Topic by jaybird 2019-04-22 08:21:53

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I'd love to find a good, modern, accessible way to play interactive fiction under Windows. I know at least a few years ago there was an NVDA addin that let you do it, but my primary screen reader is JAWS. I'm surprised someone hasn't made a Z-machine/Glulx/TADS/etc. interpreter that hooks into an accessible output library. Any thoughts?

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Reply by EternalGamer 2019-04-22 10:01:21

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Hi!
While this is not an immediate solution, there is a committee dedicated to creating accessibility guidelines for interactive fiction. They haven't published anything actionable yet but I have strong evidence they are working on it:
https://iftechfoundation.org/committees/access/
A more immediate solution may be the interpreter Lectrote, which was designed with accessibility in mind:
https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote/releases
I find it works quite well with NVDA, except that after some time it loses track of what portion of the text is new, and so it may read extraneous material. JAWS might have a better time with it.
Best,
EG

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Reply by Dark 2019-04-22 16:41:11

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@Jaybird, Isn't filfre supposed to be really good with Jaws? Don't ask me about scripts etc, but I do remember a lot of people mentioning it as the best interpreter for Jaws. See http://maher.filfre.net/filfre/ for details.

@eternal gamer, the Nvda addon works fine for me with all the interpreters I've tried it with so far, that's Winglulks, Wingit and Winfrotz.

You can find it on Jeff's NVdA addon repository, though of course with the  silly business of the latest version of NvdA supposedly breaking addons, it might need some updating.

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Reply by zenothrax 2019-04-22 20:13:25

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Also, if you're not afraid to use the command line, you may want to try the win32 console mode interpreters.

#FreeTheCheese
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Reply by targor 2019-04-22 22:09:50

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The problem about filfre is that it often crashes randomly with one command, but you have to type that one command to advance the story. No matter what you try, filfre will never do that command correctly. Oh, and it's a bit slow. I use Wingit for Glulx games, and it's almost identical to use with jaws. For Z-Code, I still use Filfre, but they get less and less now that Informs standard compiling format is Glulx.

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Reply by piller223 2019-04-24 03:21:39

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http://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/windows.html you can use frotztts2002

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