Hey, Mastodon hive mind. I'm wondering what the best sollutions are these days for accessibly interacting with IRC? I come from the era of tools like MircWithSpeech and TalkingIRC. I'm currently using ADIIRC, with its speech plugin, which I helped develop! Along with @fastfinge, but i'm not sure if that client is seeing a lot of development, and there's still some annoying accessibility quirks, I'm also quite comfortable with irssi, but would prefer a windows native sollution if possible. Anything still good for mIRC? Something else? #IRC#Accessibility#A11Y#Chat
@arfy@fastfinge Hey hi! I still use mIRC with the mIRCSpeech plugin. Sure, the plugin hasn't changed in like 20 years, but neither has the JFW or presumably NVDA API.
@quanin@arfy I mean technically, the NVDA API has changed. But nobody uses the new functionality. I honestly wish I still had the code for sjams that me and @cachondo worked on years ago. It was my favourite incarnation of that concept, and would probably still work honestly. Just needs NVDA added.
@fastfinge@arfy@cachondo I mean, probably technically so has the JFW API. It's been 20 years, after all. But the old functionality still exists, apparently, because I've been using it for 20 years. LOL
@quanin@arfy@cachondo So don't ever lose mircspeech. It's not on the internet anywhere anymore. Like totally gone. What version are you using? Is it the one by The Fudge and Mo/Ace? Or is it the one with my name on it? or the talking IRC one, Or the one Sean refactored? If it has my name on it please do feel free to dump it on github just so it's not lost forever.
@quanin@arfy@cachondo Is it bundled with a version of mIRC? Or does it install into an existing version of mIRC? If it's bundled with mirc, it's not mine. If it installs into an existing mIRC, it's either mine or Sean's. The one good thing about github, these days, is that abandoned projects stay there. This was long before github even existed LOL.
@fastfinge@arfy@cachondo It installs into an existing mIRC version. I explicitly avoided the bundled version because I do remember if you ever updated mIRC for any reason that thing hit the floor.
@arfy@cachondo@quanin The installer is probably NSIS. So unzipping it instead of running it should get you the source. Or just send it to me and I'll make it a repo LOL. It still works and it should be online somewhere.
@fastfinge@arfy@cachondo Yeah, I'll give it a repo later today. I might see if the readme is somewhere on my machine and use that as the basis for the readme.md GitHub looks for.
@quanin@arfy@cachondo If it's anywhere, it'll be part of the installer when you unzip it. It might have also been dumped into your mirc directory in program files as well. Good grief this is making me feel old. Pretty sure as a teenager I touched, in at least some small way, every single talking IRC solution that ever existed.
@fastfinge@arfy@cachondo Okay, ReadMe located and yes, your name is definitely on it. It goes on GitHub later today. IF I don't feed you a repo URL by tomorrow AM, you have my permission to slap me.
@arfy@fastfinge@cachondo It should absolutely all work. It's a pretty basic program and I've tested it on JAWS versions as recent as 2025. No reason the NVDA API should behave any differently.
