I’ve been recently trying AccessiIF, a new Windows interactive fiction program released at the beginning of the month so wanted to right down my thoughts and let others know about it. AccessiIF also has an IFWiki page.
I really want to like it but I think it is trying to do too much to it’s detriment
This program was made by a blind person primarily for blind people, and I think it has promise. I’m unsure what to call it because not only can this run games, it also has an authoring system that can create Inform 7 parser if and Choose Your Own adventure-style game books. It can also apparently do TADS 3 if supplied with the correct files.
I love what the interpreter side is trying to accomplish. It’s similar to something like Lectrote where it can run multiple game formats (ZCode, Glulx and TADS with sound support for at least Glulx), but unlike Lectrote it is a Windows application with all the UI benefits. the interface is split into 3 edit boxes - a bit like some MUD clients I have used. An input box for your commands, an output box for the game’s regular text and a status box for score, moves and the like if the game supports it. You can move between the input and output areas with tab and shift+tab and use f6 and shift+f6 to move between all three. Like in any other edit controll the arrow keys work as expected, with the up and down arrow in the input box moving through your command history.
It also automatically reads the game’s output either after entering a command or at a more prompt.
It just feels more intuitive playing parser if in a setup like this , rather than using a web app, or my screen reader’s screen review cursor in interpreters like Windows Frotz.
Navigating through a game’s help system is also trivial, with your screen reader only announcing the highlighted topic, which is something the web-based ones can struggle with .
I haven’t played with the authoring system but I am quite intrigued by it, because the Inform part uses menus and dialogue boxes to design your game like adrift does, and writes the Inform code on compiling. It says you can see the code it generates though. It’ll be interesting to see the standard of its output. Maybe someone who knows more than I do could test it. Incidentally the developer told me he has never used Adrift so it’s an interesting choice to do that.
So on to the negatives, and I really don’t want to come down too hard on it (because as I hope I’ve made clear) I really like what it is trying to do from a player’s perspective.
It can’t run certain games. Out of the ones I have tried with it, it can’t run Prince Quisborne. It just comes up with a blank screen.
And this is the biggie, the one reason why I think it is trying to do too much: the save command is broken. you type “save” as you usually would, then it asks you to enter the name of the game you’re playing, which is fair enough; keeping all saves for the same game in their own folder seems sensible. But after you have oked the dialogue, it either says save failed or types the file path as a game command, resulting in the expected “That’s not a verb I recognise” response.
I feel that if it was split into 2 or possibly 3 programs, there would be less of a chance of it stumbling at the basics such as the save command failing.
I have let the dev know about the saving issue so I hope it gets fixed. I really want AccessiIF to succeed. Nathan Tech has made some really useful tools such as a Reddit client and an accessible periodic table , the latter I wish I had at school.
I hope this has been useful.