The setup is unusual enough to need its own page, and the facts were
scattered across scratch.md, CLAUDE.md and publish.sh: the mod is developed
inside a copy of a commercial game, so the dev tree deliberately has no
remote and publishing means rebuilding a filtered repo and force-pushing
that instead.
docs/00-dev-setup.md covers the two-tree arrangement and which one you are
in, prerequisites and why the game must be an extracted folder rather than
a .love (ffi.load goes through the OS loader), building a dev tree from
scratch including the vanilla-0.4.2 baseline tag and the one main.lua line,
the everyday commands, the save location, reading the [speech] console and
the startup self-test, and the publish flow with its leak check.
Linked from CLAUDE.md and the docs index. No code change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Walking blind, the hard part is not "what is next to me" -- that is `/` --
but "what changed when I moved". Rounding a corner reveals a room, stepping
back hides it, a rat walks into sight behind you, and none of it is spoken.
Shift+/ cycles three modes:
settled (default) changes accumulate while moving, spoken once you have
stood still for 0.4s
always every step reports its own change
off
`settled` diffs against the state at the last ANNOUNCEMENT, not the last
step, so a long walk gives one combined summary that is a genuine net
change: something that came into view mid-walk and left again before you
stopped is not mentioned, and something visible throughout is mentioned
once. Summing per-step diffs would report both. A single step is the
degenerate case -- you are already standing still.
Arrivals and departures are deliberately asymmetric. Membership is current
FoV only (never rememberedFoV), but furniture drops out of FoV constantly
indoors as walls come between you and it, and "the bed is out of view"
every other step is noise. Arrivals are reported for every watched
category; departures only for creatures.
Terrain is unwatched by default -- water arrives dozens of tiles at a time.
Step detection polls playerActor.x/y as walltones does, so pathing, portals
and pushes are covered with no game function wrapped; the scan is a 14-tile
box and runs only on a step or a due settle, never per frame.
snapshot() and diffText() are pure and exposed so the testbed can assert
the wording and the FoV invariant directly instead of capturing speech.
34/34 testbed checks, 0 failures. Game footprint unchanged: main.lua | 1 +.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
New sessions land in what looks like a game repository and start treating the
task as game development, so the accessibility framing had to be re-explained
every time. CLAUDE.md states it up front: everything outside accessibility/ is
the vanilla game and is read-only reference, and a request phrased as a game
bug ("the journal doesn't work") means a screen reader user cannot use it.
Deliberately a pointer rather than a copy, so it cannot drift out of sync with
accessibility/docs/. It sends readers to docs/scratch.md first and carries only
what a fresh agent would otherwise get wrong: that the user is blind so no
verification may depend on seeing anything, the small-footprint rule, that
speech must never throw, the FoV rule, how to run the testbed, and how to read
the startup self-test when something is silent.
CLAUDE.md sits in the game tree, so it would show up in the footprint check
that must stay "main.lua | 1 +". Excluded there and in the three places the
docs quote that command.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Opening the journal and selecting an entry announced its title and stopped,
which is an index into content the player could never reach. Page flipping was
silent too.
The screen is three widgets at once: the tab row (q/e), the list of entry
titles down the left (up/down), and the page on the right holding the actual
text (left/right). The descriptor read only the first two.
It now reads options[selectedOption].pages[selectedPageId] and speaks its text
blocks. A page is bounded by what fits on screen, so it is safe as a single
utterance. Layout newlines are flattened first -- splitTextByPages joins the
game's own wrapped lines with \n, so left in they make the reader pause
mid-sentence at every wrap point. Page position is announced only when there is
more than one page, and the blocks are pushed into the console history so [ and
] walk back through a long lore entry after the utterance has gone by.
The tab leads only when the tab changed and the title only when the entry
changed, so flipping pages does not bury the new page under a repeated heading.
That suppression made read() stateful, which is a trap: it is called for the
same focus from four places -- the per-frame poll, the post-keypress announce,
repeatFocus, and the testbed's before/after probes -- so a poll would consume
the "changed" flag and the real announcement would come out headless. The
descriptor now caches its last (key, text) and replays it whenever the key is
unchanged, making read() idempotent; the suppression state advances exactly
once per genuine focus change.
Adds a generic descriptor.reset hook, called from menus.announceScreen. The
memory lives in file-locals that outlive the screen, so without it reopening
the journal on the entry you left it on would read the page with no title.
Testbed asserts the spoken text contains the page body rather than merely being
non-nil. 29 checks, 0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tracker selection now survives a rescan. The scan is rebuilt every turn and
both lists are distance-sorted, so holding a bare index meant one step by the
player silently re-pointed the selection at a different rat. The tracker now
remembers identity instead -- the actor table for creatures, coordinates for
tiles -- and re-derives the indices in reanchor() after each rescan. Selection
is dropped only when the thing genuinely stops being reported (out of FoV,
killed, picked up), and the existing clamp then falls back to the nearest.
Ctrl+Home walks to the selection, reusing the exact shape of the game's own
click-to-path in ingame.mousepressed: calculatePathFromPlayer, then either
bufferInput or playerInput for a one-step path. Interruptions and threatened-
player truncation therefore behave the way a mouse click does. Most things
worth tracking stand on impassable tiles, which calculatePathFromPlayer refuses
outright, so we fall back to the cheapest of the 8 neighbours and say "next to"
rather than "to". Guarded on states.getCurrent() == "ingame": elsewhere the
input buffer belongs to another state and feeding it moves would be a bug.
Wall tones now follow the usual proximity convention -- a near wall is loud,
one out at radius is quiet. It was inverted, which read backwards in play since
a nearby wall is the more urgent fact. config.louderWhenFurther still flips it.
Testbed covers both: selection identity across a forced rescan, and that
Ctrl+Home moves the player without breaking out of the map.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds accessibility/README.md, the player-facing setup and keymap reference --
the thing to read before playtesting.
Brings the developer docs in line with what was actually built:
- docs/README.md rewritten as an index with current status and a one-paragraph
architecture summary.
- docs/scratch.md gains a HANDOFF section: state of play, the commands to run
after any change, the five traps that each cost real debugging time, what is
NOT verified and why, deliberate omissions, and how to rebase onto a future
game version.
- docs/03-implementation-plan.md gains a status banner listing where the
implementation deliberately diverged from the plan (menu narration pulled
forward as a blocker, levelCursorPopup not patched, tryInteract insufficient
as a tracker filter, testbed added, no settings UI built).
- docs/04-open-questions.md gains a resolution banner: Q6 and Q8 remain open.
Also records that the testbed check count varies between runs (23-26) because
some blocks are conditional, so what matters is zero failures rather than the
total.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
All 23 states now have descriptors; 5 patches applied.
Final two descriptors:
- keybindings_menu has two panels (commands and keys) with independent
selection, so it reads currentlyActiveWindow to decide which one has focus.
Announcing the wrong panel's row would be actively misleading, since the two
lists are unrelated.
- research is a 2D node graph rather than a list, and its nodes are drawn as
icons with no text label, so the id is the only identifier available. What
actually matters is researched / locked / cannot afford / available: without
the affordability part the screen is unusable by ear, because pressing enter
on an unaffordable node silently does nothing.
status.lua adds two pull keys -- ' for health and active effects, , for the
current action -- plus unprompted damage alerts.
Damage is polled from actor.hp rather than hooked. ingame.checkInterruptions
exists but only fires for interruptions during queued movement, so damage taken
on your own turn never reaches it. Polling catches every source (combat, poison,
fire, falling) with no game edit. Damage speaks immediately and interrupts;
healing queues, since it is worth knowing but never urgent.
patches/popupstack.lua wraps popupStack.add, the single entry point for loot,
recipe, lore, map, quest, tutorial and bestiary popups. None of these go through
console.print, so they were entirely silent before.
speech.immediate now logs to the console like queued speech does. It bypasses
the frame queue and so also bypassed the flush-time logger, which meant damage
alerts fired correctly but were invisible in the testbed transcript. Prefixes
are now: ! interrupt, * immediate, space queued.
26/26 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
The slider turned out to be genuinely generic: modules/slider.lua is a factory,
so one wrapper on it narrates all four users -- craft, refine, trade and
ingame_wait (the wait-N-turns screen). Same leverage as the console.print and
inventoryCursorPopup patches.
The options screens do NOT share it, though: config_menu changes values through
config.increase/config.decrease, so it needed its own descriptor. It reports tab,
option name and value, and its focus key includes the value so left/right
re-announce even though the focused option has not moved.
states/_itemgrid.lua is now shared by inventory, craft, refine and trade, all of
which build a views/inventoryWindow. It stays silent while
confirmationWindowEnabled is set so the slider owns speech during quantity
selection instead of the two fighting.
testbed gains walkTo(), which navigates using the game's own pathfinder rather
than hardcoded direction sequences -- those drift as soon as anything moves the
player. The config test only adjusts a value when the focused option is
demonstrably safe, and puts it straight back.
The slider patch is applied and confirmed by the self-test but not exercised
live: ingame_wait is unreachable in the prologue because tutorial_bed overrides
bed's tryInteractFunction with an empty function by design, and the crafting
screens need an alchemy table and real items. Recorded as a NOTE rather than a
failing check, since it is a property of the game and not of the mod.
25/25 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
Adds descriptors for actions_menu, worldmap, alchemy_table, journal, character,
inventory, and a shared one for the full-screen prose states (menu_text,
ingame_message, menu_message). The prose states also push their text into the
console history, so the existing review keys walk the manual paragraph by
paragraph rather than delivering it as one unusable utterance.
Two driver improvements, both prompted by real failures the self-test caught:
- menus.getAnyUpvalue finds a file-local across all of a state's functions and
one level into inner closures. Safe because a Lua file-local is a single
shared upvalue. Needed because actions_menu and worldmap build their lists in
open() and never reference them in keypressed, so the named probe function
found nothing. The generic probe path now falls back to this.
- menus.hasUpvalue checks that a local exists rather than that it holds a value.
getUpvalue cannot distinguish 'no such local' from 'declared but currently
nil', which made the self-test report PROBE BROKEN for worldmap, whose
'local options' is nil until the screen is first opened.
patches/popups.lua now stands down for any state that has a descriptor.
inventoryCursorPopup.set only fires when an item is under the cursor, so empty
slots and empty tabs were silent and you could not tell the cursor had moved.
The inventory descriptor reports item-or-empty plus slot and tab instead.
21/21 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fixes three claims that would mislead a cold session: the levelCursorPopup
patching note (reversed in Phase 2), the tryInteract classification claim
(corrected in Phase 3), and the answered-questions list.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
Three-level navigation as specified in D2: Ctrl+PageUp/Down cycles categories,
PageUp/Down cycles kinds, Shift+PageUp/Down cycles instances of that kind, Home
announces where it is.
- categories.lua: flag-first classification into Creatures, Items, Alchemy,
Interactables, Exits and Terrain features, reusing the game's own 'exit' tag
and excluding the six nameless mechanical templates.
- tracker.lua: scan, cache, navigation, announcements.
Caching keys on level name, player position and turn: position because
everything sorts by distance to the player, turn because creatures move and
containers empty. Scans run on keypress, never per frame.
FoV is respected throughout -- creatures only when currently visible, tiles when
visible or remembered -- so the tracker never becomes a cheat.
Home reports path length alongside the offset, via the game's own
calculatePathFromPlayer. Straight-line distance is misleading indoors, where a
chest three tiles north through a wall can be twenty steps away.
Corrects D4 in docs/05-decisions.md. I had claimed tile.tryInteract cleanly
separates 'the player can do something here' from scenery. It does not: 'wall'
carries a flavour-only tryInteractFunction ('You touch the wall. It's cold and
rough.'), so every wall segment was promoted into Interactables -- 13 in the
starting house, burying the chest and cauldron. Structural tiles
(blocksMovement and blocksVision) are now excluded before the tryInteract test;
containers and furniture block movement but not sight, so they survive.
12 kinds/19 instances instead of 13/32.
13/13 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
- describe.lua: shared spatial formatting. 8-point compass and Chebyshev
distance, since the game moves 8-directionally and Euclidean would overstate
diagonal travel. Verbosity setting, because sweeping eight neighbours and
inspecting a single tile want different amounts of detail.
- states/ingame_observe.lua: narrates the game's existing examine cursor.
- surroundings.lua: probe one direction, scan all eight, or report location,
without moving anything or touching game state.
- patches/popups.lua: wraps inventoryCursorPopup.set, covering inventory, craft,
refine and trade in a single patch.
Q3 resolved as augment rather than relay: the game's descriptions carry no
position, which is fine on screen and useless by ear, so distance and direction
are appended.
Examine mode is polled rather than driven by levelCursorPopup. That popup is set
from an animation-completion callback, so unless the player has enabled the
game's quickExaminationPopup option the text arrives a full keypress late -- in
testing you heard the previous tile while standing on the next. Polling
level.cursorX/Y is same-frame and setting-independent.
hotkeys.isCtrlDown/isShiftDown are now overridable fields rather than direct
love.keyboard calls: real hardware state cannot be faked by love.event.push, so
without that seam every modifier-gated hotkey would be untestable.
11/11 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
Wall tones: stop the previous tone per direction before playing the new one.
The tones are 2.33s mono; steps land far faster than that and up to four
directions sound at once, so overlapping them stacked into a continuous drone
instead of reading as a per-step cue. Cutting the old tone also means the
distance/volume you hear always reflects where you are standing now.
ingame_dialogue descriptor: speaks speaker and message on a node change, but
only the response on a selection change -- re-reading the whole speech every
time you move between responses would be unusable.
Two more bugs found by the testbed:
4. Nested states.switch announced in reverse. ingame.open() sees
world.pendingDialogue and switches straight to ingame_dialogue; because we
announce after realSwitch returns, the inner announcement fired first and the
outer one interrupted and clobbered it, so entering a conversation said
'Game' rather than 'Conversation'. Now we stay quiet if we are no longer the
current state.
5. The game already numbers response text ('1. (Continue)'), matching the number
key that picks it, so our own numbering produced '1. 1. (Continue)'.
9/9 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pulls menu focus narration forward from Phase 4: it was a blocker, since the
screen name was spoken but not the selected option, so the game could not be
started at all.
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
- menus.lua: descriptor driver supporting both D3 backends (upvalue probe and
patched-announce), sharing one render per screen. Probe self-test included.
- Descriptors for main_menu, settings_menu, load_game, new_game, narration.
- testbed.lua: drives the game by code via love.event.push, so input takes the
same path as a human keypress. Coroutine-based, and navigates by READING focus
rather than counting keypresses, which drifts when options are disabled.
Three bugs found by the testbed and fixed:
1. love.keypressed was still bound to the pre-wrapper states.keypressed.
states.setup() captures love[callback] by value and runs before us, and
main.lua does not define love.keypressed itself, so wrapping the states table
field alone had no effect. Now reassigns love.keypressed/textinput.
2. Focus can move with no keypress: main_menu.mousemoved assigns selectedOption
from cursor position, silently overriding selection including at startup.
Focus is now polled in the update hook instead of announced only on keypress.
3. Probes sometimes need chaining. narration.keypressed only calls
continueNarration(), so the text locals are upvalues of that inner function.
Verified: main menu -> new game -> name entry -> intro narration -> gameplay,
8/8 checks passing, including console.print capture and its (x2) fold.
Known gap: ingame_dialogue announces 'Game' and reads no dialogue text.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
Console (Q4: speak everything queued, cancelled by explicit action):
- history.lua keeps our own unbounded history, since the game's console buffer
expires entries after 3s. Mirrors the game's (xN) coalescing so what is heard
matches what is on screen. The review cursor holds position while new lines
arrive rather than being yanked to the tail mid-read.
- patches/console.lua wraps console.print, calling the real one first so a bug
on our side cannot swallow a message the player would otherwise see.
- Any keypress reaching the game silences the pending speech backlog.
Hotkeys: [ and ] review, Shift+[/] jump to ends, \ repeat, Shift+\ copy.
Chosen from scancodes the game does not bind. Note keybindings.getCommand()
ignores modifiers, so Ctrl+Up would read to the game as a movement -- our keys
are consumed and never overlay a game-claimed scancode.
Wall tones (Q5: on step, 3D-positioned, radius 5):
- Direction and distance are deliberately decoupled. The listener sits at the
camera 4 units above the plane under an inverse distance model, so placing a
tone at the wall's real position would make distant walls quieter (the
opposite of the request) and collapse the stereo pan. Instead the source sits
at a fixed radius in the wall's direction at listener height, and volume is
computed explicitly from distance.
- Step detection polls player coordinates rather than hooking movement, so it
covers walking, pathing, portals and pushes for free.
- Respects FoV/rememberedFoV; never leaks unseen geometry.
tests/test_history.lua: 16 assertions, all passing, pure Lua.
Not yet verified in actual play -- needs a human at the keyboard.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Establishes the mod skeleton and gets speech working end to end.
Game-file footprint: one line in main.lua.
- accessibility/init.lua: sole entry point. Patch registry, hooks states.switch
(announces screen changes) and states.update (per-frame speech flush, avoiding
an edit to love.update). Startup self-test prints what resolved -- the canary
for when a future game version moves something we hook.
- accessibility/speech.lua: TTS wrapper. pcall-guarded so a missing DLL degrades
to silence instead of crashing. Queues utterances within a frame and joins them,
since one game turn emits several console.print calls and speaking each with
interrupt would leave only the last audible.
- accessibility/stateNames.lua: spoken names for the 28 states.
- accessibility/vendor/love2talk: vendored TTS library, see VENDORED.md.
Loads Tolk.dll by absolute path via love.filesystem.getSource() and adds that
directory via SetDllDirectory, so the DLLs live in the project instead of
needing an elevated copy into Program Files.
Verified with lovec against NVDA: TTS available, speech channel yes,
'Main menu' spoken on startup.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
