2021-04-02 18:08:10

As @CoremudSteve just mentioned, we have been going through our quests doing 2 major things:
1. Remove ASCII art when you have screenreader mode active.
2. Replace double quotes with asterisks in NPC interactions where a quest is involved.

With respect to the above, the Payroll Mystery quest has been completely revamped and should be completely screenreader-accessible.  When you decide to start Payroll Mystery, make sure your client-side voice options are set to read the asterisk character aloud, or you may miss the important quest keywords.

There are other quests and areas we have tweaked along the way.  This will be an ongoing effort as the game has entered its 25th year, and there's a lot of stuff to examine.

During peak playing hours, anywhere from a third to half of our player population is either blind or requires a screenreader to assist with limited sight.  Only the 3 Arches - myself, Steve and Nigel - can detect who is using a screenreader, and we keep that information private.

As a reminder, players activate what Steve and I call "Screenreader Mode" by typing the following command:
setenv screenreader on
In case you need it, that first word is spelled like this: s e t e n v
Then a space, then screenreader as all one word.
Then a space, then either on or off.
This setting saves with your character, and you can flip it on or off at will.  If you are completely blind, I recommend leaving it in the on setting.

As always, we thank you for your interest, constructive feedback and support!

2021-04-04 17:48:57

Core Quad, our version of Triple Triad, should now be fully accessible.  Please try it and post feedback either here or Core's #accessibility Discord channel.  Our Discord server URL is https://discord.gg/bx8MbuSYth

(Sorry that URL is ugly.  One of our backers is having billing issues, so we lost our friendly vanity URL)

2021-04-04 19:55:40

Fantastic! I'll give it a try and probably update the db page with info, since that's a very unique minigame.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2021-04-04 20:20:47

Dark wrote:

Fantastic! I'll give it a try and probably update the db page with info, since that's a very unique minigame.

Please do and provide your feedback!

I plan on making a YouTube video to explain the mini-game for those unfamiliar with the Triple Triad concept.  I had a lengthy discussion with one of our blind players earlier today and he eventually "got" it.  The YouTube video won't help those who can't see, with the exception that you'll hear my explanation as I will guide listeners step by step.

If nothing else, my "Coremud" YouTube channel is a help for those with insomnia.  wink

2021-04-04 23:00:33

https://youtu.be/PX0OSVxdDl0
Core Quad explained.  wink

2021-04-12 01:28:30

Okay I tried the tutorial corequad game, and I am liking, but I'd like chance to play another game or two against detmir to get the idea, since while I drew with him, I don't think I fully grasped how the display worked enough, and I'd like to actually win a game.

In particular, it would be nice if when a new card is played to the board, you could be told when one side of that new card beat an existing card, since when I was playing I thought I'd grasped which side of the opponents' cards faced where and where to put mine, but obviously I got something wrong since I'd be placing cards and them not necessarily have the effect I wanted, which I suspect was me missunderstanding the order that the numbers on the sides were reported.

I'm not sure at this point if it would be better to label the sides of the cards to show which number was which, EG w5, n2, e1, s1, or whether that would be too confusing or not, however it might be nice to be able to get the individual data of an opponent's card outside of the main board layout by typing the coordinates, just so that you can check it individually and decide where best to counter.

On the plus side though, love the coordinates labels and card descriptions, I can well see playing this being a lot of fun once I get my head around the idea.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2021-04-16 03:32:38

Screenreader enhancements added today for:
Pub Shop list command
Armor Shop list command
Clinic Shop list command
Shield Generator long description
Stats Cost command

2021-04-16 04:13:12

Thanks for these

2021-05-08 21:26:20

Hi everyone,

Rather than bombard this forum with every little fix, I'll point you instead to our Changelog.  Depending upon how much coding activity we have in any given month, I post an updated Changelog on the 1st and 15th day of each month, or just on the 1st day if coding activity was light during the prior month.

We've been very busy, coding-wise, since our January 1, 2021 re-launch of the game on our new server, so I've had to post a Changelog about every 15 days.

Here's a link to the latest Changelog.  Each Changelog post starts with a link to the prior one, so you may go back in time if you wish to see prior changes you missed.

April 16 through May 3 changelog

Code changes relating to improvements for screenreader users usually contain the text screenreader (if I wrote the changelog entry), or blind (if Steve wrote the changelog entry).  Sometimes Steve abbreviates it as SR and I revise it to spell out screenreader when pasting the Changelog to Core's forum.

Please do continue to use either this thread here on audiogames.net, or Core's #accessibility Discord channel, if you notice something that is game-breaking for you.  We are continuing to make tweaks as we spot commands that include a lot of periods, dashes or equal signs in the output.  We know that is annoying for this community.  It just takes time as there's a ton of code to review, and there are also competing priorities.

There's a game admin-only command that lets me and the other 2 admins know who has the game's screenreader mode enabled.  As mentioined earlier within this thread, enabling screenreader mode in-game adjusts the output for many commands to be screenreader-friendly.  It also disables ASCII art in some locations.  The more players I notice having this setting enabled, the higher the screenreader fixes rise on my priority list!

I'll still report major system updates affecting screenreader users to this forum, but minor fixes will just go to the Changelog so I don't bombard this forum.

Thanks for listening!

Grey

2021-05-29 18:32:58

A major change went in yesterday for all of our Armour shops.  Many commands were adjusted to be screenreader-friendly.  Similar changes went in for our Factory shops, but only a few people use them so the change might not be noticed.

Other little changes went in throughout the month and they will be reflected in the next Changelog post on Core's forum.

2021-06-28 02:40:44

Out of curiosity, where'd you all go?  Steve and I put in a ton of time making the game screen-reader friendly.  I set aside coding a major quest to allow me to work on this task.

Constructive feedback is welcome.  We are in the meantime working on making the character creation process easier.  I hope to have it installed within the next 24-48 hours.

2021-06-28 11:36:59

Honestly?

I got annoyed at making the soundpack try to work with tt++ and took a break.

Then RL got a hold of me and hasn't quite let go yet. I should really poke my head back in and see what's changed, really

Warning: Grumpy post above
Also on Linux natively

2021-06-28 16:30:00

JaceK wrote:

Honestly?

I got annoyed at making the soundpack try to work with tt++ and took a break.

Then RL got a hold of me and hasn't quite let go yet. I should really poke my head back in and see what's changed, really

Aaah. OK you are making sense.

I wish I had some advice to share.  Not many of us use TinTin these days.  We do have some other sight-impaired folk who play and I'm making inquiries with them.  One can partially see but has to make the MUD's font very large.  Others are completely blind and have figured out how to play with their screen-reader.  One of them is online right now and I've asked what they're using and if they can hear sounds.

The admin command I have shows the MUD client name the player opts-in to share.  Aside from this, I can see if they have screen-reader mode enabled, which changes the output of many of our commands to be friendlier to how blind players wish to hear the game.  One blind person is using "mushclient" and I think he hears the sounds we play.  I've asked him to confirm.

2021-06-28 16:49:56

I've received confirmation from one of our blind players that "MushClient", available at:

http://www.gammon.com.au/downloads/dlmushclient.htm

can play our sounds.  The direct download link is:

http://www.gammon.com.au/files/mushclie … ent506.exe

If you require a zip file of our sounds, you can get it here!
https://coremud.org/sounds.zip

Best of luck to you.

2021-06-28 18:27:00

That won't work for me since, I'm on Linux and can't use MC at all sadly.

Warning: Grumpy post above
Also on Linux natively

2021-06-28 19:07:55

JaceK wrote:

That won't work for me since, I'm on Linux and can't use MC at all sadly.

You can.  Spin up a virtual machine.  I've run Windows as a virtual machine in Linux for years.  Kind of a pain to get your hypervisor working, but it is beautiful once you have it properly setup.

Download the ISO for "Windows Server 2016 Developer Edition".  You get it for free, no license key needed.  Throw that at Oracle Virtualbox.  You now you have a Windows desktop and can install whatever you want.

Not that I would ever share the script to reset the 6-month trial key.....

2021-06-28 19:33:06

I've done that several times before and each time Mushclient just grinds the VM to a halt spectacularly even with decent specs. There's something weird with MC and a virtual machine and playing sounds where the whole VM (at least for me) freezes up after a while needing me to close the VM and open it up again.

I'm not sure what's going on with that, really, there's something definitely weird going on however. I'm trying to figure out if I can make tintin++ play the sounds however.

Warning: Grumpy post above
Also on Linux natively

2021-09-01 20:09:32

Hi!  A quick update about the game.  One important point of feedback I received is our inventory command isn't very friendly.

I put in an upgrade today so you can filter it now.  For example, you may type *i gear* and you will only have your armor and weapons read back to you.  *i edible* gives you food and drink.  And so on.  Every category read back to you in the unfiltered i command may be filtered using that category word.

For those of you listening instead of sighted, when I said "i" in my examples in the prior paragraph, it is the lower case i which is your built-in alias for the inventory command, not the word eye.

We also had a hard drive crash this week.  The game is back online but we did lose progress on our Wiki page.  Forum may be back online later tonight.  Tune in to our Discord server for more frequent updates, as that's where we are communicating details about the server outage.  Our main Discord channel for general chat is
https://discord.gg/wHA4GQkTv6

2021-12-15 10:12:56 (edited by the best in the world 2021-12-15 10:14:50)

Hello there. I'm really enjoying this game so much with all the accessibility work that's gone and still going into it. But for those who are using Mush. I have 2 issues. One with the sounds, can't get any sounds to play at all, And one with the channel history plugin. Every time I set a buffer for a channel it does this. so here I set a buffer for the say channel. Enforcement droid says: I'm sorry, colonist, but this area is currently
off-limits to you until you are more experienced.
that's the original. now when I try to revue it with the hotkeys? it goes like this. Enforcement droid says: I'm sorry, colonist, but this area is currently. that's it. any idea what to try? and thanks. and I just want to thank the devs for all the hard work they are putting in, you rock guise. smile

Hi, my Skype name is, anr1235, feel free to add me if you wish, i love to make new friends, and thanks.

2022-02-12 14:40:38

the best in the world wrote:

Hello there. I'm really enjoying this game so much with all the accessibility work that's gone and still going into it. But for those who are using Mush. I have 2 issues. One with the sounds, can't get any sounds to play at all, And one with the channel history plugin. Every time I set a buffer for a channel it does this. so here I set a buffer for the say channel. Enforcement droid says: I'm sorry, colonist, but this area is currently
off-limits to you until you are more experienced.
that's the original. now when I try to revue it with the hotkeys? it goes like this. Enforcement droid says: I'm sorry, colonist, but this area is currently. that's it. any idea what to try? and thanks. and I just want to thank the devs for all the hard work they are putting in, you rock guise. smile

Try the command *setsound*.  This is a toggle command.  Sounds are disabled by default as not everybody uses a game client capable of playing them.  You type setsound (the words *set* and *sound* all together with no space) once to enable sound, and you type it again to disable it.  You  definitely want to disable sound before joining a conference call for work!  Some of us have some pretty crazy sounds that play when we login.  smile

With respect to your second issue, it seems to me it is a line wrap issue.  Your text to speech program isn't telling you this, but in what you pasted I am seeing a carriage return after the word *currently*.  Please do these two things:

1. Check your line wrap settings in your client.  Many of our players enjoy good success when it is set to 100 instead of whatever your default might be.

2. Type this command in the game to change how the game line wraps the output:
setenv SCREEN 100

Text to speech might not have rendered that command for your properly.  Here is how to type it.
You type the letters s e t e n v, all together in lower case.  Then a space, then the word screen in upper case.  Then a space, and then the number one hundred.  You can pick a larger number if you want to.  Basically, you want the line wrap in your game client and the line wrap in the game to be the same.  At that point your buffer might work better for you.

2022-02-12 14:44:28

And now for my original purpose in coming back to this forum.  smile

Over the past 72 hours I have put a lot of work into making Farming more accessible.  I have cut down a ton of spam in how it works.  One of my sight-impaired players provided positive feedback about it.  If you were turned off by farming in the game due to how much output is read back to you, please try again.  Post in our #accessability Discord channel if you are still having problems.

Thanks!

Grey

2022-02-12 19:29:22

Didn't know this game had farming. Will have to try again then.

Who am I? Simply me!

2022-02-12 20:52:27

jescat277 wrote:

Didn't know this game had farming. Will have to try again then.

There are 2 farming tiers in this game.

The first tier is available to everyone regardless of level.  Just visit Player Mining Domes (we abbreviate them "P M D") and if the PMD owner is active, they will have a farming atrium that you may water every 30 minutes.  Each PMD has its own cooldown, so you may visit them all and water each one.  The number of field spots you may water in each PMD is determined by your Farming skill, and you gain Farming skill points and player experience points for doing this.

If you don't know where to find farming atriums, head directly south from the City center.  Type the command "directions" if you need help to get there.  Keep going south until you reach a room named the South Mass-Transit node.  A tutorial quest will be thrown at you when you enter that room for the very first time.  The quest is named "Let's Rove Around the Planet!".  Run through that tutorial quest, as it is very simple and you get a nice little reward item at the end.  In the area it sends you to, you will come across PMDs owned by Grey (me) and Mick (my test character).  Both have active farming atriums that you can water.

The second tier opens for you when you become wealthy in-game.  You can buy your own PMD and setup your own farming atrium when you've accumulated enough in-game currency.  This won't happen right away, but it should happen by the time you reach level 20.  The best time to play is Friday through Sunday, as we have bonus weekends where you get extra experience from combat, and your ore mining capacity also doubles during that time.

When you have your own PMD and atrium, you can plant your own crops and harvest them.  And of course you can water them, and other players can help you water them once they know how to find your PMD.

2022-02-12 20:57:37 (edited by coremudGrey 2022-02-12 21:04:09)

One last point about farming.  Examining the layout of the farming crop field itself is not entirely accessible.  I'm hoping to get some suggestions on how to improve that aspect.

A basic farming crop field is a 3 by 3 grid.  A 1 through C 3.  The PMD owner can expand the number of rows and columns according to their Farming skill level.  Today, the grid is rendered as ASCII art, but it does tell you the number of rows and columns, so our sight-impaired players have told me they were able to figure it out.  But as stated above, I am open to suggestions as I own and manage the farming code.

Within the last 48 hours I updated the code so the farming crop grid may now be expanded to 26 columns by 26 rows.  This would only be possible for a very high-level player who decides to choose to specialize in the "Tech" class, instead if "Miner" or "Merc".

Grey

2022-04-18 15:24:34

We have modified the game so that when you connect with VIPMUD it now automatically turns on screenreader and turns MORE off so that it won't keep prompting you to continue scrolling.

This should be a good quality of life improvement.

We have also fixed the slot machines in the casino to be screenreader friendly.