This is exactly why Tom recorded speech or self-voicing options are
better, ---- not to mention Sapi for people using windows.
It's for this reason I've never been able to try muds until Vip mud came out
with it's Sapi support, sinse I couldn't find a default client which output
directly to Hal, ---- and my usual methods with reading the screen in Hal
couldn't seem to keep up with what was going on in the Mud.
Now Hal has Lua mapping support included, it's possible for developers to
write up map files for it easily enough, though I stil agree on access
options being a better deal for developers to use, sinse people could be
using Nvda or whatever.
What really showed this to me, was Smugglers 4. I'm not sure of the
technical reasons, but the game seemed to play a lot more smoothly with Hal
(and I believe window eyes), than with jaws. We can all remember the hoo har
over that one, ---- and Niels had to redo some of the item labeling rules
just to get Jaws support added.
Hopefully, what he's learnt from smugglers 4 will make the access features
of the up coming Tv manager 2 less of a hassle, ---- but it is interesting
he had to specifically add Jaws support from reader requests, while as you
mention, many devs do not support other screen readers.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Ward" <thomasward1...@gmail.com>
To: "Gamers Discussion list" <gamers@audyssey.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 29, 2009 10:32 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Screen Readers and Games
Hi Bryan,
Well, don't forget GMA. As of Lonewolf 3.5 the game has Window Eyes API
support. That happened because us non-Jaws users nagged David Greenwood
until he realized not all of his Lonewolf customers are Jaws users, and we
want the same access to the game as Jaws users. If he could use the JFW
API for the game he could use the same for Window Eyes too.
In the end he finally added Window Eyes and Sapi 5 support in version 3.5.
However, that might not have happened if there were not enough non-Jaws
users to maret such an upgrade. However, this is clearly a good case of
how the developer uses Jaws, developed the game initially for a Jaws user
base, and finally was asked to include other screen readers as part of the
games speech output.
Cases like this sets a president that we can't assume what access
technology, if any, is present on the target computer. These days it could
be a free and open source solution like NVDA for all we know. Therefore
the game itself should provide all that is necessary for providing
accessibility to itself independant of any specific screen reader or
speech software that may or may not be present.
---
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