Inform 7 Access is an addon for NVDA (a free and open source screen reader for Windows). It aims to make the process of authoring and testing works of interactive fiction a bit better using the Inform IDE.
What it does
When the interpreter portion of the window has focus, incoming text is now read automatically. There are also hotkeys that drive an independent virtual cursor specifically for the interpreter that doesn’t lose its place when new text arrives, but allows easy navigation which includes moving by line and moving to the first and last line.
It’s becoming increasingly less common for applications to have a status bar; however, NVDA does support querying one if it can find it. This naturally fails in Inform, so this addon overrides that functionality and instead, allows the user to query the status line of the game when the interpreter window is in focus. Without this feature, users would need to scroll all the way up to the top to view this information. Now, it’s a keystroke away.
When working in the editor, it is possible to be notified when reading through syntax highlighted text. Notifications are inline and consist of a start and end announcement, along with the type of text that is being encountered e.g. quoted text for strings, text substitutions which appear as text enclosed in square brackets which are themselves enclosed in quotes, etc. The user may change the type of notification in settings. The options are None, speech, speech and sounds, and sounds.
When pressing F5 in the editor to translate a project, the addon will filter out all the extraneous focus change events and ensure focus lands where it should when the process finishes. It doesn’t alter the natural behavior, so focus will still land on the results tab if there’s an error, or the interpreter pane if the process completed successfully. This stops unnecessary chatter as the game is being compiled.
What it doesn’t do
There are some unlabeled graphics in the documentation. For example, the back, forward, and TOC image links; the addon doesn’t do anything about this currently. The same goes for the “rb” links which seem to lead to the indicated example in the recipe book.
Inform can be quite fiddly at times. For instance, when entering commands in the interpreter window, sometimes focus will jump to the testing panel. This is irritating, but the addon doesn’t address it. It’s also a very intermittent issue and would best be solved in Inform itself.