Question to the screen reader community

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Hello! I’m writing an accessibility-focused text adventure system and I’m looking for answers to the following questions…anything helps!

Question 1 of 3. Is there a website you’d say is extra good for being screen reader-friendly?

Question 2 of 3. What do you think about automatically reading each page in a text adventure?

Question 3 of 3. Do you know any other unusually forward-thinking steps I can take for screen reader support? For example, alt text of text (for emojis, and things like that).

That’s it, thank you!

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I used to work with a blind person who was a recording artist and also a musician who gigged. It was a fascinating look into that world. His screen reader software read text but did it at an extremely high rate of text to speech. The speech output was sped up by magnitudes. It was unintelligible to me but perfectly clear to him.

When I add TTS to my system, I am going to remember that lesson.

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Dev after my own heart. I’m currently swamped in other life obstacles and software dependencies, but I’ll be taking notes if you get something working before I do.

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Q2: yes, as a bare minimum? On the web, setting your main text-display area to aria-live="polite" should handle most of the “telling screenreaders to read out the new text when it changes” part…

Q3: emoji have names already: if the screenreader can see the text they’ll be read out.

Are you familiar with the WCAG standards? There are a few places where they’re maybe more bureaucratic than helpful (I don’t think I’ve seen a screenreader user bothering to interact with skip links, for instance, although I imagine some do) but in general they’re a bare-minimum baseline and if you care about accessibility you should be doing at LEAST that much.

Follow/watch some blind streamers to get a feel for some of the basics of what’s difficult and what’s a non-issue? Zersiax often streams coding/security stuff rather than games, and often talks some about the accessibility challenges he finds in using those tools…

Ultimately you could invest the time to learn to use a screenreader yourself – your OS probably has one built-in (the free NVDA for Windows is probably better than the built-in one) – so you can do basic accessibility checks yourself and get a little bit of a feel for what it’s like (for instance if you had, you wouldn’t have to ask about emoji being read out; it’d be obvious). This isn’t a substitute for testing, nor a small undertaking: WebAIM says

Using any screen reader for the first time can be a confusing and discouraging experience. Using an audio interface is almost always a little disorienting for sighted users. Also, much of the content on a web page will seem to be inaccessible, when in fact the problem may be that the new user simply does not know how to use the screen reader.

But if you get to the point where your screenreader skills and your text adventure system are good enough that you can use them blindfolded, you probably have a good chance that a regular screenreader user will whiz through it with no trouble…

Are you sure you want to do that? My impression is that in general it has a lot more pitfalls than benefits (people can’t use their preferred voice, there are probably more settings than you’ll think to add, your ad hoc implementation probably has different controls than the screenreader controls they’re used to, etc.). And the only real benefi tI know of is timing-based: with screenreaders there’s currently no way to play a sound effect at a particular point in the narration. (although if you have human-recorded voice-over the acting can be a bonus, of course).

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Keep in mind, not all blind folks are speed listeners. Some of us, myself included, have ears just as slow as the average sighted person, and even those listening to audio at like 4x speed or setting their screen readers to 800 WPM often had to train themselves bit-by-bit too listen faster. Guess what I’m trying to say, if your system speaks directly, the rate should be adjustable across a fairly wide range in fairly small steps.

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I can’t think of any websites in particular that are extra good for screen readers, ao3 comes to mind immediately because everything has a little headings so you can just navigate by heading which makes things very very quick. I think if you try your game out with a screen reader and you’re able to navigate around with no issues without using the mouse, you’re good.

In regards to speed, I can now listen to my screen readers very fast but some people can even faster than me. I’ve kind of built it up overtime where I’ve made it faster in little increments overtime which is how I got to where I am now.

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Thank you! I needed Q2 confirmed (it was not a pattern that appeared on my old MS team). The blind streaming tip is especially useful!

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You could say the same thing about implementing the graphical portion of the game using system widgets rather than custom graphics code. Or about implementing your roguelike as a terminal application rather than a graphical one (but my personalized font!).

I don’t really see how you make an effective audio UI without direct control over the TTS. Simple, critical, things like stopping speech in progress, synchronizing non-speech indicators with the speech stream, adjusting the mix of music and sound effects while the game is speaking–screen readers can’t support you in that, can they?

If we relax the assumption that most people who would play with speech enabled are super-hackers with screen readers dialed up to 500 WPM, polish and fundamental usability should come way before customizability. There’s a reason audiobooks are recorded by human professionals, and blazing through ebooks with a caffeinated screen-reader is a niche activity.

Even considering the super-hackers, the lesson isn’t necessarily that all speech output is ideally in sixth gear. High-speed speech is useful for certain purposes. Fast navigation, for instance. Skimming. I’m a big fan of cranking up the speed of a video if I feel it’s moving slowly, but I wouldn’t watch something of an artistic nature that way. If your game isn’t fun at its default speech rate, polish it to make it fun, rather than prioritizing the workaround.

Maybe in some cases, accessibility is unapologetically an afterthought. In those cases, it makes sense to lean on the screen reader and just do what it takes to make the game navigable. But if we’re talking about “an accessability-focused text adventure system”, why would compromising on polished audio be acceptable? Get the speech going on day one, don’t target the screen-reader experts (and wind up with a game that’s only playable to screen-reader experts), make a game that even you, with your aural gaming inexperience, can operate.

IMO it would be a very good thing if everybody doing UI design stopped kicking the can down the road to screen readers, and started designing UIs with the understanding that some users would operate them via audio. Maybe not a lot of chance of this, but it’s amazing that we’re just expecting some third party to come along and interpret arbitrary graphical output into speech. Anybody writing a GUI framework could have made it self-narrating, and could have designed its layout widgets to encourage narratable, keyboard-navigable design. Why is it so easy to write inaccessible programs? Just not on the radar though.

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For the ultimate audio UI experience, you have to use TTS. The reason is because a screen reader only reads the screen.

I really wanted to use the player’s screen reader and trick it into being interrupted or switching focus mid-reading, but it just wouldn’t stop reading what it had started. The user must pause or interrupt the reader’s output… which means the user must control the screen reader to reveal the elements that control your game. That extra layer creates unnecessary friction when your game is more than a simple choice-based game or a text adventure with a command prompt.

However, there is good news. Blind users are actually used to standard TTS voices and quickly configuring them is not hard at all. Voice, pitch, rate, volume… done. The default/built-in voices are pretty good and sound clearer at higher rates (in my opinion). If your game is worth playing, blind users will appreciate the hand-crafted UI experience.

I can’t shake the feeling that a lot of blind-accessible games are harder to use because of the reliance on the screen reader itself.

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Self-voicing versus screen reader compatibility is a choice I don’t think there is a clear right answer to any more than there’s a right answer to whether a video game should have pixel art or polygonal graphics or a synthy or naturalistic soundtrack.

As for testing blind accessibility, turn off/unplug your monitor, unplug your mouse, and try playing your game with just keyboard and the audio. That’s about the closest a sighted person can get to matching the experience of a blind person with no experience finding workarounds for the inaccessible. Better if you can get a sighted person uninvolved with the development to do such a test. Sure, someone who’s been using a computer blind for years might have the technical know how to find workarounds, but every time you feel the temptation to turn the monitor back on or use the mouse, that’s a potential pain point that might be insurmountable to someone blind from birth just learning to use a computer or someone relearning how to use a computer after going blind, and is a point of friction that might make even the experienced blind computer user give up if they don’t find a workaround quickly(and even with 13 years experience using a screen reader daily, I still hit brick walls more often then I care to admit), and if you’re testing your own game, remember you know the game better than anyone playing it for the first time, so you still have an advantage over the blind newbie and may be able to get through bits that would stump a blind player through knowing how the game is supposed to work, but if being intimately familiar with the game isn’t enoough to get though part of the game with the monitor off, that’s a good sign someone without the option of using a monitor is likely too have problems.

Still, it’s valuable to take in consideration the experience of those who are old hat at doing things blind, but probably worth considering that part of that experience is developing workarounds for the inaccessible and some of the tricks accumulated oover years of blind computer use become second nature to the point of being unconscious and the beginner blind coomputer user probably doesn’t know them… and that the option to use a monitor also comes with the option to turn it off and that while you can’t really tell how your game looks to someone who is colorblind or dyslexic, it’s easy to test how it plays with the monitor turned off.

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