Hi Dark, It has more to do with simplicity and personal preference than anything else. Since you yourself admittedly have only used the Windows command prompt you missed the Dos experience. What I mean by that is being able to boot directly to a console environment, start up your screen reader, and just run apps without requiring a full graphical environment like Windows. While Dos itself is long gone there are still operating systems such as Linux that offer a similar experience.
For example, if I want to I can boot directly to a console login screen, fire up Speakup, and run programs via the console rather than boot into Gnome, KDE, Unity, or some other graphical environment. This has resulted in me being able to continue playing a lot of interactive fiction games in a purely textual environment via frotz, scare, and so on. I guess for me the nostalgia comes from the freedom to play the game directly from the console without having to be running some graphical user interface like Windows, Gnome, KDE, Unity, whatever just to play a text game. Its difficult to explain this in terms you would understand since a lot of it boils down to personal preference. I would like to be able to choose weather I play that game in a console environment or from a terminal window etc. Its easy to say text is text, that's true, but how that text is accessed is not the same. In a console game all a person has to do is use a print function to write text directly to the console. It is simply white text on a black background. That's the point. It doesn't need any code to draw a window, edit boxes, buttons, and a bunch of other GUI components to display the same information. It is just printed directly onto the screen and any console screen reader can read it via their review commands, and I've generally found almost anything purely text based is 100% accessible automatically. With GUI applications things aren't so straight forward or as accessible. Even if the game is going to be text based the developer still has to create a window, create an edit box to display the text, and will probably add some sort of menus, buttons, or some other GUI components that can make it less accessible or more difficult to play. The best example I can think of is Trek 99 verses Trek 2000. In Trek 99 I had no problems with playing it using Jaws for Dos, Vocal-Eyes, whatever. With Trek 2000 David Greenwood converted it to a Windows application and while it is still largely text based I've had problems playing it with NVDA, Window-Eyes, etc because the screen readers fail to speak information automatically in the edit box, and sometimes important messages simply scroll off screen before I can review them. It is for that reason David Greenwood added an option to turn on message boxes which displays every thing in a series of message boxes instead of the standard edit box. Either way the new user interface sucks and I'd prefer the classic Trek 99 look and feel over the Trek 2000 look and feel because it was more accessible and just much easier to work with. That's not to say GUI applications can't be as accessible as their Dos counterparts. They can, but that takes more work on the developer's part to make it so. When Jim Kitchen converted all his Dos games to Windows games he added Sapi support rather than printing the text on screen in an edit box. This obviously made them quite accessible,but now a user will have to pay extra for some decent Sapi voices since Sam, Anna, and the other voices that ship with Windows are absolute crap. Gone are the days where someone could just fire up their screen reader and use their existing synth. In short, I think using Sapi can be a bit limiting. Its fine if you have some good Sapi voices, but if not most people will want to use the voices that came with their screen reader. Now that the Sapi Realspeak voices are discontinued someone may want to use the Realspeak Direct Solo voices that come with Jaws. The only way to do that is to either use the Jaws API, or just have a text based application. Since using the Jaws API is not exactly a cross-platform option a text based interface would be preferable. All of this of course assumes we intend to use speech output for feedback. What about def-blind users who rely on braille output. Should we just focus on a speech output system and forget about braille when a text interface could be read using BrailleTTY, Jaws for Windows, etc with equal accessibility? In summary there are a lot more things we could do with a plain text game such as play it in a Linux console, or in a graphical environment like Windows, we can use speech or braille, we can use proprietary voices like Realspeak Direct which work with a specific screen reader rather than Sapi, etc.The more advanced we get with a GUI application, add Sapi support, the more alternative options we throw away in the process. Cheers! --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
