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Allure of the Stars

near-future Sci-Fi roguelike and tactical squad game · By Man of Letters

A bug with screen readers on windows

A topic by jukesy1992 created Sep 27, 2022 Views: 153 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 3

Hi, I'm using the free screen reader NVDA on windows, and NVDA thinks that every single letter is in it's own column, so instead of saying "alure of the stars", it says "column 1 a column 2 l" etc etc. This literally makes the game unplayable. A good example is the first screen, where "press any key" is spelt out, not said. I'm wondering if anything could be done about this. This is in the browser version, but I'm wondering if also a binary could be set up perhaps so that the browser version isn't compromised, or if this can just be looked into for all versions in trying to fix.

Developer

Hi @jukesy1992,

Thanks for trying out my game. I'm afraid, the browser version can't currently display text in a way the screen reader would understand well enough. However, the Linux binary has an ANSI frontend tweaked specifically to help screen readers, running in a terminal emulator. I'm afraid the ANSI text frontend doesn't work on Windows. It may work on the OSX Homebrew port, though. Let me know if I can help you further.

All the best,
Mikolaj

Hi, Unfortunately I don't have access to linux or mac at this time, so I don't really know when I'll get to play this. Is there a chance you might be able to possibl work on a windows version that's accessible? Also, how does the general gameplay of this game work? I'd love to learn more.

Developer

I'm afraid I won't be able to substantially improve the accessibility of the Windows version in the foreseeable future. Does your screen reader do OCR (recognizing text from pictures)? If so, the normal Windows binary may work for you. However, there are two kinds of fonts, the smaller one is for text and it's overlayed on the larger one for the map symbols. If the OCR fails to cope with two kinds of fonts, an option can be toggled to only have the big font for everything.

I do hope the gameplay works. Several people had fun with it. Some finished shorter scenarios, some even won the longest one. However, the map is quite complex, because you have several party members to control. Not at the same time, but a few moves of one character, a few of another, for three or more party members usually. Quite a bit of tactical consideration about which character stands where in relation to the others, map obstacles, enemies. If you'd prefer something simpler, I strongly recommend classical text-based roguelike games, such as Angband, where you only control one character (usually). Many of them should be very accessible, e.g., because some of them run only in terminal emulator. A lot of them are listed at http://roguebasin.com.

Let me know if I can help in any other way.