Hi tom.
well the nvda process is indeed more difficult. With supernova, it's just a
case of pressing numbpad minus, then using all the usual read commands
such as arrowing up and down to read lines, or hitting numbpad plus to read
from current curser position. Indeed, in most turnbased games i can usually
hit ctrl up arrow to skip the last paragraph, which usually covers the
previous turn.
heck, I could even streamline this a little more if I wanted by typing >
into the find box, so that all I'd have to do to get to the last command I
gave the program is hit f2 to find previous sinse the virtual curser
generally starts at the bottom if I go into it having just typed a command.
So, my point is that with supernova reading console windows is a very quick
process, but obviously that is not the case with nvda.
This would be another reason to use sapi, sinse it is obviously free and
would mean the games could be easily played with no screen reader, ---- heck
I could imagine some older person who wasn't computer literate playing such
games just using straight sapi output.
On the nostalgia value point Tom, one thought does occur to me.
When a sighted person plays a dos text adventure in a console window, they
are physically seeing text printed on a usually black screenthus the console
window has a certain look and feel for such games.
This is why to a sighted user, something like age of fable's westward, a
web interface game with similar gameplay to origan trail would not provide a
nostalgic experience, sinse the easthetic of a game played on web pages and
the process of clicking links isn't too different.
to a screen reader user however, text is text is text. The experience could
alter with voice or sfx, but most of those old dos games as I understand it
didn't have sfx, ---- and I assume your not suggesting going back to the
ecco Ii that Bryan has mentioned as being so horrible.
so, if your game experience is basically going to be text spoken by a synth
voice does it particularly from a nostalgia point of view make a difference
whether that voice is your own screen reader reading a console window or
sapi?
Surely it's the text and gameplay that matter, irrispective of how that
text is read.
So, my point is unless your going to try and include some sort of experience
of dos screen reading for those people who used dos screen readers, it
would seem to me that sapi is just as able to provide nostalgic experience
to a vi user as use of a screen reader, sinse the nostalgia comes from the
text and the game itself not how it is read.
Of course, if your planning on also making these aesthetically similar to
the dos console window applications for sighted users, ie, white text on
black etc, that might be a different matter, ---- though certainly there are
plenty of games that print text to a window and! output to sapi as well
(spoonbills and che martins do for a start), and as I said, sinse as far as
I understand it a console window from a visual perspective is justt a black
window with usually white but occasionally coloured text, I don't see why
you couldn't provide that visual experience in a normal window writing
text to the screen and! use sapi.
If I'm wrong on this appologies, sinse obviously ll I can! see of a console
window is the colour of background and text and there might be features I'm
missing visually, or some special reason a console window isn't like a
standard window, ---- still I don't think nostalgia and use of sapi should
be mutually exclusive.
Just a thought.
Beware the Grue!
Dark.
---
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