Accessibility Options for AGS?

[CatPunter]

Hey there everyone, got some "weird" questions.

I'm currently trying to decide if I should use AGS for my next, longer project (which will be text heavy) and couldn't find any info on if the AGS system supports accessibility peripherals and programs for blind players. I tried searching the manual and the forums but the only things that came up for stuff like "accessibility" and "screen readers" weren't applicable to my question.

So the issue seems to be that there's about 6 different screen reader programs used (in general). Most of them require the cursor to be set over the text, and for the text to not be a graphic/actually written somewhere to read it out. This would mean finding a way to either design every single button to use laid over text, or finding a way to overlay "invisible" text that can be read out. That's if AGS actually displays text in the first place or not, or if it just draws it to the screen as some sort of graphical object instead.

So what options are there, and has anyone actually dealt with this before? Has anyone tested AGS if it's compatible with screen reader accessibility programs/services?

My ideas included:

-an "invisible" font at 1x1 pixels/1pt or something overlaid on things that would be possible to read out even if sighted players can't see it. Worst case, extremely small text overlaid set to Visible on everything since blind players wouldn't worry too much about what it looks like. Or, some sort of accessibility code that displays extra text when turned on basically making 2 game modes.

-Designing rooms to be broken into jigsaw style hotspot sections you can tab/use the arrow keys to scroll through, then interacted with mouse/button/key presses rather than pixel hunting or relying on the cursor. Would require you to build/design the game with that always in mind, so making changes to it in the long term would cause issues if you were using arrays to keep track of which background element the player's currently on.

-An inventory system that tracks what entry everything is at and uses text overlay of some kind to ensure the screenreader can access it - like, "1, Key" (move right) "2, Stick" etc. and have text such as "Stick Selected" when turned into activeinventory, and things like "Stick removed from Inventory" when used/dropped/whatever.

And probably the "easiest" for me to wrap my head around:

-Locking the cursor on lblText to display text that can be read while setting the player's position in other ways (like arrays/lua table type entries) to ensure some sort of text can be read at all times, including movement descriptions ("You move south"), button text ("move south" "use item" "investigate item") and dialogue ("Olivia says: You dingdong. Bruce replies: No you."). Movement and interaction through the game then would have to be rewritten into a custom system to account for all this. 

This upcoming weekend I'm going to test a few things out on some free screen readers and report back, but in the meantime I'd love some guidance if someone has experience with building around these issues.

[CatPunter]

Also whoops, it somehow submitted early and cut off half the damn post lol. Fixed now.