To those who may be interested:
I have finally managed to start playing Dragon Realms.
The good news is, it has an indeed large active community, is quite well playable to blind and VIP players, accordingly there are quite a few playing it, they even have a mentor, who is an expert for blind players, and the game can indeed be played via the vIP MUD client.
The bad...actually annoying part however is, that before each running, one needs to login into the game on its website, stay logged in, (so leave his browser running minimized, (Firefox is the recommended, best functioning one for the game), save the file with "sal" extension to hard-drive each single time, paste out the so called "key" from it into the VIP client, along with the command >/FE:JAVA, for those 2 are required to be given after each single connection to the game-server with the MUD-client.
The mentioned key is unfortunately dynamic, so it needs to be copied from the newest .sal-file each single time.

I wonder if the game is worth all this hassle before each single run, I shall yet find that out, "stay tuned"!

For now I have discovered, that orientation is quite easy, since there is a very useful, perfectly functioning directing-system with the command dir, providing the path to all more significant locations inside a town, (one can even specify how many directions to be told at once), plus even the NPC-guards can take one to his desired destination, (at least they can do that inside the town's Plaza", which is an important "pro" for Dragon Realms so far.

I'm afraid when this was discussed on the audeasy site I was rather hesitant myself for the same reasons, hassle plus quite a steep charge for a textual mud, of which there are many extremely good free, or free to donate examples.

Not that I'm against paying for a game, but subscription based systems are always something I'm a little hesitant about as opposed to donation based ones, and when the subscription system comes with so many hoops to  login it just makes the developers seem both paranoid and greedy. Plus, none of the promotional material on the website or what I'd heard about the game previously seemed to justify either the subscription charges, or the trouble to actually play the game.

Indeed, the only subscription based mud I know is Avalon, and that has the saving grace that if your an active player you really don't need to subscribe at all.

Please forgive my scepticism, but it's a bit hard for me to believe, that in a time, when even most popular FREE MUDs, and textual games have only a few dozens of faithful regular players remaining, 500 players plays a pay-based textual game regularily...

And a game even, which features no levels, so an overall less popular textual game, with a levelless system, but such a huge community nowadays...
(levelless is just what I keep searching for, and finally found this one with a huge player-base to interact with...it would be a quite unpleasent disappointment finding out, that it's indeed (still) pay-based!

Well if you look at This faq from the dragonrealms site it clearly states that gemstone Iv and Dragon realms are pay to play games. and a bit of googling turned up This page which lists what you get on a free account ass compared to a paid one.

It seems that basically yes, the game can be played for free, but things are very limited as compared to a paid account.
How limiting this is I don't know, but I will admit as an exploration fan that the idea of being locked in one city and having to pay real money to leave is not appealing to me.

Also when I checked on the wiki it seemed that the premium accounts were bloody expensive for what you got.

This is basically similar to the discussion people had on audeasy about the games.

How many of those 500 or so logged in players are paid accounts and what the mechanics of the game are I'm not sure, though if you find out further information I'd be interested to know.