Accessibility ModandClaude Opus 5
a00f327c68
The item grids said which item you were on ("a torch, slot 3") but nothing
about what it was -- no description, no condition, and no "what does this
refine into", which is the whole of alchemy.
The game already composes all of it in one place: item.getPopupMessage()
(modules/item.lua:199) returns the cursor popup's line list, so read that
rather than re-deriving anything from templates.
It also already gates it behind a dwell -- the popup only fades in after
examinationPopupFadeInDuration (0.4s), so a sighted player who arrows past a
slot never sees the details either. Mirror that instead of inventing a
modality: stop on an item for 0.6s and the details speak themselves, queued.
"=" reads them on demand, Shift+= keeps the name line too. ("r" was the
obvious mnemonic but is a game-claimed scancode, and getCommand() dispatches
on scancode ignoring modifiers.)
New generic hook descriptor.details() returning a LIST of blocks, so each is
also pushed into the console history and [ ] \ walk a long description back
afterwards -- the journal page trick. Only _itemgrid.lua implements it so far.
The other half is the hint panel craft/refine/trade draw permanently beside
the grid, which the popup never contains: recipe components, and price, which
appears nowhere else in the game. The three panels share a shape, so one
reader covers them. Affordability survives only as a red colour in the hint
table and decides whether enter does anything, so it is decoded and spoken.
59 testbed checks, 0 failures: a synthetic ivy_leaves item as the version-bump
canary for getPopupMessage, hasUpvalue over every hint-panel local, four
assertions on the pure settleStep, and an end-to-end "=" press. Not yet
exercised against a live item -- the prologue inventory is empty.
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.