Here's how to download the screen reader we use and use it. i'll try to write a short post.
download:
https://www.nvaccess.org/download/
Once you have the exe file, you can either run it as a portable app or install it on your computer. Once the app is launched, it might show you a little window asking you if you want to change your keyboard layout, or have the app launched at logon screen or when windows start. you can ignore all of that and press OK.
When the app is running it's down in the notification area and the screen reader is running in the background. y'll notice that when you move your mouse over windows elements it will read the items below it.
Let's say there are three modes of working with the computer with the screen reader.
1. application mode. You can use your arrow keys and basically the windows commands and you'll hear the reader read the elements for you as they will get focused. the primary keys are the arrow keys, tab+shift+Tab keys, space and enter. e.g. you can press windows+m, use arrow keys to navigate the desktop, enter to activate one of the icons. This is the mode that we hope could be possible to play x4 on.
2. Browse mode, (irrelivant to our case) but this is used on browsers and web apps and frames such as discord. the screen reader creates a cursor and as you use the arrow keys it will scroll through links and headings and other web elements. and there are shortcuts to jump around these elements.
3. advanced mode. we use this mode to treat x4 as a single object in the screen, and then perform an OCR on it and after it gives us the OCR results, we use the screen reader functions to put the mouse on where it finds the texts extracted from the screen.
When the game is open, you'll see that when using the keyboard the reader is not able to read the items. find a simple screen with text and perform these commands.
(the insert key is the screen reader modifier by the way. for example, if you hold the insert key+f12, you'll hear the time.
(I also do appoligize if this is hard! Unfortunately it's the way we interact with x4 screens and we have to do it every time there's a new text on the screen in the game)
So once the game is open on a simple screen:
1. make sure numpad is off so it does not input numbers as you press them. then, insert+numpad 1 -- switches the advanced mode to object review. you can make sure it is in object view by pressing insert+numpad 7, (switches to screen review) and then back to object view by pressing insert+numpad 1, once this mode is selected, you don't need to do this again in your next OCR attempts.
2. press insert+r -- screen reader begins scanning the screen and performs OCR. you'll hear, "recognizing... result document"
3. Now there's a hidden interface open and your keyboard focus is inside it. use numpad 7 and 9 to read the previous/next line, 4 and 6 for words, and 1 and 3 for letter navigation.
4. Once you find the text you're interested to interact with, make sure your focus on it by just hearing the text as you focus on it.
5. press insert+numpad slash -- this will drop your mouse pointer on top of the UI element the screen reader has found the text from.
6. press numpad slash to emulate a mouse click or juse use your left mouse button to click.
7. use the escape key to exit the OCR results window, otherwise your left and arrow keys, enter button, the numpads won't work in the game, as they're being captured to browse the ocr result.
I just hope that you do have a keyboard with a numpad -- otherwise Caplin might have to help with the alternate keys for keyboards that don't have one.
You can exit the screen reader by openning its menu from the notification area or pressing insert+n to open the menu and choosing exit. let me know if you had questions.
edit: you can use the command control+insert+up and down arrow keys to adjust the TTS speed rate
edit2: when NVDA is running and your numpad is turned off (as in, it is on page up/down/home/end mode) your entire numpad belongs to NVDA! for advanced navigation. so it will steal and capture them, so you can't use it to press home or end, for example
edit3: some texts in the game are skipped by the OCR, i'm not sure why. for example when the mission window is open, or when trading, some small texts gets skipped. maybe because there's a shadow on them, or something like that.