Lack of accessibility of the I7 IDE on multiple platforms

Hi everyone,

I’m a potential blind I7 creator here, but I’m at a loss for the accessibility support, which apparently I7 has.

I know I can’t use the feature for coding and viewing the documentation side by side, but on the macOS platform is where the app has some issues. I’ll try it on my new computer as maybe that was the issue, but when I would run game tests the built in parchment would crash when ran, and that’s just with one of the examples.

I know of at least one competition entry a few years back that was a detective game where the author mentioned using a screen reader, and it was all in Inform. If I7 was coded to specifically work with Jaws only, this would explain it, as most of us are now using NVDA.

I think you’re refering to my game, which was indeed written using JAWS. I would think you could write a game using NVDA. I would have thought the issue would be playing ghames in offline interpreters since NVDA doesn’t have the equivalent of “JAWS mode.”

As for the feature for coding and viewing the documentation side by side, you know that you can switch panes using shortcut keys on the keyboard, right? I’m not sure that this feature suffers because of screen reader inaccessibility since we can’t see the screen anyway (well, I can’t).

Neil

Which version of Inform 7 are you trying on the Mac Orinks? Because until fairly recently there was a bug in the Inform IDE on Macs running Sierra and High Sierra, so the built in interpreter would crash when games were compiled and run. A new version of the IDE was eventually released for Macs to patch this. Just want to make sure that isn’t your problem.

Thanks, I appreciate this news. I’ll give it another shot, though I think to make it easier to test games on Mac, there’s a way to code, if using the Apple Accessibility APIs, the ability to detect when VoiceOver is on. With this, you could then implement a feature where, when VoiceOver is on, the system voice can read the output automatically. Well, it’s sad we no longer have an accessible Mac interpreter after the death of Zoom.

Actually, NVDA does have something like Jaws curser, if that’s what you’re referring to when you say Jaws mode.

In any case, perhaps I haven’t played around with the keyboard shortcuts enough.