[No] TTS/Screenreader support for blind players

[Isabella Fivingpidging]

I would like to enable the speaking of text from within Doom, so that I can play it better. Specifically, when I am navigating a menu, I should be able to hear the option I am on read back to me. I would also like to be told what item I've just picked up, or the current ammo in a weapon when I switch to it.

Windows has an open-source abstraction library to handle communicating to the screenreader called Tolk: https://github.com/dkager/tolk/
However I have no clue how to integrate this into ZDoom, or how much effort it would take. I'm also not sure what to do about platforms other than windows.

[Graf Zahl]

I'm sorry but this is out of scope for a hobby project.

[Logan MTM]

Did he said "hobby"? Internationalisation was a hobby?

[Rachael]

Internationalisation was a hobby?

Yes. It was purely done by volunteers. And the work they did was amazing.

[Logan MTM]

Well, I have no idea how blind people can play Doom anyway?
Would be really nice if we could set the sound to play when each menu get focus.

[Graf Zahl]

It's not about "blind" people but about "visually impaired people". These are well capable of making out the visuals of the game but cannot read the text content.
But that's not really an easy task in an engine with so many means to output text - some even completely outside the engine's control. Adding such a feature is far from trivial with very little payoff in the end.

[Logan MTM]

I supposed to.
About play specific sounds in Menu?
New game = "sound x"
Load game = "sound y"
Basically the same Pickup.Sound does for items.
Would be great.

[Major Cooke]

Make a new topic for it.