If you like to play games, Jim Kitchen is a blind programmer who has done a lot of fun games for blind computer users. He has written them both in MS-DOS and Windows and he offers them free of charge at: Jim Kitchen's home page
Jim has added many new self-voicing games that use the SAPI 5 speech engines that you probably already have on your computer. If not, he also has a link to down load an install file for the Microsoft SAPI 5 voices. Some of his newest games work with either the keyboard or a joy stick. A few of my personal favorites are Baseball, Golf and the newer Puppy1.
Blind Gamers web site
The Blind Gamers Web site offers many free computer games from Chess Challenge, to Cribbage, Hearts, Sudoku and many more. They are all totally free and use your computers default SAPI voice to speak the game information. When you visit the site, you will find information on each game and ordering instructions. You simply send an e-mail with your name and your country of residence along with the name of the game you wish to receive. Very easy. In a few days, you will receive the game as a zip attachment, so make sure your e-mail program doesn't block the receipt of zip files.
Here is a chess game that works very well with screen readers that is reasonably priced:
KChess Elite by Arkangles.
The author, Rob McDonell, created KChess with both blind and sighted people in mind. It is suitable for beginners and expert players alike. I am fairly sure as of September 20008 that it is still available, but you will need to check to see.
Here are the Window-Eyes 7 set files for KChess Elite 4. Just unzip the file to your Window-Eyes default folder: KChess-Elite4WE7sets.zip, Last updated on September 25, 2008.
If you would like my Window-Eyes 4.5 set files for KChess Elite 4, down load the file "elite4-we45.exe" here:elite4-we45.exe (updated 09/25/03)
Cris Cross TechnologyCrissCross Technology has a free solitaire game that works with any screen reader. It doesn't need set files. They use words instead of graphics for the cards and the best thing about their game over the one Microsoft provides is that you can use the up arrow to figure out what cards are in each stack.
Here is the Harry Potter game for the BrailleNotes.
HARRY.Z8
Last updated: September 25, 2008