Screen-Reader

I wrote an accessibility review of NukeFire and flagged three things that were missing. The developer built all three and credited me by name. That doesn’t happen often.

An audiogame is spatial audio by definition. For a brain that can’t parse sound location, that’s a wall, not a ramp. Text games are a real medium, and for some of us they’re the only games that work.

NukeFire is a post-apocalyptic MUD with screen reader profiles, GPS navigation, and a crafting system that stores your materials between sessions. It’s the most accessible MUD I’ve played since Erion, and it does several things Erion doesn’t.

Most MUDs are technically accessible because they’re text-based, but Erion is the only one I can actually play. Here’s what it does that every other MUD gets wrong.

NVDA doesn’t tell you whether a window is maximized when you query the title. JAWS does. I built a small add-on that adds this feature, with a dedicated command and an optional NVDA+T enhancement that matches the JAWS behavior.

The existing word prediction tools don’t work with NVDA. So I built my own add-on that predicts words using n-gram analysis, announces them through NVDA’s speech engine, and works inside the screen reader instead of against it.

Steam added accessibility features in 2025, but the desktop experience with NVDA still has real barriers. Here’s what works, what doesn’t, and what Valve should fix next.

I built a screen-reader-first kingdom builder because I can’t play the games the audiogame community keeps making. The alpha is live, the feedback is coming in, and it works.