@SleepyGrump While I am not a blind user I am familiar with programming with blind and V/I users in mind (for apps) and I do want to throw something down here.
Screen readers can be configured to ignore certain combinations of characters so that you don’t have to listen to, you know, “PLUS EQUALS PLUS EQUALS PLUS EQUALS” when you look at a room and the game is set up to have its room name format all
+=+=+=+=+=+=| The Big Dick Saloon | +=+=+=+=+=+=
But you still have to configure it to do that so getting used to a new MUSH theoretically would require you to make adjustments to add to the list of “repeating characters to ignore” (I’ve never spoken to a blind MUSH user, I am basing this off of my familiarity as an SWE making an app accessible).
Therefore, you may want to put an option available to your players to make a @nameformat or its equivalent simply be the name of the room you’re in.
There’s some commands that are nice to include for people:
A command that lists out a specific stat, like “+stat strength” so we don’t have to listen to a whole shitload of entries. A command that only shows the latest comment on a +job so that you don’t have to tab through and/or listen to the whole fukken job. A command that lists out a specific sheet section in case you need to be reminded of something not as granular as a single stat but also don’t want to listen to the whole sheet. A flag or attribute to put on yourself that instructs the MUSH to be brief with its room descriptions. In Penn, this is terse: Flag: TERSE (players, things) When an object is set TERSE, it does not see the descriptions, or success and failure messages in rooms. This is a useful flag if you're on a slow connection or you're moving through a familiar area and don't want to see tons of text.So that when you’re cruisin’, you don’t have to listen to a room description over and over. You can still see descriptions, they’re just not dropped in your lap when you navigate, whether that’s literally cruising the map, or navigating through the backscroll to re-listen. I don’t want to have to shift tab 5 billion times through the map exploration I did to catch up to something I want to re-read.
ETA -
You also want to steer clear of using color as your only means of conveying information. For example, think of a WHO list where there’s use of color to convey whether someone is approved, not approved, idle, or whatever. Find a secondary way to convey information that isn’t color-based.
You want to try to make sure your website is as accessible as possible as well. I honestly am certain my website is not accessible 🤦 but if you’re interested I can rant at you about WCAG compliance.
At the bare minimum -
Do not style your website in px, use rem, for fucking everything, so if somebody has to increase the text size through their browser (V/I doesn’t always mean "use a screen reader) the website scales proportionally. Make sure your colors in your website meet a contrast ratio requirement for the visually impaired and just people whose eyes aren’t what they used to be because 40 hit them like a freight train.If it’s text to be read, the contrast ratio should be 4.5 to 1 or greater. If it’s an interactive element, like a checkbox, the contrast ratio should be 3 to 1 or greater.
The way you’d want to do this is by taking the CSS values you want to use over to a color contrast checker like WebAim.
