Accessibility ModandClaude Opus 5
973e62c8fe
Walking blind, the hard part is not "what is next to me" -- that is `/` --
but "what changed when I moved". Rounding a corner reveals a room, stepping
back hides it, a rat walks into sight behind you, and none of it is spoken.
Shift+/ cycles three modes:
settled (default) changes accumulate while moving, spoken once you have
stood still for 0.4s
always every step reports its own change
off
`settled` diffs against the state at the last ANNOUNCEMENT, not the last
step, so a long walk gives one combined summary that is a genuine net
change: something that came into view mid-walk and left again before you
stopped is not mentioned, and something visible throughout is mentioned
once. Summing per-step diffs would report both. A single step is the
degenerate case -- you are already standing still.
Arrivals and departures are deliberately asymmetric. Membership is current
FoV only (never rememberedFoV), but furniture drops out of FoV constantly
indoors as walls come between you and it, and "the bed is out of view"
every other step is noise. Arrivals are reported for every watched
category; departures only for creatures.
Terrain is unwatched by default -- water arrives dozens of tiles at a time.
Step detection polls playerActor.x/y as walltones does, so pathing, portals
and pushes are covered with no game function wrapped; the scan is a 14-tile
box and runs only on a step or a due settle, never per frame.
snapshot() and diffText() are pure and exposed so the testbed can assert
the wording and the FoV invariant directly instead of capturing speech.
34/34 testbed checks, 0 failures. Game footprint unchanged: main.lua | 1 +.
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. |
| 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, 26/26 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.