alchemist-accessibility/accessibility/docs/03-implementation-plan.md

Implementation plan

Phases are ordered so each one is independently playable-and-testable. Nothing later is required for something earlier to be useful.

---

Phase 0 — Baseline & bootstrap

1. git init in the game root; commit the pristine tree, tag vanilla-0.4.2. (.gitignore: dist/, *.json save data.)
2. Vendor d:\code\love2talk into accessibility/vendor/love2talk/ (drop objc/ and main.lua).
3. Resolve the Tolk DLL placement question (see 04-open-questions.md Q1) and document the launch procedure.
4. accessibility/speech.lua:
   • pcall(require, "accessibility.vendor.love2talk"); on failure, all functions become no-ops and we log once.
   • speech.say(text, interrupt) — normalises nil/empty, collapses whitespace, strips the game's inline markup if any.
   • speech.interrupt(text) — convenience for keypress-driven output.
   • A small queue so consecutive say calls in one frame don't clobber each other: buffer within a frame, flush one joined utterance at end of update. This matters a lot — a single game turn can emit several console.print lines.
5. accessibility/init.lua with preInit/postInit, everything inside pcall so a mod bug never bricks the game.
6. Add the bootstrap line(s) to main.lua. Add mod globals to .luacheckrc.

Test: game launches, speaks "Main menu" on startup.

---

Phase 1 — Console speech + line-by-line review

This is the highest-value, lowest-risk piece.

accessibility/history.lua

• Wrap console.print(message, colorTemplate).
• Append {text, colorTemplate, turn = world.turn, time = os.clock()} to an unbounded (or N=1000 ring) list.
• Mirror the game's coalescing: if the new message equals the last, increment times rather than appending, so review output matches what a sighted player sees ("You feel cold (x3)").
• Speak new lines automatically, non-interrupting, queued.

Review keys (working proposal, all rebindable):

Key	Action
Ctrl+[ / Ctrl+]	Previous / next history line (moves review cursor, speaks it)
Ctrl+Home / Ctrl+End	Jump to oldest / newest line
Ctrl+\	Speak current line again; press twice quickly to spell it
Ctrl+Shift+C	Copy current line to clipboard (love.system.setClipboardText)

Entering review mode does not pause the game (it's turn-based; nothing advances without input anyway). Review cursor resets to newest whenever a new line arrives unless the user is actively reviewing.

Open design point: should routine flavour messages (colorTemplate == "flavor", greyed out in-game) be spoken automatically or only on review? Proposal: a config toggle, default on but spoken last in the frame's queue. See Q4.

Test: walk around, take a hit, harvest something — all log text is spoken; review keys walk the full session history.

---

Phase 2 — Tile inspection & surroundings

The game already has a full examine cursor (states/ingame_observe.lua), driven by moveCursor(dx,dy) and producing text via levelWindow.getCursorPopupStats() → level.getCursorMessage().

2a. Narrate the existing examine mode (nearly free). Patch views/levelCursorPopup.set(lines, …) to speak lines. That instantly makes the game's own examine mode (default key: the examination command) fully usable — arrow keys move the cursor, each tile is spoken.

Augment the spoken string beyond what's drawn:

• Prepend distance + direction from the player ("3 north-east").
• Append passability ("blocked" / "passable" / "water"), whether the tile is currently visible vs. remembered ("remembered"), and whether it holds lootable items (tile.loot and not tile.unlootable).
• Announce cursor-hit-edge-of-map rather than silently not moving.

2b. Surroundings explorer (new). A quick "what's around me" that doesn't require entering examine mode.

Key	Action
Numpad 1–9 (with a modifier, e.g. Alt)	Speak the single tile in that direction, without moving
Alt+5	Speak the tile the player is standing on
A "scan" key	Speak all 8 neighbours in clockwise order, terse

2c. Wall tones. accessibility/assets/walltones/walltone_{n,s,e,w}.wav are present. Play the corresponding tone when the player bumps a wall (movement blocked) and optionally as a continuous ambient cue when a wall is directly adjacent. Use TEsound.play(..., {"sfx","interface"}) so the game's own volume sliders apply. Needs a decision on when they fire — see Q5.

Test: blind-navigate a corridor in the starting area using only examine + surroundings + wall tones.

---

Phase 3 — Object tracker

The headline feature. Key scheme as specified:

Key	Action
Ctrl+Page Up / Ctrl+Page Down	Previous / next category
Page Up / Page Down	Previous / next item within the current category
Shift+Page Up / Shift+Page Down	Previous / next instance of that specific object
Home	Announce distance + direction of the current item

Semantics I'm assuming (please confirm — Q2): a category is e.g. "Creatures"; an item within a category is a distinct kind, e.g. "rat"; an instance is a specific rat at (12,7). So Page Down cycles rat → beetle → guard, and Shift+Page Down cycles rat #1 → rat #2 → rat #3.

accessibility/categories.lua — the tracker's own category table, since the game's templatesByTag only defines exit. Proposed categories:

1. Creatures — from level.actors, excluding the player, filtered to visible-or-remembered. Sub-grouped by templateId, labelled with actor.nameObserved.
2. Items — lootable tiles / items on the ground (getItemOnCoordinates, and tiles with loot). Sub-grouped by item category from modules/item/categories.lua.
3. Exits — reuse level.getListByTag("exit") verbatim (doors, ladders, ways out, horses).
4. Interactables — tiles with tryInteract that aren't exits (containers, levers, alchemy tables, beds, fires).
5. Terrain features — water, fire, hazards (spore clouds, slime), stairs.
6. Alchemy — harvestable ingredient nodes specifically; this is an alchemy game and these matter enough to deserve their own category.

Category membership is determined by a predicate over templateId + tile flags. Building this requires a pass over modules/tile/templates.lua (6745 lines) to classify template IDs — the single biggest chunk of manual work in the project. Mitigation: classify by flags first (tryInteract, loot, blocksMovement, blocksVision) and fall back to an explicit ID list only for the cases flags get wrong. That should keep the hand-maintained list to dozens rather than hundreds of entries, and it degrades gracefully on new content in future versions.

Scanning. One function tracker.rescan() walking x=1..xMax, y=1..yMax, honouring FoV / rememberedFoV exactly as getListByTag does (so the tracker never reveals unseen information — important, this must not become a cheat). Results cached and invalidated on turn advance / level change / FoV recalculation. Sort each bucket by distance to player (sortByDistanceToPlayer logic already exists in modules/level.lua).

Announcements.

• Category change: "Creatures, 4 kinds".
• Item change: "rat, 3" (3 instances).
• Instance change: "rat 2 of 3, 5 tiles north-west".
• Home: "5 tiles north-west, 7 steps by path" — using calculatePathFromPlayer for the true walking distance, which is far more useful than Euclidean in a walled map.
• Empty category: "Exits, none".

Extras worth adding (cheap, given the above): a key to move the examine cursor to the tracked object, and a key to auto-path to it (bufferInput("move", calculatePathFromPlayer(x,y), ingame) — the game already does exactly this in ingame_observe.keypressed under confirmTarget).

Test: in a populated level, enumerate every creature, exit and item; verify counts match what examine mode finds; verify nothing outside FoV is ever reported.

---

Phase 4 — Menus and screens

Now the ~16 states that keep focus in file-locals.

accessibility/states/<statename>.lua — one descriptor per state:

return {
  probe = "keypressed",              -- which state function to read upvalues from
  focus = "selectedOption",          -- upvalue holding the index
  list  = "optionsList",             -- upvalue holding the entries
  title = "Main menu",
  render = function(entry, index, total, state)
    return ("%s, %d of %d%s"):format(entry.title, index, total,
      entry.isEnabled and "" or ", unavailable")
  end,
}

The generic driver (patches/states.lua) wraps states.keypressed: run the real handler, then re-probe the descriptor; if focus changed, speak. It also wraps states.switch to announce the screen title and the initially-focused entry.

States needing descriptors: main_menu, settings_menu, config_menu, keybindings_menu, load_game, new_game, journal, character, research, worldmap, actions_menu, alchemy_table, ingame_dialogue.

Special cases:

• ingame_dialogue — must speak the NPC's line and the numbered response options; the game already supports number keys 1–0 to pick a response directly, which is ideal. Needs a "repeat the NPC line" key.
• journal, character, research — tabbed and paged; need tab-change announcements (activeTabIndex, selectedPage, selectedPageId) plus a "read the page body" key that hands the long text to the history reviewer from Phase 1, so it can be read line by line.
• menu_text, narration, ingame_message, menu_message — full-screen prose. Route the whole text into the review buffer and speak it; these have no meaningful focus state, so they need no upvalue probing.
• craft, refine, trade, inventory — already covered by the inventoryCursorPopup patch from Phase 2a. But they also have a confirmation sub-window with a slider (modules/slider.lua, quantity selection). Left/Right adjusts it (adjustByFive modifier for ×5) — needs the current value spoken on change.
• ingame_targeting_melee / ingame_targeting_throw — targeting cursor; reuse the Phase-2 cursor narration plus valid/invalid-target announcement (canThrowOnCell, level.recalculateInteractableArea).

Test: complete a full loop — new game → dialogue → inventory → craft a potion → journal — with the monitor off.

---

Phase 5 — Player status, polish, packaging

• Status key(s): HP (player.actor.hp/maxhp), active statuses (views/statusGrid.lua, models/status), current action (player.currentSelectedAction), hotbar contents, level name + in-game time (level.getLevelDescriptionMessage()), player coordinates.
• Popup announcements: wrap popupStack.add and the ingame.*Popup methods so loot/recipe/lore/bestiary/tutorial popups are spoken and reviewable.
• Interruptions: ingame.checkInterruptions(hpLoss) fires on damage — speak an urgent, interrupting alert.
• Mod settings screen: speech rate/verbosity, toggles for flavour text, wall tones, auto-speak. Either a new state or (cleaner, more decoupled) a plain accessibility/config.json plus hotkeys to toggle at runtime with spoken confirmation.
• Self-test: startup check that walks every state descriptor and every patch target, logging what resolved. This is the version-bump canary.
• Packaging: decide .love/exe distribution vs. source drop, given the DLL constraint (Q1). Update build.lua's ignore if needed.
• Docs: a player-facing accessibility/README.md with the full keymap.

---

Effort estimate

Phase	Relative size	Risk
0 Bootstrap	S	Low (DLL placement is the only unknown)
1 Console	S	Low
2 Tiles	M	Low — builds on existing examine mode
3 Tracker	L	Medium — template classification is the grind
4 Menus	L	Medium — 13 descriptors, upvalue fragility
5 Polish	M	Low

The pleasant surprise is that Phases 1, 2a and much of 4 lean on text the game already generates (console.print, getCursorMessage, getCursorPopupStats). We are mostly re-routing existing strings to speech, not writing a description engine.