lock in laptop layout.
When encountering an entirely new to me page, I usually start with headings, followed by lists and tables, with most of the hotkeys related to form elements mostly being helpful for navigating forms that have a wonky tab ordering or finding search boxes or quick reply/comment forms on places like blogs or forums. And sometimes, I have to fall back on ctrl+F because the page’s layout provides nothing useful for getting to the part of a page I care about, and there are some websites where a hotkey I use almost nowhere else becomes useful(e.g. when reading a story on Fanfiction.net, I find jumping to the combobox that lets you jump to specific chapters is the best way to find the beginning of the text of the current chapter, and on pages on Archive of our Own listing stories, the summary field is formated as block quotes, making it easy to jump straight to that, and after jumping to the summary, the link to the latest chapter is a single tab away… Though I also make use of headings(titles are level 4 headings, tags start with a level 6 heading, date last updated is the line immeiately above the tags heading, the next page link is 1 shift+tab from the title of the first story on the current page). Admittedly, it can be a real pain in the anatomy to figure out how to efficiently navigate a newly discovered website or when a site you’ve been using for years changes their layout, but for familiar websites that never change their layout, one kind of develops a sense of how to get around efficiently that you don’t really have to think about, kind of the digital equivalent of being able to navigate your own home in the middle of the night versus stumbling in the dark in an unfamiliar place… except I’ve known sighted people who become useless in their own homes where they’ve lived for years the moment the power goes out, so I’m not sure how much of my comfort navigating in the dark pre-blindness was already developing a reliance on non-visual senses as someone with only one working eye with severely decreased visual acuity versus people who rely on vision more than average standing out for being clumsy in the dark… or maybe efficiently navigating a webpage with screen reader navigation hotkeys is like knowing a game’s map like the back of your hand versus playing a game for the first time(and this can apply to both games like Zork and games like Zelda.
Still, doesn’t mean they’re beginner-friendly. When we see something new and are exploring it, we may not mind that it’s not really meant for beginners, we’re having fun discovering it… and it’s not like we have alternatives of its type to turn to. The designers also didn’t go “we have to make this accessible to beginners”, they go “we’re making a new and exciting thing, what can we achieve and what can we get away it?”.