MUDs for the visually impaired
 

If there are any visually impaired folks here I'd be interested to know about your experiences with MUDs. How is your client setup? What tools do you use for speech to text and text to speech? Do you use native OS support or third party utilities? What are your frustrations if any and how could things be improved? Etc. Thanks!

Qwanta

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

I don't know personally, but we did have a visually impaired player on Atonement RPI who used text-to-voice to play, I think. I'm not sure what client he used.

I think his experience was quite good, as RPI's and MUSHes likely proceed slower than hack and slash muds. I do remember him saying that gigantic combat scenes could get spammy for him, but then again- that's par for the course for most players.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

We have a 100% blind player on Aarchon .. he uses VIP Mud, and JAWS text-to-speech. Not sure if he uses a speech-to-text program as well or no. He has a simplified prompt, and has been able to do almost everything in the game that non-impaired players can do. He hasn't taken advantage of a lot of the gags we offer to reduce spam, although I'm not sure why.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

hi Qwanta, there are some VI players here but I also suggest you go to audiogames.net, where you'll find a lot more VI mudders.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

I understand text-to-speech, but what is the purpose of speech-to-text?

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

no typing / less typing would be required, with speech-to-text. In most cases it's probably faster than typing, although maybe not quite as accurate.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Our blind player doesn't talk about it much, but he has mentioned a lot of aliasing, text to speech. Though it does seem to be a little slow at times and those of us who know he is blind will wait for him to catch up in the conversation.

No real way around that though. Though I have wondered if he got some specialized text to braille converter if that would help.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Most of my blind players use MUSHclient or VIP-Mud, with a handful using other clients such as MonkeyTerm or even Windows Telnet.

I previously suggested including a category in the mud listings, but sadly nothing more came of it.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Blind players can't really compete with sighted players. Tactical graphical interfaces, fast combat, tactical color usage, etc, make this problem worse.

So it's not only important whether a MUD has 'blind friendly' features, but also how many features it has that further the gap between blind and sighted players. An important question is how big a handicap blind players are willing to tolerate.

A web based mud might be able to be audio only, possibly with a lot of content that has been recorded in advance. I guess you'd need a good narrator. This could be an interesting challenge for sighted players.

Another problem is that some/many ? blind people have never been taught to write, so they don't know how to use a keyboard, so speech to text would be important, and a MUD would probably need to support some error handling and handle fuzzy input.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Alter Aeon has a lot of blind players, and the differences aren't nearly as severe as Scandum has painted. We've also only ever had one person use speech to text, everyone else can type.

-dentin

Alter Aeon MUD

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Same here, I'm not sure where Scandum is getting his information from but it doesn't match my experience at all.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Echoing what dentin said, it's the same for us at Materia Magica. One of our highest level Archons is sight-impaired, and we have a bunch of others who do boss runs, PK, etc with other sighted players.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Did someone remove my post? Lol, I wrote a miniature essay on this subject, but I guess it failed to post or something. Anyhow, the highlights:
-almost no one uses speech dictation.
-Vipmud is becoming the most popular client for the blind, is non-free, and I hate it. Mushclient is 100% accessible but most blind people have trouble with it for some reason.
-There are 4 windows screen readers that are prominent: Jaws, Window-Eyes, Hal, and NVDA. Only the last is free. NVDA is gaining in popularity, and I recently switched from Jaws after 10 years. Screen reader doesn't matter to the mud designer, except that someone could test using NVDA because it's, like, free. NVDA works only with Mushclient atm, without some groundwork, and the plugin is called Mushreader.
-The mud clients are calling the screen readers directly via a bridge, which is different for each screen reader. The screen readers have no way of telling that the mud output window is special and don't automatically read it. The bridging API, built into VipMud and accessed via a plugin in Mushclient, fixes this.
-The screen readers speak insanely fast. I've not heard of anyone using braille for mudding. Recording myself mudding is on my to do list, so that I can point at just how fast it really is.
-Depending on skill level, aliases and triggers can be involved. I personally only use one: it assigns a prompt (the most recent line to begin with status: ) to a variable, hiding it from normal output, and making it readable with a hotkey. Others use more or less.
-If you provide telnet access, you're probably at least marginally accessible. Web clients can be made accessible, but no one's actually done this yet, except for Bedlam's which works only with windows 8 narrator. This would be interesting, because various solutions exist on the web to problems posed by ascii art, mainly using html tables for the same information and words instead of symbols. This would only work for smallish maps, 5x5 at the most.
-Ascii art is bad.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

You obviously aren't going to attract analphabetic player, so the question is what percentage of the blind population is excluded, and this may be as high as 75%.

I'm also not certain to what extend a MUD could be improved when it comes to speech to text. It'd be an interesting area of research.

The gap between regular and blind players is pretty vast in my experience, to such an extend that I think a sound only MUD would draw in most blind players, though there is of course only one way to find out for real.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Scandum, please look around more before continuing to insult the blind. Me and quite a few other blind players have successfully played Godwars2, and if you can name a more visual mud I'd love to hear about it. Godwars2 got rid of rooms. Yes, there's an alternative interface, but it conveys the same information, just without ASCII art.
Blind players tend to be less skilled at the computer in general. This is not the fault of the blind specifically and has to do a lot with the focus on tech training being about employment instead of genuine understanding. Even so, once someone helps said player set up a mud, and teaches them some basics, said player is about as competent as someone sighted who's never played a mud before.
And, I don't know what you think a "sound mud" is, but I have a feeling that you don't know what you're talking about there either. The only method by which a "sound mud" would be remotely interesting to many is if it were basically a full-on MMO. People don't realize this, but audiogames are basically 100% games for the sighted, just no one bothered adding the graphics. Swamp is an MMO, look it up on audiogames.net. It is not like an MMO, it is not a fake MMO, it is an MMO with a server and multiplayer and all that. It gets less players than a normal MMO, but graphics could be added, it could be labelled indie, and there you go.
I suspect, whichever mud you're on, you haven't actually gotten many blind players. Your impressions and opinions of what is and is not possible for the blind are very, very incorrect. I think you need to reevaluate what the blind can do versus what you think they can do. Someone blind wrote my screen reader. Consider that for a moment, and then think about what you're saying.
it is true that throwing an ASCII map at the blind will be of no help whatsoever. It is not true that exposing the same information in another format will leave a blind person less capable at playing the game.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

I think this is jumping the gun a bit. He's just saying that 'in his experience', he's seen a gap. His experience could be accurate if it's based on games that, knowingly or not, give sighted players various advantages.

I think the most Scandum is guilty of so far is lack of awareness. But all of us have some work to do in that respect.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Allow me to apologize. I've been getting a large dose of "blind can't" attitude recently, for some reason, and consequently was harsher in conveying my thoughts than I should have been.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Not really true. One of our top combatants in Achaea, for instance (and our combat is fast, intense, and complicated) is blind. We have a whole clan in-game of blind players, and they compete just fine.

In Achaea, they tend to use JAWS with Mudlet, as most of our experienced players use Mudlet, whether sighted or not.


That's not our experience, at least, though I'm sure players self-select for the features we offer. If they need that kind of fuzzy input tolerance (which we don't offer), they'll just quietly leave.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

From what I gathered Achae's combat is so fast, intense, and complicated that most people use a bot. And I assume some amount of $$ is involved to be a top combatant.

The degree to which a blind player can compete will vary per game. The real test would be a sound only MUD to determine whether competing with sighted players is frustrating enough for blind players to move to such a MUD.

It might be an interesting investment for a company like IRE, as all that's needed is two narrators (male and female) and text to speech software.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Hilarious. I meant maybe to some sort of pad they can press their finger against that will rapidly scroll itself across the finger, altering its texture to match the text on screen. Thus with some practice allowing them to 'read' the text on screen at a pace close to what a visual player might see it. Assuming the visual players are sub-vocalizing it.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Firstly, an audio-only mud, a "sound mud", I'd have to go with no. The whole point of muds for the blind, if you ask me, is that it can be shared with the sighted. Also, with the right setup, and with text to speech being what it is, it is possible to already get a voice of the quality required for "telling a story". Most of us don't, but it does exist; see the Nuance voices for NVDA, for example, or Siri on your iPhone. None of us seriously use those, though, so far as I'm aware: things like Espeak or ETI Eloquence are robotic, but intelligible at 400 words a minute plus (I'm not exaggerating here).
Scandum, most blind people I know don't even know how to bot. Most blind people I know hear the word trigger and go catatonic in horror, or something like that. I think that you are drastically underestimating the capabilities of a blind player. The spectrum varies widely. One advantage is that text to speech, if you train yourself to it, can be 400 words a minute plus; one disadvantage is the lack of skimming. Our comprehension isn't somehow "less". I have my idea of what a fireball is-in my case using what I can see of the world. For those fully blind, I imagine an apt description is a graph of things that relate to other things; I can see that a fireball is big and bright, for example, but don't have a clue what most common animals look like. I know what they represent, however, and that is enough for me to write about them, let alone comprehend your writing about them. I'm not sure if you somehow think that a blind person gets less out of the same words, or if it's something else. Consider, however: some of the top Godwars2 players are blind, some of the top Achaea (can't recall proper spelling, sorry) players are blind, and apparently at least for a period the highest level player on Materia Magica was blind (I don't know if this is still true, and don't know them myself). Please, explain what it is that you think blind players can't comprehend, or what specifically blind people can't do on a mud.
And, addressing the moving pad comment: see refreshable braille display, omnacon (discontinued in 2005, haven't used one myself), and the new generation of touchscreens that are promising tactile feedback (or not, no one's built a tablet yet). In general however, text to speech goes ridiculously fast. By ridiculously fast I mean faster than most, if not all, sighted print readers. I will meet someone who can come up one day and understand my computer, I keep telling myself that, but it hasn't happened yet; as you improve your reading skill, we can choose to improve our listening skill, and the nonscientific evidence I've seen places the rate I can achieve (and have achieved) above print reading in general. I am faster than most; I chose to treat it like exercising and systematically turned it faster, but some are even faster than me.
PS: For the record, I don't have enough vision left to help me with muds in any way.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

The inability to skim isn't a small problem. Especially if trying to keep up in a conversation. A casual skimmer can boost their WPM to around 600-800 WPM, according to this quick look over of google I'm doing.

So anyway a mud programmer could take that software you just described and fine tune a program to connect their client with it so it can increase its speed to a more reasonable say 1000 words per minute for the sake of skimming?

I have no idea how programing this stuff works. I guess what I'm asking is the limitation in the hardware or software?

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

I mostly base my statement on tactical interfaces, and the knowledge that sighted players feel forced to switch to tactical (graphical) interfaces in order to compete.

Obviously blind players can add a make-shift tactical interface, by giving a specific status report when pressing a specific macro, but this will be slower than skimming a graphical interface.

I'm not sure if a system allowing two or three different voices to speak simultaneously would work to improve things.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

I think that the major shift to graphical interfaces with muds is more to do with laziness and making them accessible to a wider audience than it is with making competition easier. Obviously people mudded before the invention of graphics or the miniwindow. Multiple voices probably wouldn't help.
The top rate achievable by Espeak is, according to the manual, 900 words a minute. This is subject to change depending on the passage: a word is not like a meter or a foot. It is possible to flush the speech buffer, and I and many others do that; this is close but not equal to skimming, and allows one to start skipping combat messages. Moving the prompt to a hotkey is something that I've done, and there are various auditory progress bars one could implement. Alter Aeon has these via MushZ, but I've not felt it worth my time to bother implementing one for other muds, even though such would take all of a half hour, at most, and would probably be reusable by simply modifying one trigger. It is possible to skim up the input, as it were, but it isn't easily possible to skim new stuff coming in.
I haven't looked at the piece of software you've found but suspect that it wouldn't work well; taking control from the person to whom the reader is reading would probably add to the confusion. The main method of skimming is to read the first few words of each paragraph/line/etc, but the formatting information is lost when mudding; events are separated by time, not lines, for us. When reviewing prior output the formatting information exists again, just not while reading new messages.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Where does that knowledge come from? Because once again it doesn't match my experience at all.

The general attitude among those I've spoken to is that the graphical interface looks pretty, is helpful for newbies, and makes it easier to navigate. But none of that helps you in combat, and I've never heard any player describe the interface as a competitive advantage.

Competitive advantages come from client features like aliases, triggers, scripting, etc. But those options are available regardless of interface, and can be used by blind and sighted players alike.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Of course your GUI gives an advantage, don't be silly. If there was no benefit there would be no point to it.

And this hurts blind players because they can't as easily skim tactical information. I don't need to read combat messages if I can see my own, and opponent's health in the interface. I don't need to read entrance messages as new people will pop up in the list with characters in the room. I know how much mana and move I have left by glancing at the status bar. If someone closes the door that is the only remaining exit I will notice this almost instantly by the slight flicker in the status bar. Another quick glance gives me a list of spell affects: BlBlGiSa (Bless+Giant Strength+Sanctuary) and a color code will tell me if one of them is about to run out, and I sure won't attack someone with less than one tick left on my sanctuary. If there are any messages I need to read I can highlight them.

Take that away from a player who is used to it and they'll be annoyed and less effective in chaotic combat situations.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

I already listed some of the benefits - it looks pretty, it's helpful for newbies, and it makes it easier to navigate. But no, it certainly doesn't give any noticeable competitive advantage. Around 20-25% of my active players are blind, and none of them have ever complained about the GUI. Even many of my top sighted players don't use a GUI.

Re: MUDs for the visually impaired
 

Scandum, saying that taking away something that someone is used to is going to make them less effective is indeed true. This doesn't mean that adding it will necessarily make someone more effective, only that it made you more effective. I'd say that, in terms of Godwars2 specifically, blind people have a higher developed skill of spacial memory, for lack of a better term, than sighted peers, for the simple reason that we experience the entire world differently. I think that muds haven't changed in any meaningful way in at least 20 years, possibly even 30, and that people didn't have all these fancy status bars back then and did just fine. Even sighted players choose to play without them and there's nothing stopping a blind person from throwing together a quick sound notification--such would take me a few minutes the first time, and a few seconds after that.
Verbannon, I only just saw what you meant when i re-read the thread. Such APIs are limited to asking the screen reader to say something on behalf of the user, asking the screen reader to stop, and in one case using undocumented functions to get it to do other things. IAccessible2 may make it possible to do this in a screen reader agnostic manner via live regions, but that's hard to play with without learning a lot of the inner workings of windows first, and only NVDA to my knowledge has full support and it may not work outside of a web browser. Also, the particular feature I think might be useful there is even more finicky than just calling the screen reader directly. I'd say that with some support, namely functions to query settings and if the screen reader is talking, some callbacks, and the ability to temporarily speed up speech, something might be workable. This would only be likely to be implemented in NVDA, for the simple reason that you could go implement it yourself, and is generally a bad idea, as it begins the slippery slope of adding specific screen readers to the system requirements lists. I'd say that flushing the speech buffer is good enough that it's worked for the last 10 years, but that a better solution may exist. I just don't think that it could be too much better than what we have now, and there's no way of doing it in a screen reader independent manner. It's already a big enough problem making things accessible, as they tend to only work properly with the screen reader with which they were tested. The required APIs for this would aid the mudding community, but could very, very easily lead to numerous difficulties outside of it: nonstandard interfaces because application developers started calling directly, only working with one screen reader and not another, the list goes on for quite a bit.