Re: ambiguous status of games from games for the blind.com
The reason for bundling Eloquence with the games is I think more a product of its time than anything else. The games were coming out in 2000/2001, and this was the time when SAPI wasn't even included with most versions of Windows in use and you couldn't be sure everyone had it. Window-Eyes I think actually started shipping with SAPI Eloquence around this time, but most people had JAWS which had an internal copy. Second, most people did not have multi-channel sound cards. If you recall developers like VGStorm recently complaining that they didn't like screen reader API's because you couldn't easily sync up speech and sounds, well this problem was made much worse back in those days. If you wanted sounds in the game, using a screen reader API meant that you'd either play them to early and crash your app because the sound card was busy, or cause the screen reader to miss an important message because a sound effect was playing.
And finally re: royal ties, Nuance was far from having Eloquence rights back then. It makes me wonder if ETI/Speech Works offered developers better licensing deals versus what Nuance is doing now. Aside from AT I don't think Eloquence was too popular in the software speech world, certainly less than Softvoice which you saw much more often in old Windows Shareware. I wonder if this was a case of marketting, pricing or both.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
