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jcwild / ADRIFT-5

ADRIFT: Adventure Development & Runner - Interactive Fiction Toolkit
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
17 stars 9 forks source link

ADRIFT 5 Accessibility #9

Open BlindHunter95 opened 4 years ago

BlindHunter95 commented 4 years ago

Now that ADRIFT is actively being developed again (or at least it seems that way), I feel the need to bring this issue up. I brought it up on the IntFiction forums when this project was first open sourced, but it never hurts to remind the contributors to this project. The ADRIFT 5 developer and runner are inaccessible to screen readers. As stated on the ADRIFT Forum, most windows in the developer's main interface are refered to by screen readers as Ultra List Boxes, the buttons and list items are unlabeled, and most UI elements in the rest of the interface (such as in the settings dialogue box) are not spoken at all. The only thing that is accessible is the dialog box stating that no libraries have been loaded during the first run. The runner has no option for reading game text with text to speech and the menu bar and other toolbars are inaccessible at all,. The most common screen readers today include NVDA and Job Access With Speech. NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access) is completely free, and JAWS has a free 40 minute demo available.

jcwild commented 4 years ago

Thank you. I will do my best to improve this.

On Sun, 11 Oct 2020 at 07:20, BlindHunter95 notifications@github.com wrote:

Now that ADRIFT is actively being developed again (or at least it seems that way), I feel the need to bring this issue up. I brought it up on the IntFiction forums when this project was first open sourced, but it never hurts to remind the contributors to this project. The ADRIFT 5 developer and runner are inaccessible to screen readers. As stated on the ADRIFT Forum http://forum.adrift.co/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3910, most windows in the developer's main interface are refered to by screen readers as Ultra List Boxes, the buttons and list items are unlabeled, and most UI elements in the rest of the interface (such as in the settings dialogue box) are not spoken at all. The only thing that is accessible is the dialog box stating that no libraries have been loaded during the first run. The runner has no option for reading game text with text to speech and the menu bar and other toolbars are inaccessible at all,. The most commly used screen readers today include NVDA https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/ and Job Access With Speech https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/. NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access) is completely free, and JAWS has a free 40 minute demo available.

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BlindHunter95 commented 4 years ago

Here are a few resources to make this fix a bit easier: Tolk - a library to make communicating with screen readers and braille displays easier, by Davie Kager Universal Speech - Another library;this one only supports screen readers and Microsoft's Text-To-Speech API. AudioGames.Net Forum - a forum where many blind people congrigate to discuss game playing and development, and where new releases are announced. There are many people there who would be glad to help. R/Blind - a more general blind/visually impaired subreddit, where other blind people can be found, who would be glad to help in whatever way possible.

zersiax commented 4 years ago

@jcwild a lot of this can be improved by adding the requisite properties to the controls in the runner forms. Should really just be a matter of adding the correct XAML markup. I'd love to have a look, but having serious issues building the project. I'm sure the fact I'm trying to build with VS 2020 doesn't help. I'll see if I can get the project to build on another version an report back. Seriously though ...these fixes are very likely extremely simple, and making them would make a bunch of people's day. Standard WPF, Winforms and win32 controls already have the fields built in, just need to set them, and custom controls can implement an interface to do the same thing.

zersiax commented 4 years ago

@jcwild Ok, did some more digging. I still can't get the thing to build, mostly because I don't have the required version of the infragistics tools, but therein also lies where changes will most likely need to happen: Pretty sure that the runner uses Winforms or WPF. Infragistics themselves has the following to say on the subject, at least where Winforms is concerned: https://www.infragistics.com/help/winforms/win-accessibility-overview

AccessibleObject is what I was referring to yesterday. I really hope this will enable you, or anybody else seeing this, to make the runner work better with screen readers. Text adventures are games a lot of blind players in particular really enjoy playing, and due to the way Adrift 5's runner is currently broken for accessibility, they can't effectively play anything that requires this version of Adrift.

jcwild commented 4 years ago

Thanks guys. I'll make this a priority for the next release.