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Greetings. I received a comment on one of my posts today. This reader was grateful that I published my Starcross transcript because they could use it to input the mass coordinates. They made a general statement that copy protection feelies made it difficult or impossible for them to play some of Infocom’s games.
I am wondering: has there ever been an effort to assess possible issues with feelies for sight-impaired persons? If so, are there any resources I could direct readers to?
If not, this is something I’d like to spend time on. I could do things like flatten the A Mind Forever Voyaging code table to one row/code, move documents to plain text (due to Infocom’s font choices I’ve had character recognition problems in PDFs) with alt text, that kind of thing.
Fortunately for me I’ve been able to scrape together the information needed to get past the copy-protection feelies mechanism, but it would definitely be helpful to have everything consolidated into a single resource. The screenreader-friendly files on the Infocom Documentation Project’s website are great, but as mentioned above many of the feelies that contain game-stopper details haven’t yet been made accessible.
I’m glad to hear your thoughts on this! I’m going to reach out to the webmaster and try to get involved. If you have any thoughts on which games should be tackled first, I could definitely use some suggestions.
Thanks for taking an interest in this . I think it would probably make sense to start with the files that contain details which players would require in order to access the meat of a game. Cuttthroats, The Lurking Horror, Seastalker, Sorcerer, and Starcross are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. AMFV and Stationfall as well, but these have already been converted (although unfortunately I believe I may have found a couple of discrpancies with the AMFV color wheel values.)
Great! I’ll prioritize these, starting with Starcross since that was the one my reader had a specific problem with. Thanks for your help. As time allows, I’ll look at the wheel, too.
It’s later than I hoped, but I’ve begun work on this. Can anyone tell me what technologies are commonly used for screen reading on the Windows platform? I see that there is a built-in “narrator,” and that there are also third-party applications. I’d like to verify functionality as I go.
Hi all. Just a quick update. I have (hopefully) completed work on Starcross, though my inexperience with this type of writing may have led to some mistakes. I’ve asked Gunther to post it. I’m not sure when it will happen; I don’t think the site has been updated in years.
I’ve decided to work on Cutthroats and Seastalker next. It will be good to have them out of the way.
In the interim, I have placed the Starcross document on my google drive. I have gone over the copy protection bits several times, hopefully it will be helpful and reliable.
Hi all. Gunther now has Starcross up at IDP and will soon be posting a text-only doc of Spellbreaker’s copy protection.
I’ll continue to post here when the site updates to provide tracking (and to keep me accountable).
Seastalker will be next.
If you have a need for a specific document, let me know and I’ll try to do it first.
E: Although now that I think of it, the character graphics at the end of Seastalker may make the program inaccessible as-is.
I can provide a transcript for navigating the sub to the dome, but I don’t think that would work for the endgame. If anyone has any thoughts on this problem, I’d welcome them!
I think Seastalker was one of the games where I absolutely had to use a walkthrough in order to get past some of the copyright barriers. I’m not sure what the feelies look like, but I’m going to play through this game again and try to figure out how accessibility might work out here.
. I think it would probably make sense to start with the files that contain details which players would require in order to access the meat of a game. Cuttthroats, The Lurking Horror, Seastalker, Sorcerer, and Starcross are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. AMFV and Stationfall as well, but these have already been converted (although unfortunately I believe I may have found a couple of discrpancies with the AMFV color wheel values.)