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IF for visually impaired

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Bob

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Jun 18, 2001, 6:45:23 PM6/18/01
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Apparently my telnet system, which now has something like 1,000 IF
offerings, has attracted at least some attention among visually impaired.
At the suggestion of one user, I have set a goal to improve accessibility to
that group. Are there any comments about accessibility of IF in general?
Does anyone have suggestions? Given that IF is one of the few computer game
manifestations truly useful to that community, should authors (and
interpreter writers) keep accessibility in mind?

Bob
ChungKuo BBS
telnet://chungkuo.org

Branko Collin

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Jun 19, 2001, 6:53:39 AM6/19/01
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A test to see if a game is accessible, is to have somebody act as your
hands and ears: have somebody read the game to you as it appears on
screen through your telnet connection. And do not let them smuggle: if
there are two types of information that appear simultaneously on
screen, your reader cannot mention that fact. He or she has to start
at the top and work their way through to the end, and only then read
any new information that has appeared or wait for new input. If you
want to give commands, tell the command to your aid and have them
enter it, again reading out loud all the visual feed-back they get.

This should give you a rough idea of how the system works for the
blind pretty quickly.

Another thing you could do is read the accessibility guidelines of the
W3C, although they are probably overly broad. However, they do concern
themselves with presenting information aurally that was primarily
targeted for visual presentation. See http://wwww.w3.org, then follow
the links.

--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl

Kelly Sapergia

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Jun 19, 2001, 10:49:16 AM6/19/01
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Hi Bob,
Being a visually impaired game player myself, I personally think
developers should try to keep the accessibility of their games and
interpreters in mind, especially when it comes to Windows-based
systems. I can use my screen reader's mouse capabilities to read the
screen, but I think a beginning user of a screen reader might have
problems with this.
Thanks.

Kelly

Kevin Harrelson

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Jun 20, 2001, 4:42:27 PM6/20/01
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I have always thought that, with the availability of speech recognition and
synthesis software, that somebody should make a speech-enabled Z-machine.

The input vocabulry could be limited (most games use a thousand or so
words). Even old-fashioned discrete-word technology would be OK (most
times, you need four or less words in a row).

Text-to-speech, although sounding very mechanical, works quite well and is
very stable.

This would also be perfect for people who have to drive long distances.
They could play Curses while they drive. Some assumptions would have to be
made about the status bar at the top, but this type of interpreter should be
possible.

"Kelly Sapergia" <k.sap...@dlcwest.com> wrote in message
news:3b2f657d...@news.dlcwest.com...

James M. Power

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Jun 20, 2001, 5:47:15 PM6/20/01
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Voice interactive IF. I like it. In addition to being of service to the
blind, I would love to be able to play Curses while driving. However,
better than speech synthesis would be narrated. Perfect thing for a
volunteer effort. Anyone else think this is interesting and/or
feasible.

Jason Melancon

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Jun 22, 2001, 9:06:56 AM6/22/01
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I hereby volunteer to read and record game text, if such a terp ever
requires it.

--
Jason Melancon

Thorsten Franz

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Jun 24, 2001, 5:51:51 PM6/24/01
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"James M. Power" <jim....@atip-usa.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:3B3119E3...@atip-usa.com...

> Voice interactive IF. I like it. In addition to being of service to the
> blind, I would love to be able to play Curses while driving. However,
> better than speech synthesis would be narrated. Perfect thing for a
> volunteer effort. Anyone else think this is interesting and/or
> feasible.

I'm very interested in this sort of thing. Some time ago, I posted a
question about audio IF to this newsgroup and was pointed at a software
called StoryHarp (info at www.kurtz-fernhout.com), which allows you to
create a story in a sort of if-then table format. You can have the text read
by a speech synthesizer and reply verbally with one out of several choices.

StoryHarp also allows you to integrate audio files into the story, so could
have a good narrator record all the text in the game. (The speech
synthesizer really does sound bad. :-))
The conditional table architecture does impose some severe limitations on
what you can do - you couldn't do "Curses" with storyharp, but a decent
adventure game should certainly be possible.

--
Thorsten Franz, Bonn, Germany (shlomo.g...@gmx.de)


TheCycoONE

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Jul 30, 2001, 9:21:49 PM7/30/01
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"Thorsten Franz" <shlomo.g...@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:3b36...@news.ivm.net...

> "James M. Power" <jim....@atip-usa.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> news:3B3119E3...@atip-usa.com...
> > Voice interactive IF. I like it. In addition to being of service to the
> > blind, I would love to be able to play Curses while driving. However,
> > better than speech synthesis would be narrated. Perfect thing for a
> > volunteer effort. Anyone else think this is interesting and/or
> > feasible.
>
<snip>

> StoryHarp also allows you to integrate audio files into the story, so
could
> have a good narrator record all the text in the game. (The speech
> synthesizer really does sound bad. :-))

One problem is file size. Reasonable quality wav's are huge, even for
paragraphs of speech. Doing an entire game would be completly unfeasable.
Assuming that we could instead convert these audio files to MP3's were still
dealing with file sizes completely out of wack with the normal IF game.
Speach synthisis takes care of this problem very well... (it could be built
into the runner) and despite what most people witness in cheap 3'rd party
software, there are actually some good voice synthisisers out there.
Actually I've been fooling around with the idea. TADS and a number of other
windows based runners can be run symotantiosly with MS Voice or some other
such program. Voice is capable of reading the adventure (currently with
some human intervention) and also capable of writting in the command box.
If you make a dictionary specificly for text adventures, or become good at
using such a program as I'm sure most visually impaired people with access
to it become then it is quite possible to simply say your commands.

So I guess what I'm really saying is that should the will be great enough
there is already a way but it's kind'a complecated and a nicer way would be
appreciated, but not one which makes our dear Zork 40 Mb.
<snip>

Joe Mason

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Jul 30, 2001, 11:11:05 PM7/30/01
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Joe Mason

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Jul 30, 2001, 11:15:48 PM7/30/01
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In article <tmc1vmo...@corp.supernews.com>,
TheCycoONE <cyc...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Speach synthisis takes care of this problem very well... (it could be built
>into the runner) and despite what most people witness in cheap 3'rd party
>software, there are actually some good voice synthisisers out there.
>Actually I've been fooling around with the idea. TADS and a number of other

I'm still really annoyed with myself for not looking into this further
when I was working for AOL By Phone...

<snip>

>So I guess what I'm really saying is that should the will be great enough
>there is already a way but it's kind'a complecated and a nicer way would be
>appreciated, but not one which makes our dear Zork 40 Mb.

Well, what you would do is put the interpreter on a server, where it doesn't
matter what size it is, and then you just dial 1-800-555-ZORK to connect
to it. Don't even need a computer, and you can play on your cell phone
without having to fiddle with annoying tiny screens and buttons.

Joe

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