A screen you read is not a menu of screens

The documentation used to be a menu of seven entries, each of which opened a window you then closed to get back to the menu to open the next one. That is the shape a sighted interface takes, because a menu is one glance and a window is another. Read aloud, it is two key presses in and one out per section — and the map descriptions were a menu inside a menu inside that.

Both of the game's reading screens are one screen now, with a strip of sections across the top. Left and right pick, tab goes in, shift and tab comes back out. The section is not behind the strip, it is the thing you tab into, and that one change took the documentation from twenty-one key presses to walk through to seven.

It is deliberately the same arrangement as the options screen, and the options screen is deliberately the same arrangement as the loadout screen and the match browser.

Forty of anything is not a tab strip

The map descriptions get a strip of their own, inside the section, on the same left and right keys — because the alternative is either forty tabs across the top or a list that opens a window per map, and both of those are the thing this section removed. What nests is the idea, not the control. The form library hands a tab press back out of a page as soon as focus is on its last control, so a literal tab strip inside a tab strip would be tabbed past rather than tabbed into and would never see the key. The inner strip is an ordinary control that reads the same two arrows: same behaviour, no fight with the library.

It starts on the map you are standing on.

The same descriptions, on this site →

Every choice is a slider

There were switches: a control you cycle with the space bar, which says the thing it landed on and nothing else. No sense of how many choices there are, no sense of where in them you are, and space is the one key somebody arriving at an unfamiliar control is least likely to try — the arrows are what everybody tries.

A slider moves on the arrows like everything else, says two of two on its own, and takes a label per position, so it reads out exactly the words the switch did. Two positions or twenty, it is the same control: the voice chooser is one of these with a position per voice on the machine.

In a game with no screen, the number of distinct interaction patterns is a cost paid by every player on their first evening. One kind of choice, one kind of strip, one kind of list. Anything that is nearly the same as something else should be the same as it.

A setting judged by ear has to be audible while you set it

Everything on the options screen waits for save, which is what makes cancel possible and is the right default: a form holds a working copy and nothing is touched until you say so.

The speech settings cannot wait, and they are the only ones. A voice is not a number you can reason about — set a rate, save, listen, come back, set it again is four steps to answer a question one arrow key should answer. And for somebody who has just switched to SAPI because their screen reader is not running, save and find out means committing to a setting that might leave the game silent.

So that one group is live, said in the voice it is describing, and cancel puts the voice back exactly as it was along with everything else. The exception earns itself: it is the only setting in the game whose effect is the thing that would tell you about it.

If the game is silent, it is the voice

Windows lists things among its SAPI voices that are not voices — SAPI2SR and the like are pipes back to whatever screen reader is running, and they say nothing at all when there is not one. The game steps off those on its own, and the voice is a setting on the speech page with the bridges named for what they are.

Escape opens a pause menu that does not pause

Escape in a shooter is a key people press by accident, and a menu that made them safe while they read it would be a menu people pressed on purpose. Every list and form in this game runs the world underneath it.

Every key can be moved

Options → Keys → Key bindings lists every action as a button whose caption is its current key, so tabbing through that screen reads your whole keyboard aloud. They are kept in keyconfig.ini in the game's settings folder, and deleting that file puts everything back to default.

Documentation is on the main menu, and alt+D from anywhere.