Sadly, I won't be playing this because jaws, but hopefully other folks can get some enjoyment out of this.

If I can figure out a way to make it work with NVDA,  I will definitely let people know. The problem is that, for some reason, some of the tabs and other features used to organize information are not properly recognized. I’m not sure if it’s a bug in the screen reader, a quirk of the way the game is written, or some combination of the two.

Yeah. Fortunately, the C# version, which is being written/tested now, is supposed to dispense with the picky resolution requirement. There's no timeline on its release, though, and the VB6 version works well enough.

I was just reminded that I've been nattering on about this game off and on for ~8 years, how time flies.

The Comparison with Dwarf Fortress is interesting, because a lot of the focus is weirdly similar. There are tons of procedurally-generated bits in both games, and a focus on sometimes absurd detail.

I'll definitely try to get part 2 posted soon, and will let everybody know when it's up. In the mean time, this thread might be a good general discussion place.

One question I'm trying to figure out is how to balance explaining the game concepts with focusing more specifically on accessibility. There are a lot of complicated gameplay mechanics, which are generally well-documented on the official wiki. Still, if I just gloss over things it's possible people will get confused or not realize there was a step missing somewhere because I just assumed people would figure it out.

Do y'all have any thoughts on what kind of  balance would be helpful?

I thought this game is dead since the developer was starting to  work on an inaccessible space game so i stopped trying to understand it.
Extremely appreciated for your guide, I will totally check this out and will let you know if i have any questions and all. I really want to play this game, specially since i can't play games like eve online or no man's sky or any good space games at all.

edit: i just saw the part 1, I'll be waiting for part 2! that's the part I totally would have no idea about. but nice tip on resolution, i never knew this.
edit 2:, I just found out about C# aurora. any ideas if that's also going to be accessible or probably not?

@orko
Maybe he ment the height of the screen needs to be also grather than 800?
Also, supporting jaws only is not intentional by the way. i'm pretty sure about that.

@Orko Developers don't go out of their way to screw Jaws users from playing games, its the way Jaws handles keyboard input, it literally traps keys from reaching the application. How can a developer fight against that unless they know exactly what is going on? Such s Phillip Benefall knew this is what happened, so he wrote a very low level hook that could be injected into memory to stop this process. The problem is, the key hook does have its consequences, I can't speak first hand about this, but supposedly, it stops you from being able to interact with Jaws specific keystrokes while the window is in focus. So its not like devs are cackling behind half-moon glasses going hee hee hee hee, Jaws users suck, let's not make our game work with their screen reader, hee hee hee. It's just the way Jaws works that makes it incompatible with gaming unless you want to do some real hackish coding, that maybe not all programmers can do, or know that they need to do.

Hi,

I'll try to answer a few questions in this post.

Orko, I should have been clearer in my description of the requirement. The important measurement is actually the 800, not necessarily the 1280. The Aurora windows tend to be very tall, and 800 height is essential. Also, there is an option in the Game Parameters menu you need to enable, "reduced height windows." If that isn't enabled, the requirement is 1280x1024.

Hadi, the window you're having trouble with is the System Map screen. It tends to be used a lot by sighted players, but it isn't required. It's possible to get textual overviews of system bodies, contacts, and so forth from other places. The map is only used because it shows a lot of things at once in a convenient form, but it is cluttered. I would recommend avoiding for the most part, just because it's more confusing than necessary.

Everyone else, C# Aurora, the port of this game being worked on at the moment, is supposed to dispense with the resolution requirement. I haven't personally played it, so can't vouch for its accessibility or lack thereof.

I will work on part 2 this weekend, and try to answer any other questions I can in the meantime.

Orko, the problem is that if your screen is less than 800 pixels high, Jaws and other screen readers won't see the bottom buttons on many windows. It's annoying for sighted users too, and I wish there were a way to force them to be visible, but without fancy scrolling desktop programs, none of which I know to be accessible, it just won't work.

So in short, if your screen is at least 1280x800, and you enable Reduced Height Windows, the game will work fine. If your screen is 1280x1024, you don't need to enable that option, and things are a little easier, because things like long component lists don't need to be scrolled quite as often.

I hope this clarifies things.

Jaws doesn't need that API I don't think, I do believe Jaws uses standard COM (Component Object Model) calls to interact with other apps. My knowledge in this field is sparse, so I won't attempt to comment further, but I know Jaws can work without that DLL, while NVDA cannot. sapi32.dll, as nidza07 correctly points out, sis for system access. TO be more clear, NVDA needs that dll if the game wants to directly communicate with it, rather than relying on standard window classes and so forth.

If we strip this down to bare facts, and take away any bias of which screen reader is better, the fact is simply that Jaws is intercepting all keys and not allowing those keystrokes to reach the game in question, or in the case of the arrows, it may let one pass through when the key is being held down, and the game's event handler is looking for the event to fire to keep you walking in the case of holding down an arrow key. So its not negligence on the developers' part that leads to games not supporting Jaws, its the way Jaws monopolizes the keyboard.

The problem with that argument is that not all games have problems with JAWS, if JAWS monopolizing the keyboard was itself a problem, then more than just some games written in BGT would have problems with JAWS, but that's not the case, so the problem is with the games, or more properly and accurately with the development system the game was written with.

Could Freedom Scientific resolve the problem? Probably, but since their focus is on helping people be productive, not play games, it's not a problem they are going to pay any attention to.

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That's my point exactly, the only reason for the presence of those DLLs is to use the screen reader API directly instead of using a standardized approach that all screen readers support, the developer chooses to communicate directly with the screen reader and chooses to only only communicate with NVDA. Where does that leave users of other screen readers?

That's why I don't use those DLLs in my programming, instead I use methods that most, if not all, screen readers support, making my programs screen reader agnostic. That, in my opinion, is the only way to go.

zkline, thanks, that makes it clear, I will have to use the reduced screen height option.

From the way it sounds, NVDA users will probably need an add on to play this game. Hopefully somebody will write one.