Accessibility ModandClaude Opus 5
93ef26349a
The tutorial teaches "press s to see the contents of containers", and it was silent. For a sighted player s sets levelWindow.itemsHighlightEnabled, which draws the top item's icon on every loot-bearing tile in FoV. We watch that flag rather than binding s ourselves -- it is game-claimed, and keybindings.getCommand() ignores modifiers -- and speak on its rising edge, so the player's own binding, hold vs toggle mode and the toolbar icon all work. The flag is checked both at end of frame and inside the keypressed wrapper, because in hold mode a quick tap goes up and down within one frame. Reads the whole tile.loot list, not just the icon's top entry, nearest first, with each container pushed to the console history for [ ] review. 71 testbed checks, 0 failures. 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.