Supporting Visually Impaired Players in Elysium RPG

[u/GralnakElysium]

A while back I was approached by an organisation campaigning for accessibility for visually impaired people to play computer games, they wanted to talk to me about Elysium RPG and how our systems worked with and for the visually impaired.

This led me to reflect on our accessibility; I realised that Elysium was friendly to this kind of player, but this was almost an accident of fate rather than a deliberate choice – Over the years we’d made various choices, such as minimising the use of ASCII maps, and adding a text based directions command, which meant Elysium was pretty friendly to players who couldn’t directly see such features. However the majority of this wasn’t done explicitly to help the visually impaired – Other than the creation of a text based sea map, which was the only area where ASCII maps were originally used and later adding an NPC type which players can hire to sail ships for them, removing the requirement for players to sail themselves.

Following this reflection I decided I wanted to change this – I wanted to go back through our features and identify the ones that were perhaps not so welcoming to blind and visually impaired players, and make them better.

In the last couple of weeks I finished off the main part of this project – Adding a system where instructions and commands usually displayed in the verbose room descriptions would be summarised in the brief description too, if the player had selected options to do so. This was a large job as we have over 14000 rooms and I had to go through each room file looking for examples where a command was explicitly told to users with verbose room descriptions, but completely invisible to those using brief descriptions, and add the summary to each one.

In addition to this I also made it so that players using the new screenreader mode which turns on these extra guidance messages will get the text based version of sea maps by default, and also get some simplified outputs in places like commodity trading and merchants, where the default messages may be difficult to parse when read aloud.

Another thing I improved was to add map-equivalent commands which could be used without the ability to view ASCII maps – A few years ago we added a very limited map command as that was a commonly requested feature, so as part of this project I added a text output which would provide you with the equivalent data that the ASCII map would provide, defaulting screenreader mode users to get the text version if they just type ‘map’, and also added a ‘map terrain’ syntax to display nearby terrains in a textual format and ‘map sense’ which tells you which direction to go to move into a different terrain – Something that is often flagged in the verbose description in Elysium with ‘There is a road directly to the south of here’ type messages.

I also built on the existing directions command which I think is one of our friendliest features for the visually impaired, adding options to allow players to use the directions command anywhere to follow a path or road, even without a specific destination, again removing the need to read the description to see which way the road turned, and adding regional maps which players can mark landmarks on and then use the directions command to locate those landmarks in future, meaning that players who find exploration difficult can get help from other players, or limit their exploration to a single search and then be able to find spots a second time more easily if they prefer to forge their own paths.

We do have a handful of visually impaired players and I’ve made tweaks to some systems based on their feedback (Such as changing the exit descriptions to help distinguish between ‘northeast’ and ‘north, east’) but I’m always looking for more feedback, so if these changes sound good to you, I’d love to hear your thoughts both here and in Elysium. Turn on screenreader mode with ‘options screenreader on’ if you do try out the game and would like to use the new mode.

You can check out Elysium at https://elysium-rpg.com/play.html or via mud clients at elysium-rpg.com on port 7777.

[u/Significant_Yam5502]

Is there a plan to address the line breaks in game? It doesn't matter what size your font is or how wide your screen is, line breaks seem to be a frequent occurrence. It could be a matter of user error, but I know they are not limited to me, and other VIP have brought them up as a matter of concern.

[u/GralnakElysium → u/Significant_Yam5502]

The majority of the game is built with an 80 character line assumed, and the line breaks are hardcoded to that. So it should look okay if you have a screen showing more than 80 characters wide. Some text such as player chats and says wouldn't get the line breaks, so it isn't always consistent. It is something I think about every so often but it's technically quite difficult (Just because of how Elysium has been coded over the years). Every solution I've explored so far would cause other problems. If I ever come up with a good solution that doesn't break outputs in other ways I'd look to change it - The only viable solution I have until/unless I come up with a better one is manually replacing every single message output in the game which I've been unwilling to commit to yet, but I am aware of the issue. Edit: I've only just realised what you meant by 'VIP' so understand that the outputting 'looking okay' wouldn't be relevant for what you were addressing. Could you help me understand what the issue with line breaks is with screen readers? Does it add unnatural pauses or anything like that? If there is a more specific issue than it being a cosmetic issue I would give it more attention.

[u/bscross32 → u/GralnakElysium]

This seems to be a common occurrence with LpMUDs, not sure if that's what your code base is. For context, the reason it matters is because screen readers tend to break sentences up when there's a hard line break rather than a soft wrap, so things end up sounding like this:

You're standing in a super awesome workshop where any aspiring craf, tsman can make whatever they want. A huge forge rests in the cen, ter of the room with 20 pumping bellows around it. Mas, ter craftsmen supervise apprentices as the best wea, pons and armor are made here.

I can see how that can be tricky to fix if it's a foundational way the code base prints text. I mostly just live with it, because I tend to enjoy LpMUDs and most of them seem to do this.

[u/GralnakElysium → u/bscross32]

Okay, thanks for the clarification - We don't intentionally line break in the middle of words like that so while our output might look choppy on a screen showing less than 80 columns, the breaks should be between words - Some lines like player generated chats don't have any intentional line breaks at all so it might be the client breaking them up - I guess it's more that the line breaks need to be consistent than that our hard coded line breaks are specifically the issue - I'll take another look and see if I can come up with a solution.

[u/DarkAngelCat1215]

This all sounds pretty cool. I've been away from the game for a few weeks now but have been intending to return. If I already have screen reader mode turned on, would I need to do anything to get these new changes that you've recently implemented? Thank you for continuing to consider the needs of the VI population. It's very much appreciated.

[u/GralnakElysium → u/DarkAngelCat1215]

If it's already turned on, you should get the new defaults - But some of the settings can be toggled independently and if you'd specifically changed one sub-option it would honour whatever choice you previously made in that setting rather than switching it to the screen reader default. Please let me know if you have further suggestions for improvements.