So in 1997, I went the next step in asking — given access to the underlying information, is it possible to build effective eyes-free interaction to highly interactive tasks? I picked Tetris as a means of exploring this space, the result was an Emacspeak extension to speech-enable module tetris.el. The details of what was learned were published as a paper in Assets 98, and expanded as a chapter on Conversational Gestures in my book on Auditory Interfaces; that book was in a sense a culmination of stepping back and gaining a sense of perspective of what I had build during this period. The work on Conversational Gestures also helped in formalizing the abstract user interface layer that formed part of the XForms work at the W3C.
Speech-enabling games for effective eyes-free interaction has proven highly educational. Interactive games are typically built to challenge the user, and if the eyes-free interface is inefficient, you just won’t play the game — contrast this with a task that you must perform, where you’re likely to make do with a sub-optimal interface. Over the years, Emacspeak has come to include eyes-free interfaces to several games including Tetris, Sudoku, and of late the popular 2048 game. Each of these have in turn contributed to enhancing the interaction model in Emacspeak, and those innovations typically make their way to the rest of the environment.