Re: Question about vgstorm games.
Right, okay, that's cool.
So Aaron decided, at least at first, that if people wanted to play manamon, they had to 1. pay forty dollars, and then 2. get better SAPI voices. You talk about a learning curve? Most other games don't ask this, and if you want to hit on the whole user experience thing, expecting users to know that/react to that is maybe asking a bit much. After all, if you have a screenreader that does 99.4% of everything else you could possibly want, why the heck would you ever bother getting better SAPI voices?
So the user experience for many probably went like this:
1. Get excited, buy the game
2. Realize the game is clunky with their default SAPI voices
3. Wind is gone from their sails, complaints ensue
4. Ask for support for NVDA, which the fair portion of blind users either use or can grab access to (NVDA is not my primary screenreader, but I have it installed and it works for plenty of things)
There are even users like me who were strongly considering not supporting if the game didn't get screenreader support. I know the headaches Jaws has, but NVDA, apart from the Mathmon issue, is very, very smooth. No bugs, no glitches, and it handles the text precisely the way I want it to. If it interrupts, it does so because I, ahem, know how to handle my screenreader and am making it do so. If this is how I want to play - and ostensibly how a lot of others want to play - then who is Aaron to deny that, or suggest that his way is the "best"?
It kills me that you talk in one breath about the new user experience, and how hammering enter in this apparently awful way might kill one's enjoyment or whatever, or be otherwise alien...and yet, by your own admission, the default SAPI voices aren't great, so Aaron's game would've essentially been asking people to go download voices they ultimately weren't likely to use for much of anything else. Newbie-friendly? New customer friendly? Nah, I think not.
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