This question just arose in another thread, but I thought I’d ask in a new topic just in case it gets seen first. Does anyone know if there are Windows interpreters that can screen read TADS games? Or Linux, for that matter?
Spatterlight can successfully screen read TADS games on Mac, and that’s the only platform I have at home for testing. I read on the (very dated) tads.org site that there was a program called DOS Box, that could screen read Windows/TADS? Does anyone have definitive answers on this? I feel like it’s probably been talked about recently but I don’t remember where the threads were. Thanks!
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Ah, the old “DOS BOX interpreter for TADS” quote from the TADS website. That tripped me up a lot back in the day. What Mike Roberts was referring to was actually the Windows Console Mode version of the standard TADS interpreter. As for screen reader friendly TADS interpreters, both the console mode and graphical HTML TADS interpreters work fine with the NVDA screen reader, although the HTML interpreter requires an add-on (basically a plug-in written in Python) which can be found either here or here.
As for my preferred screen reader, JAWS, the HTML terp works fine when Say All mode is turned on, although it incessantly reads the part of the screen which displays the amount of time you’ve been playing the game in real-time. The console mode interpreter works without having to turn on say all mode, thank God, but it requires use of the JAWS cursor. (Think of it as a mouse cursor controlled by the keyboard, which reads everything it is moved to, in a command line window or otherwise.)
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Because DosBox is mentioned here I just wanted to add Dosemu2 to the list. Dosemu2 is updated nearly daily and a very flexible Dosemulator, running on Linux.
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If you’re used to using a browser with a screen reader, then Parchment is always an option. TADS should work with screen readers in Parchment as well as the other formats. But it is text mode TADS, which not all games have been designed for.
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In my case, that is preferrable over the HTML variant. I had no idea Parchment had been updated to support anything other than Z-machine games.
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Oh, yeah it’s supported Glulx for probably close to a decade now, and then Hugo, TADS, and Adrift 4 (but not 5) more recently.
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