Accessibility ModandClaude Opus 5
0477097e29
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>
Accessibility mod — documentation
Research and planning for making Sulphur Memories: Alchemist 0.4.2 blind-accessible.
| Doc | Contents |
|---|---|
| 01-architecture.md | How the game is built: states, console, level model, keybindings, where text already exists. |
| 02-hooking-strategy.md | How to attach the mod with (near) zero edits to game files. |
| 03-implementation-plan.md | Six phases, each independently testable. |
| 04-open-questions.md | Decisions needed before/while building. |
| 05-decisions.md | Answers given so far, and what they imply. Supersedes Q1/Q2/Q7/Q10. |
The short version
Three findings shape everything:
-
The game is already keyboard-complete. All 28 states implement
keypressed; there's a full rebindable-keys system with contexts. The accessibility gap is that nothing announces what is focused — not that things are unreachable. This makes the job much smaller than a typical mouse-driven game. -
The game already writes the text we need to speak.
console.printis a single chokepoint for all log messages.level.getCursorMessage()returns tile/creature descriptions.getCursorPopupStats()feeds the item popups in five screens. We are mostly re-routing existing strings to speech, not writing a description engine. -
Everything is a
required singleton, anddebug.getupvalueworks. Module functions can be monkey-patched in place, and the file-localselectedOptionvariables in menu states are readable from outside. A one-line bootstrap inmain.luais the only unavoidable edit.
Proposed footprint: 1–3 lines added to main.lua, everything else new files under accessibility/. A git baseline tagged vanilla-0.4.2 makes re-application on future versions a rebase.