Hi Jim, I see. Well, I know back when I was using Jaws for Windows. This was perhaps some 10 years ago I could set Jaws to "say all" and it would read everything in the command prompt window. I was using something like frotz and could load up a game like Arthor and it did a decent job of reading text automatically as long as "say all" was enabled. Still I take your point. SAPI and prerecorded speech has given everyone a truly screen reader independant design that doesn't require a screen reader at all let alone weather it has good command prompt/terminal support.
For instance, I myself use a screen reader called Orca on Linux. Most of the time it does ok with gnome-terminal, something similar to the Windows command prompt window, and I can run text-based programs in it. Unfortunately, Orca is sort of hit or miss with these games etc. You might be using Scare and it will fail to read all of the text on the screen, and the mouse cursor might not be able to read the text either. For that reason alone when I play Adrift, Tads, or Inform based text adventures under Linux I often exit the graphical user environment all together, log into the shell itself, and use a screen reader called Speakup that was specifically designed for text-based programs. While it doesn't necessarily read the text automatically I can review the screen and see what is going on. So I do understand and know where you are coming from. From that point of view it would be nice just to use speech-dispatcher and shoot the speech out to one of the Cepstral voices, ESpeak, Festival, AT&T Mike, etc rather than fooling with reviewing the screen. On the other hand what I really wanted to do is write a game like Piledriver. I.E. just a simple text -based wrestling game. Nothing too special or complicated which is what we get if we have to include SAPI, unicode support, and all that other crap that goes with Windows API programming. Unfortunately, for a C++ programmer you cant just send an ascii text string like "hello world!" to SAPI 5. Instead the Microsoft Windows API forces you to convert that text string to unicode, and then you can pass it to the Speak() function. That's something of a pain which is one reason I haven't used SAPI in a while. I pretty much have to write my own convert functions to convert a single word or line of text to and from unicode complecating the source code. Plus making it totally operating system specific. I guess the best thing to do here would be to use something like Scansoft Tom and just record everything from scratch. Then, I could use LibSDL, which is totally cross-platform, for sounds, music, sspeech, and input. I'm already doing this for STFC so there is nothing barring me from doing this with a wrestling game as well. Cheers! On 4/10/11, Jim Kitchen <j...@kitchensinc.net> wrote: > Hi Thomas, > > Other than web based, I do not know of a single blind accessible game that > puts text on the screen that gets read automatically by all windows screen > readers. It has never worked that way. That is why we have always used > recorded speech and or sapi5. > > BFN --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
