Re: Screen Reader Support in Audio Games
Greetings Philip.
I'm going to give you an account of my experience with trying to use built-in voices, as well as personal opinion on preferences and the reasons for them.
A while back, I worked with Aprone on making Castaways 2. For that game, me and Aprone shelled out money to hire someone to record professional voice clips just for menu items as you arrow over them, as well as to speak a few quick prompts (the rest of the game used a screen reader API). Even with the high quality voice clips that I honestly think made the game feel a lot more alive and interesting, people continually requested that Aprone add in a choice to turn those voice clips off and just have them spoken by the screen reader API. It's about the only time I disagreed with Aprone, as we had spent money on the recordings, and capitulating to those requests basically made our expense a waste. Moral of the story here is that, as least in my experience, most blind players want to have speech piped through their screen reader, no matter if that makes the game less theatrical.
This can also be seen in Manamon and its sequel, where the game fully supports SAPI, and indeed prefers that engine, but overwhelming demand from the user base has mandated that the develop also implement a screen reader API.
My own views on the matter are a bit less black and white, as I can see the merits of both approaches:
In favour of speech delivered by SAPI and such engines: You are able to monitor when speech ends, have fewer dll's to contend with, etc. I honestly don't mind this approach, nor do I mind pre-recorded speech for menu's and prompts, as you can create a much more immersive atmosphere with this approach.
In favour of the screen reader though, is that the gamer has free range to navigate and explore the contents of the game. That is, a player has the facilities built in to review a name's spelling, as well as to customize the manner in which punctuation and other types of data are expressed.
I'm neither in favour of one or the other, but I definitely recognize the benefits of both. Now, if you could easily add in a facility to cover the review capabilities of a screen reader as part of the game (spelling names, copying text, etc), then I definitely think there's no reason why using SAPI or other more inter actable engines would be a bad thing.
Kai
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