Re: Seeking Blind or Visually Impaired Alpha Testers
Hi.
First, welcome to the forum, and thanks for the news of the game. NEw releases is for, ---- well newly released and playable games, Alpha and betas included, so don't worry about breaking any rules, if you have any questions about the forum rules check the site faq, it can be found in the General game discussion or in Site and forum feedback.
As to your thoughts and the game. I do appreciate the problem of interpreting real time text, and why this element wouldn't be naturally accessible if the text comes in on a second by second basis. however, while designing your own program and interface shows a real commitment to accessibility, I do wonder if you considered a couple of points.
I can't unfortunately try the interface you've got myself as I'm a windows Xp user (though when you have a version for Ios let me know), however what your talking about sounds remarkably like a mud.
Muds, multi user dimentions (or dungeons i n some older understandings), are net based text games which have existed ever sinse the bbs days. Players connect to a mud through a client program, (You can use windows telnet but it's not the best option), and game text is sent and descriptions received.
With a little tinkering and a few additions muds have proved some of the most accessible games available, particularly sinse most screen reader users use one of a number of customized mud clients to handle oncoming text in a quick and efficient manner.
Probably the most widely played mud by Vi players is Alteraeon, see http://www.dentinmud.org/alter/ which has included huge amounts of access customizations.
Perhaps You could consider outputting your text in such a way that a vi player could connect via a mud client to your game's site, sinse it would probably be easier than making your own custom program to do a similar job, and also because mud clients exist in accessibleforms for MAc, Windows and Linux.
As another alternative, macromedia flash can be used to output to microsoft sapi on windows, and thus achieve a similar end to your voiceover mac interface. The disadvantage is that the quality of the synth voice will vary according to what voices the user has on his/her machine and for a decent experience a person would need a decent voice, the advantage however is no screen reader support issues and an easy mode of output.
Finally, I will check your html version myself. Assuming it doesn't conflict with internet explorer, it would be interesting to see what speed the text is sent to the game sinse it is possible that the game might be playable via the standard interface and that tweaks to the standard layout might be workable. I can think of a couple of games where real time text was sent to the browser, but was at a slow enough rate to not be a problem.
Of course this isn't to attempt to invalidate what your doing, indeed I think it's great that you have such a commitment to access, just some suggestions on things you might not have considered or avinues you might not have explored sinse information on accessible games isn't exactly in the public eye.
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