Oh. Inform 7? Let's see here. I would have to look through my projects to find something. The manual is quite terrible sometimes. There are way too many times of having to play with things until something works, but it is usable. I also dislike the interpreter it uses, but there are ways of doing things. You might be able to export the project as a completed project and run on a good interpreter, but that's a usually undesirable process, i'd imagine. I wonder if there is a screen reader addon for just such an occation. In any case, by default, it compiles in the right tab which would be the story pannel. I do dislike the interface. So long as the right panel has focus, you should be able to write to it. Don't worry, the story panel is one of my biggest complaints about the software. It works, but not as one would like. Though the manual has a learning curve, if you are using the most recent version, things should work as expected. Feel free to ask any questions if you are having trouble. It's been a while since I've worked with the software, but I can write examples that should showcase certain concepts. just remember to always create a room before you do anything else.

Could you post the errors you're getting, along with the examples you're pasting in? there's currently not enough context to direct you to something better.

I attempted learning this language some time ago, but my main problem with it is the syntax. I thought at one time that the idea of syntax that looked close to English was good, but that was until I tried it. I could never fully wrap my head around it.

When you try to run it, errors should appear once it finishes attempting to compile (hit f6 to view them, f5 to compile). If there are none,, it should toss you directly into the interpreter, where you can type in commands. (It works perfectly fine with both NVDA and JAWS; I've tested it with both). I'm really not sure what you're looking for, but I can paste a part of a project I've been working on that demonstrates scenes (a little bit) and the power of dynamic descriptions.

***Begin pasted text***

A span is a number that varies. The span is 0.
Every turn, increase the span by 1.
Morning is a recurring scene. Morning begins when the span is 0. Morning ends when the span is 3.
Afternoon is a recurring scene. Afternoon begins when morning ends. Afternoon ends when the span is 6.
Evening is a recurring scene. Evening begins when afternoon ends. Evening ends when the span is 9.
Dusk is a recurring scene. Dusk begins when evening ends. Dusk ends when the span is 12.
Night is a recurring scene. Night begins when dusk ends. Night ends when the span is 15.
Twilight is a recurring scene. Twilight begins when night ends. Twilight ends when the span is 18.
When twilight ends:
now the span is 0.
When morning begins:
say "Hesitant light from the recently reborn sun heralds the start of a new spawn."
When afternoon begins:
say "Light from the planet's blue star becomes increasingly difficult to bare as it continues on a radiant arc across the sky."
When evening begins:
say "Light slowly drains from the area as the sun continues its journey clockwise, dropping below the rim of your humble abode."
When dusk begins:
say "Vestiges of blue die out in the eastern sky, signifying the spawnly death of the sun. The temperature drops quickly under the burgeoning presence of the moon."
When night begins:
say "The greenish grey moon gathers a quilt of star-stitched blackness about it, blanketing the world in night proper."
When twilight begins:
say "Greenish silver shifts subtly to the grey mists of twilight, which descend about your jar, but do not quite enter. Though illuminated by the moon, the natural satellite itself is no longer visible."
The Jar is a room. The description of the Jar is "White porcelain presents the soles of your feet with a surface slick and smooth as silicon, and curves upwards to form the walls of the chamber. [if the span is at most 2]Light, violet and pale, pours in from above, filling the room with the scent of dew and rotting leaves[else if the span is at least 3 and the span is at most 5]bluish gold afternoon light sizzles against the white ceramic as it gushes in through the open-air ceiling, leaving jagged black scorch marks across the pristine whiteness of the room[else if the span is at least 6 and the span is at most 8]Muted shades of blue and purple swirl peacefully within the heat-bleached confines of the cylindrical space, trickling in from above like celestial molasses[else if the span is at least 9 and the span is at most 11]Save the blinding spans near the middle of eachh spend, dusk tends to comprise the darkest spans of the spawn; there is no heat from the sun, nor cold from the moon, and your small home is plunged into a deep pool of terrestrial shadow. Specks of silver gather around the terrible black scars in the building's structure, signifying the start of the healing process[else if the span is at least 12 and the span is at most 14]The greenish grey light of a full moon accompanies the frosty bite of nightfall. Under its eerie glow, shadows shiver across the sun-scarred ceramic of the walls and floor, and the charcoal colored burns gradually scab over in gleaming streaks of silver[else if the span is at least 15 and the span is at most 17]Silver steadily drips from the walls of the cylinder. It gathers as dust on the floor, and is quietly lost to the greens and greys of twilight. Outside, the moon is only just barely visible; soon it will be no longer[end if]."

***end pasted text***

Truthfully I don't really use scenes for much here (what I do use them for can be easily replicated with the spans system probably) but I use them for something later, so that's why they're there. This does, however, demonstrate how to make a proper room, with descriptions that change. I decided to put an example of that because the grammar required to set up some of the variations in text and put math into words can sometimes get tricky and annoying.

Inform is designed to make text based (and so, by definition, fully accessible games). It is accessible, down to the compiler and the tester. I am by no means an expert on inform, but I've read the manual and probably at least have sort of an idea of what I'm doing.

Anyway, if you have any more questions, let me know. I hope this helps.

It's always worked fine for me. When something compiles through f5 it should automatically put you into the game. you can type commands in directly, and then use insert+arrows or the jaws cursor to navigate through the output.

  I entirely agree with the natural English comment though. IN fact that's another reason I wanted the example of the if statements there. If you notice, I had to put the span statement twice in one sentence to get it to recognize that. It's no fault of the program language really, being vague with if statements is just begging for complications, but it wouldn't accept "if the span is between x and y" or "if the span is at least x and at most y"; I had to specifically say "if the span is at least x and the span is at most y". I'm wondering if using or would have let me be a bit more grammatically accurate, but yeah, sometimes it's just really hard, if not impossible, to disguise programming with plain old English, and for figuring out how inform wants some obscure feature to be phrased you're probably going to have to hit the books, because what you think is logical won't make sense to the computer.

  It's conceptually awesome though, and I enjoy messing around with small projects whenever the mood strikes me. Inform is sort of a product of a community that finds guess the verb games worthwhile puzzles though, and sometimes that shows -- I'm not saying that it was purposely designed that way, but most of the people who regularly use inform7 don't seem to mind at all if they have to search through the massive manual for whatever phrasing they need, or figure out how a particular extension works with whatever they're trying to do. I guess after a while you just become really good at figuring out how to put things into an inform7 comprehensible format, just like any other language, programming or otherwise.

  Anyway, sorry for the long ramble, hope the room works out. Just remember to try to be as literal as possible, if the logically written sentence doesn't work out. Also, keep track of your punctuation, because inform will sometimes worry about that (like ending sentences with a period).

Good luck!

Without knowing what errors you're getting, it's hard to know why the examples don't work.

Can you access the error screen? if you can, copy the errors from that and paste them here.

I unfortunately don't have an inform copy, so I can't test it out for you, but by all estimations that should work fine. Again, if you'd post the errors, that'd be helpful.

When you set up a new Project, Inform writes the title and author in the first line. Have you erased that before using the example? Because otherwise the "Midsummer day" line is seen as text that is completely out of context to Inform. Hope that helps.

1. Yeah,, Glulxe works great for windows, So does Winfrotz, actually. I'm not really sure about Mac.
2. I'm not sure about a language translation for Danish, but as far as descriptions and whatnot go you could just write them in Danish. After that you'd need to find out all the misc bits of text stored in rules that provide the character with English text, and translate them (like get, drop, inventory, looking in items, items on the ground, etc). Ironically,, the same thing that makes inform simple to use is the same thing that might complicate a translation somewhat -- all the pre-built rules required to understand the English language.

Thanks a lot for your answers. Time to check this out.

So, I can't just translate the command inventory into an other language and assume it works as the inventory command?

It makes sense. I mean: If I wanna make a game in danish, or an other language, do I then have to translate the commands like get, inventory, the walking directions, open, close etc. or do I have to rewrite those commands from scratch?

I'll figure that out when I get more experience with Inform. I'll gladly let you know what I figure out if you're interested.