Twine Screen Reader: A Browser Extension for Improving the Accessibility of Twine Stories for People with Visual Impairments

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the design, evaluation, and results of a screen reader created to improve the interactive fiction (IF) experience for people with visual impairments. Our screen reader was designed for IF written with Twine 2 using the Harlowe and SugarCube story formats. As a starting framework, we use the IF accessibility guidelines to address three major shortcomings of screen readers when used with Twine IFs: 1. Improving page content extraction with Twine-specific HTML elements; 2. Adding sound notifications and read out for page updates (commonly used by Twine); and 3. Adding keyboard commands to navigate between interactive elements. Running small-scale user evaluations of our screen reader with novice and expert screen reader users allowed us to refine our screen reader and highlight some ongoing challenges in this area. Finally, we posit that to improve the overall accessibility of interaction fiction requires the contribution of the entire IF community.