Accessibility ModandClaude Opus 5
fd06961af5
Both aiming modes announced their name and then went silent, so there was no way to know what the arrow keys were pointing at. Prompted by "it says targetting, melee, but when I press the arrow keys it does not tell me what I am currently selecting." They look like a pair and are not, which is the whole shape of the fix. Throw has a real free-roaming cursor on level.cursorX/cursorY, so its descriptor is ingame_observe plus one clause: whether the tile is a legal target. That clause is recomputed from level.FoV, level.interactableArea and level.canThrowOnCell rather than read off the state's targetAllowed upvalue, because ingame_targeting_throw.lua:228 sets targetAllowed false for the whole 0.3s cursor glide and only the animation's onFinish restores it -- and mid-glide is exactly when we speak, so it would have said "blocked" on every single move. The same class of trap as the examine-cursor popup lag, and the same answer: read the model, not the view. Melee has no cursor and no target state at all. ingame_targeting_melee.lua:184-195 takes one direction key and fires the callback in that same keypress, so nothing is ever "currently selected" and there is no focus for a read() to return. Its descriptor speaks only on entry, listing the eight adjacent tiles -- which are precisely the legal targets, the game's rule being Chebyshev <= 1. Arrows still commit immediately; the game plays as it did. A two-step confirm cursor was considered and rejected for that reason. That entry line is surroundings.scan()'s sentence, so scan() splits into describeNeighbours() returning the text and scan() speaking it. onOpen grows the ability to be a function rather than a fixed string, since the neighbours differ every time. menus.selfTest needed a branch for a descriptor with neither read nor probe -- melee is the first -- or it would index a nil probe and take the whole self test down with it, which is the one report that must never fail quietly. Neither mode is reachable by its key in the prologue: b is filtered out by the room's level.allowedActions, and t falls through to gotoInventory() when there is nothing throwable. Found that by writing the testbed block as keypresses and watching it land in the inventory. It now drives both states directly, borrowing levelWindow, hpbar and levelDescriptionWindow off the ingame state's upvalues the way gotoAction would pass them. 129 testbed checks, 0 failures. The throw block asserts the focus text CHANGED across a cursor move rather than merely being non-nil, which is the assertion that would have caught the targetAllowed mistake had it been made. Still unverified against real content: only "can throw" has been heard, not "blocked", "out of range" or "no line of sight". Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Alchemist Accessibility
A blind-accessibility mod for Sulphur Memories: Alchemist 0.4.2 — screen reader speech, an object tracker, tile-by-tile exploration and directional wall tones.
Speech goes through Tolk, so it uses whichever screen reader you already have running (NVDA, JAWS, System Access) and falls back to SAPI 5 if none is.
This repository contains only the mod. It does not contain the game, and you need your own copy. Developed against version 0.4.2.
Installing
You need the game as an extracted source folder — a directory with main.lua
and conf.lua in it — rather than a packed .love or the Steam build. The mod
loads its TTS libraries by absolute path, which cannot work from inside a
.love archive.
1. Copy the accessibility/ folder from this repository into the game
folder, next to main.lua:
Sulphur Memories Alchemist 0.4.2/
main.lua
conf.lua
states/
models/
accessibility/ <- this repository's accessibility/ folder
2. Add one line to main.lua. Find love.load() (around line 95) and add
the marked line immediately after console.prepare():
function love.load()
...
user.initialize()
states.setup()
console.prepare()
require("accessibility").initialize() --ACCESSIBILITY MOD: sole entry point
local messages = require("models.messages")
That is the entire game-side change — one line. Everything else the mod does
is applied at runtime from inside accessibility/, which is what lets it be
lifted onto a new game version cheaply.
The placement matters: by that point templates are preprocessed, keybindings are
loaded, states.setup() has run and the console canvas exists, and it is still
before the first states.switch().
If you prefer, install.patch in this repository applies the same change:
git apply install.patch # from inside the game folder
3. Run the game.
"C:\Program Files\LOVE\love.exe" "C:\path\to\Sulphur Memories Alchemist 0.4.2"
You should hear "Main menu" once it loads.
Checking it works
Run with lovec.exe instead of love.exe to get a console window. Every
spoken line is mirrored there, and at startup the mod prints a self-test:
[accessibility] TTS initialised
[accessibility] TTS: available
[accessibility] speech channel: yes
[speech]! Main menu
TTS: UNAVAILABLE— the DLLs inaccessibility/lib/were not loadable.speech channel: NO— Tolk loaded but found no screen reader and no SAPI, so nothing will be audible.
The self-test also reports every patch and every menu probe. If a future game
version renames something the mod reads, it shows up here at startup as
PROBE BROKEN: no upvalue 'x' rather than as silence three screens into a
playthrough.
What it adds
Full key list and explanation: accessibility/README.md.
In brief:
| Message log | [ / ] walk back and forth, \ repeats, Shift+\ copies. New messages are spoken automatically. |
| Looking around | / scans all eight neighbours, ; says where you are, Ctrl+numpad probes one direction without moving. The game's own examine mode (x) is fully spoken. |
| Object tracker | PageUp/PageDown with Ctrl/Shift to move through categories, kinds and instances; Home for distance and path length; Ctrl+Home to walk there. |
| Your character | ' for health and effects, , for the selected action. Damage and healing are announced unprompted. |
| Wall tones | Each step, a tone sounds from the direction of any wall within five tiles, positioned in 3D. |
| Menus | All 23 screens are spoken, including the journal's page text, inventory, crafting, dialogue and the options screens. |
The tracker never reports anything outside the game's own field of view or your remembered map — it is an accessibility aid, not a cheat.
Reporting problems
Run with lovec.exe and include the console output. [speech] lines show
exactly what was said and when — ! interrupted, * urgent, queued.
The most useful report is something that was silent when it should not have been, together with the screen you were on and the key you pressed.
For developers
Start with CLAUDE.md for orientation, then
accessibility/docs/ — docs/README.md maps it, and
docs/scratch.md is the living handoff document with the current state of play
and the traps already discovered.
There is a code-driven test harness that plays the game by itself and checks what gets spoken:
"C:\Program Files\LOVE\lovec.exe" . --a11y-test
Design goal throughout: change as little game code as possible, so the mod re-applies cleanly to a new game version.
Credits and licensing
The mod is built on love2talk
(vendored in accessibility/vendor/love2talk/, see VENDORED.md there for the
local modifications and the licence).
accessibility/lib/ contains:
- Tolk — screen reader abstraction, LGPL 3.0
- nvdaControllerClient64.dll — NVDA controller client
- SAAPI64.dll — System Access API
These ship with the mod because Tolk loads them through the OS loader, so they must sit on disk beside the game rather than inside an archive.
Sulphur Memories: Alchemist is the property of its developers and is not included or redistributed here.