v1.0 — Iron Lung, playable by ear

Iron Lung, fully playable with the NVDA screen reader. Start to finish, including the ending.

Install

1. Download Iron-Lung-Access.zip below and extract it anywhere — your Downloads folder is fine. It does not go in the game folder.
2. Run Install.
3. Start NVDA, then launch Iron Lung from Steam.

That's it. The installer finds your Iron Lung folder itself, on any drive, and only asks you to type a path if it can't. It won't run while the game is open, it checks the files landed, and it tells you if NVDA isn't running.

You should hear "Iron Lung accessibility ready. New game." Press F1 in game to hear the controls.

To remove it, run Uninstall — the mod never touches the game itself, only adds files beside it.

If you'd rather not run a script, the files folder in the zip is just the contents of the game folder. Copy it next to Iron Lung.exe yourself; that's all the installer does.

What this is

Iron Lung's own briefing says, in the game's voice:

"Since you can't navigate by sight, pay attention to your coordinates and consult the map."

The pilot cannot see. Everyone who plays Iron Lung plays it by instruments in the dark. This is not a simplified version for blind players — it's the game as written, with the numbers spoken instead of drawn.

The whole game is ten marks, each with an x, a y and an angle. Drive there, turn to that heading, take the photograph. The map is a maze and nothing routes you through it. That part is untouched.

What it does

• Menus — spoken, and keyboard-navigable. Unmodded, the menus only bind navigation to a controller, so a keyboard genuinely cannot drive them.
• Driving — direct keys. Unmodded, every control in the sub is a physical object you aim a mouse at.
• Instruments — position, heading, the four proximity sensors, hull, oxygen, depth.
• The marks — step through them, latch a target, re-read it. The same data hovering a map marker prints. No routing, no bearing, no waypoints.
• Text — briefing, tutorial, checkpoints, death, the quit prompt, the terminal (with your typing echoed back), and the note.
• Audio description — all ten photographs, and the ending.
• Looking around — the cabin's fixtures are called out as you turn. Without this the ending is literally unreachable: the climax is gated on which way you're facing.
• chview — the game ships a cheat that lets a sighted player opt out of the darkness. Now it reaches you too.

On the descriptions

The photographs are deliberately terrible — grainy, dim, half-legible. A sighted player often genuinely cannot tell what they're looking at, and that uncertainty is the horror. So the descriptions describe the photograph, not the object. They stop where the picture stops.

You are not being told what's out there. Nobody is.

Notes

• Requires the Steam version of Iron Lung and NVDA.
• Includes BepInEx (LGPL-2.1) so installing is one step instead of three.
• Contains none of the game's code or assets. Iron Lung is by David Szymanski — buy it, it's a few pounds and it's very good.