Wild Encounters for NVDA

A fan project. Wild Encounters is a free, unofficial fan add-on, made by a fan for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Nintendo, Game Freak, Creatures or The Pokémon Company. Pokémon and Pokémon character names are trademarks of Nintendo. No game data, art or music comes with it: names and facts are fetched from PokéAPI, every sentence is written for the add-on, and the sounds were made for it from scratch. It is free, with nothing to buy.

A sweet, ambient Pokémon add-on for the NVDA screen reader. It is not a game. Now and then NVDA tells you which wild Pokémon is around you, based on the real weather, time of day and moon where you live:

Psst! It's raining over Batam... a Wingull is gliding just above the rooftops near you. Wingull is a Water- and Flying-type Pokémon from generation 3. It's about 0.6 metres tall and weighs about 9.5 kilograms. It's mostly white. It likes the sea. It evolves into Pelipper. It's a common sight. It's new in your Field Journal.

There are no battles, no catching and nothing to grind. Every Pokémon you meet goes into your Field Journal. Each kind of Pokémon has its own little sound, and rare ones have their own too.

Install

  1. Download the latest wildEncounters-<version>.nvda-addon from Releases.
  2. Open the file. NVDA asks whether to install it. Say yes and restart NVDA.
  3. Open NVDA's menu, then Preferences, Settings, and choose Wild Encounters. Paste where you live (a map link, coordinates or a city) into New home and press Find this place.

You need NVDA 2024.1 or newer. The add-on is English only.

Keys

Press NVDA+Alt+O, then:

Key What it does
W Look around for a wild Pokémon (once every 20 minutes)
J Open your Field Journal
L Say your last encounter
C Say how many Pokémon you've met
S Say the status
O Open the settings
H Say these keys

You can change all of them in NVDA's Input gestures dialog, under Wild Encounters.

Pokémon don't come by themselves until you turn that on in the settings. When you do, the weather decides when they come. You get at most one to three a day, never during your quiet hours, and never while NVDA is reading something to you.

The full guide is addon/doc/en/readme.html. It is also in NVDA's Add-on Store dialog under the add-on's Help.

Privacy

  • Your home is kept rounded to about 1 kilometre. The exact point you paste is never kept or sent anywhere.
  • The weather comes from Open-Meteo. A city name is looked up with Open-Meteo's geocoding, the town's name with OpenStreetMap's Nominatim, and a short Google Maps link is followed only on Google's own addresses.
  • Pokémon names and facts come from PokéAPI. The requests carry nothing about you, and the answers are cached on your computer for 30 days.
  • Your settings and your Field Journal stay on your computer.

For developers

Wild Encounters started as an extension for Hariku.

  • addon/ holds everything that goes into the .nvda-addon package: the manifest, COPYING.txt, the guide, and the global plugin in globalPlugins/wildEncounters/.
  • tools/make_sounds.py makes the 13 sounds from scratch with numpy. The sounds are committed, so you only need to run it after changing a recipe.
  • tests/ tests the plain modules, plus a smoke test that runs the plugin with real wxPython and stand-ins for NVDA's modules.
  • build.py packs addon/ into dist/wildEncounters-<version>.nvda-addon.
python -m pytest
python build.py

License

GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version, like NVDA. See COPYING.txt.