Heiko wrote:
Qt isn't used for the user interface in the screen reader edition because Qt's accessibility support was nowhere near good enough. Qt5 claims to have better support, but documentation was still missing the last time I had a look. So what is being used: I use the windows C API to get better screen reader support and I use windows SAPI directly because this is the only way to get full control over what is being spoken. The user has a reading cursor in the text that he can move freely, skip lines, words etc.. The interface consists of 2 console windows (game console and command console plus a popup file editor to write your scripts.). The current state of the project is close to alpha stage. The screen reader is just a front end to the current Mudlet version, so blind players have the full capabilits of the client including package installation, auto walking support from the mapper etc..
Where I can download the latest mudlet screen reader edition?
Talking about direct control over spoken feetback, I am not sure it is what you really need. Screen reader developers put a lot of time and efford to make user experience effective and customizable, and replicating that efford is imo an overkill. If we utilize standart native controls, most screen readers will pickup the interface easily, allowing user to customize the output in whatever way he/she wants. For exammple, you get braille display support for free.
Heiko wrote:The voice quality of NVDA is very poor compared to SAPI and I don't know of any blind user that actually uses NVDA.
Here you confuse screen reader with speech synthesizer. Screen reader is a program which collects information about events in the system and uses different means of communicating this information to blind person (mostly speech and braille). Speech synthesizer is a piece of software which takes text on input and computes/plays an actual voice tone. You can use whatever synthesizer with every screen reader. e.g. you can easily use sapi voices with NVDA (and jaws, and any other windows screen reader).
Espeak, the synthesizer NVDA ships with by default, is in no way the most natural sounding voice. But do not forget that blind users often prefer low latency and ease of recognition on high speech rates to human sounding.
As for popularity, NVDA counts as being third most used SR in the windows world (
http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey4/#primary), while being second in some local markets. I recomended to use it because 1) it is free, 2) it supports all modern accessibility interfaces. In particular, its qt support is superior to jaws.
Heiko wrote:The interface of the screen reader version is a mix of native windows GUI and console application. More GUI elements could be added in the future if there is more interest from the blind users. Until then the development will not continue. If a few active blind testers want to help this project - or if you want to participate yourself as a blind software developer, I will continue development again.
I will definitely evaulate the current SR version and get back with my feedback.
However currently there is some obstacles preventing me from switching to mudlet from my current client and hacking it for my needs.
1. I respect lua, but Python takes mutch stronger position in my heart as for scripting languages. I have significant ammount of mud client scripts in python.
2. I want to have the same (or close) experience as my sighted peers. For example, I often provide support to friends. If we use different interface, this means we have difficulties communicating about problems etc.
I explained my attitude about isolated vs mainstream experience in the previous posting.
3. While I am trying to slowly move all my activities to mac, I discovered mudlet as a brilliant cross-platform mud client. But SR version seems to be available only for windows.
Thanks,
Lex