Text adventure interpreter makes Infocom's Journey and Arthur accessible

I might just try this!

Is there any way to disable the accommodations completely and just rely on reviewing the buffers in the usual way, or are they complementary?

Spatterlight is simply the gold standard of IF play for the blind now, in my opinion. Thanks so much for the work you've done and still do. It's much appreciated, not to speak of unexpected!

You mentioned dynamically-added menus when VoiceOver was detected. I supposed that the experience would therefore be parallel to, rather than complementary to, the existing model of each game window being its own interactible element, and all the output would be self-voiced differently. From what you're saying though, it should still be possible to review the text as printed by the game. Just for context, I've used a DOS screen reader with frotz to play and win Journey, so I'm not unaware of the mechanics of the z6 format and the way it presented the two-pane view and menus.

But don't worry, I'm a long-time user of Spatterlight (thanks again!) with VoiceOver, so I'll figure it out and let you know if I run into any trouble.

Probably the weekend, I'll take this out for a spin.
And yes, the important thing is to have options, because it doesn't always work correctly, but when it does, it's awesome!

Thanks again and I'll let you know.

Yes, it works. It's workable. It's clearly superior to having no assistance at all, because as far as I can tell there's no textual representation of the cursor and, therefore, no obvious way to navigate from the keyboard using the arrow keys and space bar, as the game directs. The entire status window is always announced, which makes knowing what the options are possible and convenient, but navigation impossible.

Use of the menu bar is understandable and intuitive, but somewhat clunky, requiring player to keep using the menus rather than staying in the game window. It may however be the best option. Perhaps you could try working on alternative approaches that try to read the highlighted text in the status window. There again, it would make reading the transcript harder, and not everyone would grok the screen layout. Maybe this is the best way, really. I like your use of popup windows for completing commands, but VO sometimes lands hard, and left/right navigation gets stuck, VO announce that it's in a alert dialog, but unhelpfully, nothing else until interaction commands are used to move to child (VO-Shift-Down-arrow). The dimming of invalid menu choices is a nice touch, because it means information isn't lost.

In the Preferences window, the selected tab isn't tracked right by VoiceOver; the selected button is wrongly announced. And the popup hint for redirecting text to the main window is bogus.

In general, I think we need a place where all your notes on VoiceOver use can go. Right now everything I've learned comes from somewhere in the release notes on GitHub. This is of course great to have, but it does mean there's no reference to direct people to and that I might have missed something.

I'll grab the new build and keep playing ...

Edit: Build grabbed, autorestore worked (thank goodness), clarified alert dialog workaround.

I agree, it feels like a standard panel and I'm not sure why you aren't automatically getting this. For contrast, try the Finder. When you select a tab in the toolbar, VoiceOver then correctly tells you that the button in the toolbar is "selected", which means that this set of options is now being displayed. Specifically, use VO-left and VO-right to select the button in the tab bar, press VO-space to select it, and confirm that this button, alone, is given as "selected". If you can't fix it, it's really not the end of the world, but it would be nice if it could be fixed, as it makes navigating all the prefs that little bit easier.

For the difficulty of the modal dialogs in Journey, simply select an option (let's say, Individual Commands, Praxix, Examine) and, when the dialog opens, simply use VO-left/right to navigate. What I get is "Alert, dialog" until I interact, and only then do I see the popup control for target objects (you have to be at that point in the game, obviously, where you have such choices).

Then last night I ended the story, but got confused by the "Musings". I thought you were supposed to get musings from each player character, on each topic, but as soon as I chose a topic, I saw the dialog reappear; only by choosing all of them, then Cancel and reviewing the transcript, did I gather that your detection logic had perhaps fired a little too aggressively in this case and it would have made more sense to let the player listen to the game output first. Give it a try.

I apologise for the somewhat terse nature of these comments—feel free to follow up if you need more info.

I look forward to it!

I just want to come in here and say once again how amazing this program is for playing Interactive Fiction. Thank you for everything you do! I'm making a game with Inform 7, and this program makes it super easy to play and test.

Yes. Truly, really great work.

It's paradoxical, too, because it's basically a highly specialised accessibility experience for Interactive Fiction running on a platform, and using the support of the screen reader, that offers—or, at least, was best known in our community in the past for offering—a highly generalised and mainstream accessibility experience. And it has all the same contradictions and quandaries that go along with it, of the difficulty of balancing the general with the specific in order to get maximum accessibility and user experience.

But the end result is unmatched. Interactive Fiction that self-voices at a comfortable speed through the screen reader, but with functional sound, menus and open/save dialogs, that nonetheless allows screen review. It's just awesome. I never thought I'd be playing IF on macOS much if at all, and that if I did play again it would be in Windows using TTS or a plain console interpreter. There really hasn't been anything close to it since the DOS days. Or maybe, at a stretch, the console versions of Windows or Linux interpreters running in their stupid "Dumb" modes, with no use of anything but plain stdio, no terminal escapes (no scrolling in ncurses, no cursor movement).

Edit: @Petter Thanks! Grabbing it now.

Unfortunately it seems there's a regression, in that if I use the Individual Commands menu, I sometimes don't get automatic speaking of the last move, even though pressing Cmd-Shift-Left reads it for me (thanks for the accessibility doc, BTW, which is excellent and very handy!).

Then, I regret also to inform you that the toolbar issue still isn't fixed, if you worked on that. The button says selected when activated with VO-Space, but it's not identified as selected when navigating the toolbar.

I'll keep playing, and tweaking … and thanks again for all your efforts, as always.

For now, concerning prefs, yes, you've got it announcing "Selected" when the button is pressed. But it must be announced as selected when navigating left/right across the toolbar, as well. So for instance, in Finder settings, press General in the toolbar, displaying the general settings, then use VO-left/right to confirm that General is selected; then, press Tags in the toolbar, and again use VO-left/right to confirm that Tags is now selected. It's not just the announcement that the button is selected when pressed, though that's useful. It's the state when the toolbar is subsequently reviewed, and it's the selected item when the toolbar is interacted with.

I have yet to reach the musings again—I'll get back to that once I'm out of hospital—but what I refer to is just general gameplay, the Individual Commands menu no longer seems to provoke automatic reading of the transcript in all circumstances. That means Journey is now harder to play than it was with the previous build.

I will likewise test the alert dialog behaviour, and let you definitely know whether you've fixed it. I don't recall running into this recently, so I think you have fixed it, but I need to test it thoroughly.