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Tomorrow I'm going to be speaking to a small group of #blind students at a local high school. Apparently the teacher wants me to help motivate them to learn more about assistive technology, which they've fallen behind on; she specifically mentioned JAWS, but I've asked if I can talk about NVDA as well. It might help to have some ideas for fun things to do on a PC, things a high-schooler would enjoy, that require some mastery of a screen reader.
Follow-up question for #blind people who play text-based interactive fiction (a.k.a. text adventures): Which IF interpreters work best with Windows screen readers, particularly JAWS? Lectrote (https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote) wasn't bad the last time I tried it with NVDA, though you have to be a somewhat advanced user to find the right download (on the GItHub releases page) and unzip it. Wondering if there are better options.
It seems to me that interactive fiction / text adventure games reward mastery of a screen reader more than, say, audio games developed specifically for blind people, or the mainstream games I've seen that have added accessibility via their own TTS and other audio. And for those lucky enough to have a Braille display, they can use that as well when playing IF.
I might demonstrate my favorite IF game, Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short (https://i7-examples.github.io/counterfeit-monkey/), while talking with the students tomorrow. That game is all about manipulating words, so it should go over well in a school environment. There's an in-browser player, but at least with NVDA, that has some annoying verbosity at every prompt. Would be nice to have a Glulx interpreter that works really smoothly with Windows screen readers.
@matt If you're allowed to use add-ons, then may as well check out the IF Interpreters add-on. It does tell you which ones it works with too:
https://github.com/nvdaes/ifInterpreters
@twynn I'm hoping I can use my own laptop to demonstrate stuff while I'm there. As for what the students can use, I'm still waiting for an answer on that.
@matt Well even portable NVDA can use add-ons, and it's not like the IF Interpreters add-on requires admin privileges or anything.