Playing on a Screen Reader
The following information was provided to the staff by a player. While reading the below, keep in mind that CF stands for Carrion Fields. Playing CF on a screenreader can appear like a bit of a nightmare initially, but there are a few things you can do which vastly reduce the scale of the problems you will face. Some of this only really becomes obvious/apparent after you've played a while, so I'm making this to try to spare you the extra deaths to go along with the standard fair for starting out in CF. First thing to understand: the vast majority of abilities in CF have at most four activation results: failure, impossible, success, critical success.
- Failure: your ability fired, but did nothing.
- Impossible: your ability succeeded, but it is not possible vs the target at the moment. For example, say you tried to bash a shapeshifter who had control translucence up: its important to separate this from failure because if you fail something on someone often you'll want to do it again. You really don't want to be doing that if they're immune: nothing will make your friends/enemies mock you more.
- Success: your ability fired and did whatever your ability does.
- Critical success: your ability fired with its standard effect, plus did something on top.
- Critical success abilities are actually kind of rare, but they're numerous enough that you should factor this in. Invoker and transmuter are mage classes with a fair number of these, and assassin has a few too: this is notable because assassin is a class often recommended to new players.
Sound Cues
If you're not a new mud player, you'll probably know that standard procedure for adding audio queues for screenreader users is to make a sound for each important ability you use. I do not recommend doing this. It is a huge task in the context of CF and has very little benefit (and a lot of drawbacks). As someone who tried this originally, just save yourself the pain. The reason you don't need to do this is due to the second thing to be aware of concerning CF's combat system: outright action failure is exceedingly rare. If you enter a command, with some very notable exceptions that command will always go through (even if its after you've died). Its important to be aware of these exceptions, but they're not only few and far between they're also on much less commonly played classes, so it isn't something to really worry about initially. You do not need to have different sounds for different abilities, because you will always know what ability you've entered and should never have more than one thing queued up (this is a standard piece of CF combat strategy). Therefore, you only need to know: when your ability fires, and the result of that ability. In summary: make a sound for when an ability fails, when it fails due to impossibility, when it succeeds, and when it critical succeeds. This is 90% of what you need for sound support when it comes to CF.Chasing your TargetTop
Chasing will be very frustrating at first, but its tough for everyone. To be about on par with sighted players, you will want:- A sound when your target leaves the room or arrives (different ones).
- A sound when you see your target is in room (the line which shows them being present on look).
- This is a little more involved and client/screenreader specific, but most clients have support for an ability to interrupt screenreader dialogue with a message that overrides everything else currently being read out. Having your client interrupt with the direction your target left will immediately let you know which way they went: the only drawback here is that it might override other critical information, but this is just one of those things that you need to deal with. I've personally found this is 100% worth it. If you use mushclient and the jaws screenreader and its associated plugin, you'll find this functionality under the tts_interrupt alias. I don't know if mudlet has the facilities for it yet, but I expect they will do soon if they don't.
GeographyTop
Geography is going to be super important for you as a CF player in general, but probably even more so than normal. It is very unlikely you will get as good as an elite sighted player at chasing, but if you get good at predictive chasing you will come very close, and close is often good enough. Knowing where someone is going will very rarely let you down.Defensive SoundsTop
Its important to really address what the whole point of this exercise is. The vast majority of a sighted player's focus is not on whether their ability succeeded or not - its pretty immediately obvious with a highlight or similar. Adding sounds for your offensive actions is to let you mostly marginalise the amount of focus you need to devote to an otherwise significant task on a screenreader: this is so you can focus on the same things sighted players do, which is what is going on in the fight itself. Your goal with defensive sounds should be almost entirely to notify you of things that require immediate reaction. Once you remove having to figure out if your ability failed or what have you you can direct most of your attention to actually parsing the fight: you don't really need sounds for when people use things on you once you get the hang of this. That said, there are a few things that will help you a huge amount:- A sound when someone attacks you. Initially you just need something on the You yell line or something: this gets a little bit fiddlier later on as there are some other lines and some very rare items can make you yell weird stuff in combat (so you'll need to regex these out), but that's a bridge to cross if or when it becomes needed.
- A sound when you fail to flee and when you successfully flee.
Challenging ExceptionsTop
- Classes that are reliant on heavy useage of dispel are really, really hard. Dispel is one of the situations that often breaks the results model described above: they could have a lot of things you're trying to dispel, etc. Don't do one of these as your first class if you aren't good with really major frustration, I still haven't found a way to do it that really works well. If its just one thing you need to dispel its not bad, but if there are a lot of specific things (say in an invoker vs invoker matchup) its a bit of a nightmare and you will really have issues.
- Classes that rely heavily upon servitors are hard just due to the volume of additional text they tend to generate. Spam is the enemy of screen readers, and these classes do tend to be the spammiest. This problem becomes much more manageable as you get used to the game, but initially it might be one of the harder things to deal with.
- Classes with a lot of timers/affects are also tough. You won't have something like an affects window that really benefits sighted players in this regard, so a lot of this is going to need to be kept in your head. This is not as bad as dispel, but its a major additional thing to handle on an already very steap learning curve: I don't recommend anything where this is a factor as a first class.
Other ConsiderationsTop
- Parsing where for your target's location. Worth doing another interrupt here once you get comfortable with the other aspects of CF. Chasing well is going to take a long time to learn, so if you can just run at people and get the drop on them that's just good for you in general (that probably goes for sighted people too though). This doesn't really become a big deal though until you know a little bit of geography, so its a later thing.
- Minotaur speech is heavily distorted and will be very frustrating, that's just something you'll have to deal with. Same for drunk speech, though this is usually not quite as baffling.
- CF is very light on ascii art for quests etc compared to a lot of muds, so this standard problem is basically nonexistent. It might exist, but I've not found it yet if it does. The newbie maps you receive on creation are ascii however, so those might give you the impression this is much more common than it is. You can just drop them and move on, it won't come up again.
- Parsing long lists rapidly is tough, as usual. This most often comes up when trying to pick out the cool stuff in someone's corpse, but this is also a nice problem to have.
- The AFK command is your friend if you miss what someone said over your cabal channel or similar. Its not a bad idea to have a sound when something is said here, just so you don't ignore your glorious Emperor or similar by accident.
- Basically, most mages are going to be very challenging to play on a screen reader on top of already being very challenging classes in the general context of CF. If you're going to pick one, go in with that in mind. Shapeshifter and to a slightly lesser extent antipaladin are the big exceptions to that rule, they won't have any screenreader specific issues to overcome. Warriors are probably the easiest, assassins are somewhere in the middle (easy for the same reasons as warrior, harder because lots of critical success things).
- The right client is probably whatever you're already using due to familiarity, and CF is nice in that you don't have any triggers or what not beyond sounds to worry about so something lightweight is just fine. If you're not already invested in a client however, mushclient is tried and tested for screenreader use. Mudlet is getting there (still some teething problems, but its maintained and constantly improving so you can expect them to be resolved). Its probably worth trying both to see which you like better. I'm told tintin++ works well if you prefer just a terminal, but I've never dabbled in this myself so take that with a grain of salt.