Accessibility ModandClaude Opus 5
5778e86e8e
Prompted by "do sighted players have a minimap we don't have access to?"
No widget, but two map surfaces were only half exposed: the world map
screen, and the level view itself, which IS the explored-floor map --
rememberedFoV keeps everything ever seen drawn, and a sighted player pans
over it and reads the fog edge at a glance.
The world map dropped the three things the picture carries: what kind of
place each area is (the icon shape), which way it lies, and how long
travelling there takes. The last is the number the decision turns on and
was only ever in the side panel. states/worldmap.lua is now a read() plus
details() rather than probe/render -- necessarily, because render() gets
no state table and the travel time needs the screen's currentAreaId, an
upvalue like options and selectedOption. Travel time is the game's own
getDistanceMessage, the same call the screen makes. The blurb runs to
several sentences, so it goes on = and the settle timer instead of the
focus line.
Two gotchas: options[i].icon is already an image object, so the icon id
string has to come off the model area; and describe.direction only tests
the sign of each delta, which on the map's floating-point coordinates
called almost everything diagonal, hence a 25% deadzone carrying the same
4/3 x-correction the game's own distance maths uses.
New frontier.lua answers "where haven't I been", which nothing did:
surroundings is local, examine is one tile, and the tracker only finds
things it already knows about. A frontier tile is seen, not blocking
movement, with an in-bounds unseen CARDINAL neighbour -- cardinal because
the diagonal test fires on the unseen tile behind every wall corner, so a
lit corridor would report an unexplored way per corner. Clustered
8-connected and reduced to each cluster's nearest member, so a wide
doorway is one way but two openings that both lie north stay two. Reads
only FoV/rememberedFoV and reports only THAT an opening exists, never
what is beyond it -- exactly what the fog edge shows.
Shift+End names the nearest exit without disturbing the tracker
selection. Note for later: level.exits does not exist at runtime, it is
packed as nil and never assigned. The primitive is the game's own
getListByTag("exit"), which already gates on FoV or rememberedFoV, skips
hidden tiles and sorts by distance. Exits were already a tracker
category, so this is a shortcut rather than a new capability.
"remembered" moves from verbose to normal verbosity. tileFacts reads
actors only when a tile is currently VISIBLE, so a remembered tile is
silent about whatever may be standing on it now, and at normal verbosity
that silence was indistinguishable from "nothing there". A safety flag,
not a nicety.
Also adds descriptor.probeNames: a read() descriptor has no probe table,
so menus.selfTest could only report "custom read()" and the version-bump
canary was lost on exactly the screens reaching for the most upvalues.
worldmap and research now declare their game locals and get the same
PROBE BROKEN check.
120 testbed checks, 0 failures. It caught two things review had not. The
world map said "You are currently here." twice, because
getDistanceMessage and getLastVisitedMessage return the same sentence for
the area you are standing in -- fine as two panels on screen, a stutter
in one utterance. And the first frontier check walked a step east and
demanded the numbers change; it failed on a run where nothing was wrong,
the step landing but both openings keeping the same Chebyshev distance.
Replaced with the deterministic property: every reported distance must
equal Chebyshev from the player's current position, nearest first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Accessibility mod — developer documentation
Making Sulphur Memories: Alchemist 0.4.2 blind-accessible.
Player-facing keymap and setup: accessibility/README.md.
Picking this up mid-stream? Read scratch.md first. It is the living handoff document: current state, every bug found and why, and the traps.
| Doc | Contents |
|---|---|
| scratch.md | Start here. Working state, bugs found, gotchas, keymap, how to run the testbed. |
| 00-dev-setup.md | Setting up. The two trees, prerequisites, building the dev tree, everyday commands, publishing. |
| 01-architecture.md | How the game is built: states, console, level model, keybindings. |
| 02-hooking-strategy.md | How the mod attaches with (near) zero edits to game files. |
| 03-implementation-plan.md | The original six-phase plan, with outcomes. |
| 04-open-questions.md | Questions raised; see 05 for answers. |
| 05-decisions.md | Decisions made, and the D4 correction. |
Status
Phases 0–5 complete. 23 state descriptors, 5 patches, 34/34 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Game-file footprint: one line in main.lua. Verify at any time:
git diff --stat vanilla-0.4.2 -- . ':!accessibility' ':!.gitignore' ':!CLAUDE.md'
The three findings that shaped everything
-
The game was already keyboard-complete. All 28 states implement
keypressed, with a full rebindable-keys system. The gap was that nothing announced what was focused — so the job was narration, not reimplementation. -
The game already writes the text.
console.printis a single chokepoint for all log messages;level.getCursorMessage()describes tiles;inventoryCursorPopup.setcovers four screens. Mostly we re-route existing strings to speech rather than writing a description engine. -
Everything is a
required singleton, anddebug.getupvalueworks. Module functions can be patched in place, and file-local focus variables (selectedOption, …) are readable from outside. Hence the one-line footprint.
Architecture in one breath
main.lua calls require("accessibility").initialize(). That patches module
singletons (console.print, popupStack.add, inventoryCursorPopup.set,
modules.slider), wraps states.switch / update / keypressed / textinput,
and installs a global hotkey layer. Per-screen narration lives in
accessibility/states/<statename>.lua descriptors, read via debug.getupvalue.
A startup self-test reports which patches and probes still resolve — the canary
for a future game version moving something.