Accessibility ModandClaude Opus 5
96ec79ed75
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>
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.