Accessibility ModandClaude Opus 5
e57350ded3
Establishes the mod skeleton and gets speech working end to end. Game-file footprint: one line in main.lua. - accessibility/init.lua: sole entry point. Patch registry, hooks states.switch (announces screen changes) and states.update (per-frame speech flush, avoiding an edit to love.update). Startup self-test prints what resolved -- the canary for when a future game version moves something we hook. - accessibility/speech.lua: TTS wrapper. pcall-guarded so a missing DLL degrades to silence instead of crashing. Queues utterances within a frame and joins them, since one game turn emits several console.print calls and speaking each with interrupt would leave only the last audible. - accessibility/stateNames.lua: spoken names for the 28 states. - accessibility/vendor/love2talk: vendored TTS library, see VENDORED.md. Loads Tolk.dll by absolute path via love.filesystem.getSource() and adds that directory via SetDllDirectory, so the DLLs live in the project instead of needing an elevated copy into Program Files. Verified with lovec against NVDA: TTS available, speech channel yes, 'Main menu' spoken on startup. 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.