Mudlet & screenreaders

tspivey
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Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2012 7:26 am

Re: Mudlet & screenreaders

Post by tspivey »

I'm confused about how mushclient duplicates lines. Perhaps that's jaws and its echoing of highlighted text, that's caused problems in the past.

Another problem with MUSHclient is partial lines. If you receive "What is your name?" without a trailing newline, it won't speak until you enter your name and the mud sends a newline. This is confusing for those who don't know about it, and sometimes annoying to work around if the particular mud doesn't support changing the prompt.

As you said, the screen reader interfaces are just fire and forget. There's no way to get status, just start and stop speaking, but sapi has its own problems. I wouldn't want to use Anna for serious mudding, and she's the default voice. Espeak is free, but as said earlier in the thread doesn't sound that good to some people. Marry, Mike and Sam require a lot of work to get going on windows 7, and it seems sapi on windows 8 is noticeably slower than previous windows versions. I haven't tried running my full mud interface through it, so I could be wrong on some of this.

Mudlet's mapper is quite interesting to me because I currently have no way of getting from place to place without memorizing directions. I can speedwalk, but that requires I can always get to a known starting place.

I'd really like to see what you have, and maybe try to modify it (though my C++ isn't that great). Is there a git repository somewhere?

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Heiko
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Re: Mudlet & screenreaders

Post by Heiko »

I've removed all screen reader related material because there wasn't enough interest from the blind community, but I'll upload something again in the near future.

Delrayne
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Re: Mudlet & screenreaders

Post by Delrayne »

Can't remember if it's been posted in this thread or not, but vip mud is what a blind player uses on Imperian. If you all want to check it out as far improving Mudlet's screen reading functionality.

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Heiko
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Re: Mudlet & screenreaders

Post by Heiko »

New version of the screen reader. You can download it here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mudlet/ ... e/download

Garagoth
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Re: Mudlet & screenreaders

Post by Garagoth »

Heiko,

I wanted to show this Mudlet edition to blind users of my MUD.
However most menus (except Play, About and Exit) are not working and I cannot add my mud to the list, not to mention change any settings.
From what I see list of muds is compiled into the binary, so I cannot do much.
Any help with this please?

Regards,
Garagoth.

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Heiko
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Re: Mudlet & screenreaders

Post by Heiko »

This is just a stripped down alpha test release to find out more about what blind users need, but tell me your server and port and I'll add it to the next version if you have helpful blind users. The guy who wrote the screen reader plugin for Mushclient is going to help to make Mudlet accessible so chances to get Mudlet accessible have improved dramatically, but it will take a while until people can really use this to play seriously.
So far the feedback has been that it works if you know how to use it correctly i. e. no alt tab, but only change the windows via the F1, F2 and F3 function keys, but SAPI voices are not good if used at extremely high voice speed which most blind players seem to be used to so I'll look into the IAccessible2 interface now to try to get the screenreaders themselves involved more.

Garagoth
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Re: Mudlet & screenreaders

Post by Garagoth »

Ok, we will wait for next version then.
It it will have hosts hardcoded as well, could you please ass the following:
Host: warlock.pl
Port: 23
Name: Warlock

Regards,
Garagoth.

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kevutian
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Re: Mudlet & screenreaders

Post by kevutian »

Has there been any progress on this lately?

It was recommended to me by one the blind players in my game that grabbing a copy of VIPMUD and seeing how that deals with the screenreader might be very prudent. Apparently it deals with them very well.

AKJ
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Joined: Sat May 11, 2013 12:47 am

Re: Mudlet & screenreaders

Post by AKJ »

Just letting Heiko (or whoever is now working on the screenreader branch) know that I am interested in testing and brainstorming. I won't be much use at coding, but I would be happy to help in any way short of that. Mudlet is a client for serious power users, and I'm excited at the prospect of the possibilities for its accessibility.

As of now I don't have much to add to the most recent synopsis of the branch (getting the screenreaders involved will help a ton).

parham
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Re: Mudlet & screenreaders

Post by parham »

Hi,

I'm a long-time MUDder and interested to help with testing/ideas as well. I downloaded the Mudlet referred to in this forum (Mudlet-ScreenReader-2.1.1). However, I didn't find any key reference/manual for using it with a screen reader, and honestly, since this is pre-alpha, I didn't expect to find one.

Can anyone give me a quick overview? I've gotten as far as the f1-5 keys opening different windows, but in the game window, when I try to connect to, say, Achaea, all I hear is the info about the mapper plugin and such.

Also, a question. What I don't understand is why you can control speech in SAPI and not in, say, NVDA. As far as I know, these screen readers provide an API for speaking text that you can send the data to, just as you send the text to the speak function in SAPI. What's different in this case?

Thanks.

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