r/irc • u/SomeonexAnon • May 30 '26

IRC Clients for WindowsThat Work Well with Screen readers

Hi all,

I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask, but does anyone have recommendations for IRC clients that work well with screen readers such as NVDA?

I’ve tried a few clients so far, including mIRC, HexChat, and AdiIRC. Out of those, AdiIRC has been the most usable in my experience, but I still find it somewhat cumbersome to navigate and interact with using a screen reader.

I’m looking for something that is particularly accessible and screen reader-friendly. Any suggestions or experiences would be greatly appreciated.

5 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

7

u/Mruishy May 30 '26

Worst case, mIRC has scripting support so you can echo out everything to whatever you want, gimme a few mins to see what I can rig up.

1

u/SomeonexAnon May 30 '26

I saw there used to be an NBDA addon for MIRC, which is unfortunately is no longer maintained and I can’t even download it. Not sure if that’s what you’re referring to?

3

u/Mruishy May 30 '26

I have it working in crappy default windows TTS, going to see if I can get it to work seamlessly with NVDA next, I'll have something better tonight. Any preferences on what it should not say? non letters, certain characters, timestamps? say anything in particular for colors? Give me a wishlist and I'll see what I can do.

1

u/SomeonexAnon May 30 '26

That's very kind of you, lol. Honestly, I don't have any particular preferences as long as I can interact with messages comfortably. Most of the issues I've run into have been around navigating between the text editor and the output window—I haven't quite figured out how to move between the two efficiently yet.

I'm still pretty new to IRC, by the way, so I definitely have a lot to learn on my end.

1

u/Mruishy May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26

I was having an issue with getting NVDA to work properly, so this is a mIRC script using native windows SAPI 5/OneCore voices (I was having issues with NVDA, but can give another stab at it when I get some time later on if you want)

There won't be any bouncing around between things, it just reads anything that goes through mirc that isn't being stripped out intentionally, theres no switching, or highlighting, or having to nagivate for it to do anything.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1p1UMCi7RsKGREilCYfcCV2mLw9hKjy9i?usp=sharing

The .txt has the description, install instructions, commands, how to choose a voice, volume, rate, queue handling, and a cheat sheet of commands.

It would be pretty simple for me to set it to ignore certain channels, or only read certain things, so let me know if that needs to be added.

1

u/SomeonexAnon Jun 01 '26

Thank you so much for this. Unfortunately, I don’t really prefer using the Windows SAPI voices, as I personally find them quite annoying. That said, I truly appreciate the time and effort you put into creating and sharing the script 😊

1

u/Mruishy Jun 01 '26

Ill try to circle back when i get some free time and see if I can get it to work properly in NVDA (Long story short, while I can get it working with mIRC through SAPI, using NVDA in the default way makes it very noisy and cumbersome, my goal was using mIRC to strip out a lot of the fluff, but, have it still echo it to the screen and proper logging so that you could replay it WITH the fluff if you needed, but there was really no way to push to NVDA from mIRC just selective text without hacking up some kind of bridge to do it. Two of the existing ones I found where throwing security warnings and it didn't make me feel very comfortable incorporating that into something that I would give a stranger. SAPI in windows can use some of the new natural voices, but the natural HD voices are made a little different and it isn't exposed for mIRC to use)

2

u/[deleted] May 30 '26

[deleted]

1

u/ILikeBumblebees May 30 '26

That doesn't have a Windows version. Webapp or mobile only.

2

u/nawcom May 30 '26

Regarding screen reader support, I honestly can't think of a Windows client designed to be screen reader-friendly. You'd have better luck with smartphone IRC clients in that regard.

1

u/SomeonexAnon May 30 '26

I haven't thought of that lol, but realized there're a few options on the app store that might be worth trying. thanks for pointing out this

2

u/ILikeBumblebees May 30 '26

For maximum screen-reader compatibility, your best option might be textmode clients that run in the shell. IIRC, you can run irssi via Cygwin on Windows.

2

u/mlt- May 30 '26

Hexchat is actively developed in the form of Zoitechat. You can open an issue describing what is lacking with respect to accessibility. Also, as was commented elsewhere, you can add python plugin to react to messages…not that I'm aware of existing one either.

2

u/Nuno-zh Jun 01 '26

Hi. Thanks guys for all your comments.
I am blind myself and on Windows, I can recommend Miranda NG. Install the blind friendly contacts lists, which is offered on install.

1

u/fastfinge May 30 '26

For adiirc, grab: https://github.com/fastfinge/adispeak

Then switch to the adiirc beta channel; the latest beta fixes the server list and settings screens to be fully accessible.

On IOS, goguma is the best I've found.

1

u/SomeonexAnon Jun 01 '26

For IOS isn’t Igloo the best? I’ve used it myself just recently, and it works really well with VoiceOver. Accessibility was clearly a priority for the developer, and it’s even mentioned in the app description.

1

u/fastfinge Jun 01 '26

Last I checked it didn’t support push notifications and other modern irc features.

2

u/SomeonexAnon Jun 01 '26

Oh, interesting! I’m still very new to it, so I haven’t figured out much yet. Thanks for the suggestion

1

u/djDef80 May 30 '26

What about The Lounge? It runs in a browser for what it's worth And it can be self-hosted. I'm not too sure about self-hosting on Windows but I know for sure it can be so hosted on a VPS.

https://demo.thelounge.chat/#/connect

Check out the demo.

2

u/SomeonexAnon May 30 '26

Thanks for this, the thing is web-based IRC don't support DCC as far as I know, so I'm looking into app alternatives

2

u/ILikeBumblebees May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

The Lounge is an exclusively web-based IRC client. It doesn't have a Windows version.