Accessibility ModandClaude Opus 5
c841bcc68d
The documented way to run the testbed began with
rm -rf ~/AppData/Roaming/LOVE/Alchemist
which is the player's actual playthrough. It was written down as the
official procedure in four places, so every run of the test suite ate a
real save -- including twice in the session that produced the previous
commit. Reported by Talon.
The testbed does genuinely need an empty save directory: it drives a new
game from the main menu through the prologue, which has already happened
in any real save. So tests/run-testbed.sh MOVES the save aside (never
deletes it), runs, discards the test run's directory and moves the real
one back. Restore is on an EXIT trap plus INT/TERM, so it also happens on
a failed run, a crash and Ctrl-C. If the restore itself fails it says so
loudly and leaves the backup on disk rather than pressing on.
This cannot live inside the mod: love.load calls config.initialize,
keybindings.initialize and user.initialize long before main.lua reaches
require("accessibility").initialize(), so by the time any of our Lua runs
the save directory has already been read. The swap has to happen around
the process.
The rm -rf is removed from all four docs that carried it, each replaced
with the script and the reason not to clear that directory by hand --
being written down as procedure is what made it recur.
accessibility/.gitattributes forces LF on *.sh, or a Windows checkout
hands bash a \r and the script dies. It sits inside accessibility/ on
purpose: a top-level one would show up in the game-file footprint check,
which still reads `main.lua | 1 +`.
Verified with a marker file in a populated save directory: 38 checks, 0
failures, marker intact, no leftover backup directories.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Accessibility mod — Sulphur Memories: Alchemist
Blind-accessibility mod adding screen-reader speech, an object tracker, tile exploration and directional wall tones.
Speech goes through Tolk, so it uses your running screen reader (NVDA, JAWS, System Access) and falls back to SAPI 5 if none is running.
Running
"C:\Program Files\LOVE\love.exe" "D:\code\Sulphur Memories Alchemist 0.4.2 sanctified"
Use lovec.exe instead of love.exe to get a console window — every spoken line
is mirrored there, which is useful for reporting bugs.
The TTS libraries live in accessibility/lib/ and are loaded by absolute path,
so nothing needs installing or copying into Program Files.
If speech does not work, check the console for the startup self-test:
[accessibility] TTS: available
[accessibility] speech channel: yes
speech channel: NO means Tolk loaded but found no screen reader and no SAPI.
Keys added by the mod
All of these are in addition to the game's own controls, and none of them replace a key the game uses.
Reading the message log
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
[ |
Previous message |
] |
Next message |
Shift+[ |
Oldest message |
Shift+] |
Newest message (and resume following new messages) |
\ |
Repeat the current message |
Shift+\ |
Copy the current message to the clipboard |
New messages are spoken automatically. Pressing any key that does something in
the game cancels whatever is still queued, so you are never stuck listening to a
backlog. While you are moving through the history, new messages do not drag
the cursor away — press Shift+] to return to the newest.
Looking around
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
/ |
Scan all eight neighbouring tiles, clockwise from north |
Shift+/ |
Cycle automatic announcements of what comes in and out of view |
; |
Where am I — area name, in-game date and time, coordinates |
Ctrl + numpad 1–9 |
Describe the tile in that direction without moving |
Ctrl + numpad 5 |
Describe the tile you are standing on |
Announcing things as they come into view (Shift+/)
/ tells you what is around you now. Shift+/ decides how much of that
happens by itself as you walk, cycling three settings:
- View announcements when you stop (the default) — changes pile up while you are moving and are read out once you have stood still for a moment. A single step reports as soon as the step lands. A ten-tile walk gives you one combined summary at the end rather than ten reports on top of each other, and it is a net change: something that came into view halfway along and went out again before you stopped is not mentioned.
- View announcements on every step — each step reports its own change. Best when you are creeping along carefully; too talkative for crossing a room.
- View announcements off.
You hear things arriving — In view: a rat, 4 tiles north-east. barrel, 3, nearest 2 tiles east — and creatures leaving: Out of view: a rat. Only
creatures are reported when they leave. Furniture drops out of sight constantly
as walls come between you and it, and being told the bed is out of view every
other step would bury everything useful; a creature you can no longer see is
worth knowing about.
These announcements are queued rather than urgent, so anything you asked for yourself is spoken first, and any key that acts in the game clears them.
Nothing outside your current field of view is ever reported.
The game's own examine mode (x) is also fully spoken: the arrow keys move a
cursor around the map and each tile is described with its distance and direction
from you. Press f in examine mode to jump between exits.
Object tracker
Finds everything you have seen, sorted by distance.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Ctrl+PageUp / Ctrl+PageDown |
Previous / next category |
PageUp / PageDown |
Previous / next kind of thing in that category |
Shift+PageUp / Shift+PageDown |
Previous / next instance of that kind |
Home |
Distance, direction, and number of steps by path |
Ctrl+Home |
Walk to it |
Categories: Creatures, Items, Alchemy, Interactables, Exits, Terrain features.
So Ctrl+PageDown to reach "Creatures", PageDown to move between rat / beetle
/ guard, and Shift+PageDown to step through the individual rats. Home gives
you the walking distance, which indoors is often very different from the
straight-line distance.
Ctrl+Home does exactly what left-clicking the tile does with a mouse: it queues
a walk along the game's own path. If the thing itself cannot be stood on — a
creature, a chest, a bed — you walk to the nearest tile beside it instead, and
the announcement says "next to" rather than "to". As with a mouse click, the walk
stops early if something interrupts you, and while an enemy is in view the game
only ever commits one step at a time.
Your selection sticks. The list is rebuilt and re-sorted by distance every turn, but the tracker follows the thing you picked rather than the slot it was in, so a rat you are tracking stays selected as it moves around. It is only let go when it genuinely stops being visible.
The tracker only ever reports things you have actually seen.
The journal (j)
The journal has three parts, and all three are spoken:
| Key | Moves |
|---|---|
q / e |
Between tabs — Quests, Lore, Bestiary, Components, Recipes, Tutorials |
| Up / Down | Between entries in the current tab |
| Left / Right | Between pages of the selected entry |
Selecting an entry reads its title, its position in the list, and then the text of the page itself. The tab name is only spoken when you change tabs, and the title only when you change entry, so flipping pages doesn't make you sit through the heading again.
Long entries run to several pages; you are told page 2 of 3 when there is more
than one. The page text also goes into the message history, so [ and ] will
walk back through it and \ re-reads a line — useful for a long lore entry you
want to take in a piece at a time.
The inventory (i)
Moving the cursor reads the item under it, or empty, plus the slot number:
a torch, slot 3. q / e change tab, and the tab name is spoken when it
changes. An item you are currently wearing, wielding or have switched on is read
as equipped.
Pressing enter (or z) on an item opens a small menu of the things you can do
with that item right now — the list is different for every item, and changes
with its state. It is read as, for example:
a torch, actions, Switch on, 1 of 2
Up and Down move through the actions, enter performs the selected one, and any
other key closes the menu without doing anything. After the action runs you hear
the item again, so Switch on is followed by a torch, equipped, slot 3 — that
is your confirmation it worked.
Some items have no actions at all (plain crafting reagents, for instance). For
those, enter does nothing whatsoever in the base game — not even a click — so the
mod says a pinch of sulphur, no actions rather than leaving you wondering
whether the key registered.
Common actions include Activate, Wield, Unwield, Wear, Take off, Switch on, Switch off, Drink, Eat, Apply, Read, Open, and Prepare for throwing / Pack away. Equipping is done from here — there is no separate equipment screen.
Your character
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
' |
Health and active effects |
, |
Currently selected action |
You are also told automatically when you take damage or are healed.
Wall tones
Each step you take, a tone sounds from the direction of any wall within five tiles, positioned in 3D so you can hear where it is. Further walls are louder.
Reporting problems
Run with lovec.exe and include the console output. Lines beginning [speech]
show exactly what was spoken and when:
[speech]!— interrupted whatever was being said[speech]*— urgent alert, spoken immediately[speech]— queued normally
If something is silent that should not be, that is the most useful thing to report, together with the screen you were on and the key you pressed.
For developers
See accessibility/docs/ — start with docs/README.md, and read
docs/scratch.md first if you are picking the work up mid-stream.