All right then, great. Do you think it would it make more sense to have “speak commands” off by default?
I think a default on would probably be better just for the sake of conformity—Apple devices ship with Voiceover hints enabled.
Well,here’s something a bit different. Up until this point I’d primarily been experimenting with text-only games, but I realized it would probably be a good idea to see how well Voiceover would do around in-game media. I pulled out Peter Nepstad’s 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery, which is supposedly packed with images as well as music. (A quick note: the game’s opening screen may be one of those instances where Voiceover doesn’t recognize that it is being presented with a menu.) Unfortunately that ended up being rather an excruciating experience, although the graphics themselves weren’t at fault. Most of the room and object descriptions are accompanied by what I assume are photo captions–a single line of text containing the name of the object followed by around 80 ___ characters. For some reason Voiceover pronounces each one of those characters individually even though my system verbosity preferences are set so that this shouldn’t happen. On the other hand, I had no issues actually playing the game around all the images, which of course is good news.
Thanks! The TADS support in Spatterlight is not great, especially for games that rely on HTML TADS functionality, of which 1893 is one of the more well-known. The broken opening menu is not just a VoiceOver problem, it is broken for everybody, and no images are shown, just a lot of line feeds. Unfortunately the only good HTML TADS interpreter on the Mac, QTads, seems to have no VoiceOver support whatsoever.
To reproduce your repeated underscore problem, I had to change my VoiceOver text verbosity to “Punctuation: All” and “Repeated punctuation: Always spoken”. This is on Catalina 10.15.7. Still, trimming all underscores from spoken output strings is pretty trivial and unlikely to break things, so this will be fixed in the next version.
I did experience a similar problem where VoiceOver wanted to read every individual space in a grid window. These use space characters for padding, so they contain a lot of them. Has this ever happened to you?
That’s interesting about the repeated characters; I’m running Mac OS Big Sur 11.0.1 with punctuation verbosity set to “some” and repeated punctuation to “spoken with count”. In most cases things do work as expected, but text adventures seem to be the exception for some strange reason. I did a few more quick experiments and noticed that the *** end-of-game message also isn’t being announced as it should. For example, going down immediately at the beginning of Curses gives the following: "asterisk asterisk (only twice when there are clearly three) You have missed the point entirely asterisk asterisk asterisk (all three the second time, but with the way my preferences are set this should have been pronounced as "3 star ".)
Yes, now that you mention it I do remember a few instances where Voiceover read out a load of spaces. I think I was attempting to look at text in a game’s status window when it happened, but of course now that I’m trying to reproduce the issue it’s not wanting to show itself.
https://github.com/angstsmurf/spatterlight/releases/download/v0.7.3b/Spatterlight.zip
This update is not really focused on VoiceOver functionality, but it contains some major changes that will likely introduce new VoiceOver bugs as well.
The main new feature is autosave and autorestore for Z-code games. Previously this was only implemented for Glulx.
There are some minor VoiceOver-related improvements:
- Fixes a bug that made VoiceOver say “No last move to speak” when certain game windows were selected or opened.
- Underscore characters, as seen in 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery are trimmed from spoken text.
- Quote boxes can now be searched with the text search rotor. (VO + F)
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Thanks, I can confirm that underscores are gone–phew! Also, no accessibility-related auto-save issues that I can find as of yet.