ASCII Art Descriptions

[Areia]

I imagine ASCII art is super cool for sighted folks, but for blind users it can be, at best, a bummer, if not a hinderance to playing the game really. It's an awkward albeit minor inconvenience to have to come up with IC explanations for how my PC never knew what picture was hanging up in her own temple's great hall (incidentally, a sort of inside joke with myself is that all my PCs are color blind for similar reasons ), but a big frustration when I know I might, and other blind players likely will, fail this or that quest for OOC instead of IC reasons.

The latter issue, ASCII-centric questing, is, while the most frustrating, fortunately not very widespread. After thinking on this for a few hours, I can come up with one in SM and a couple down in UM, only [*Addendum for myself: DF and MP also have these quests]. ASCII art for asthetics' sake is more common but frankly somewhat easier to shrug off, and in truth, in a lot of instances it can be easy to tell what a piece of art is meant to be given indirect descriptions given in game already (for instance, I have no idea what my holy symbol's extra desc looks like, but given that its a Kelemvorite holy symbol, I imagine it's scales upheld in a dark skeletal hand). So I wonder what people would think of adding one or maybe two lines at the end of these things explaining for blind users what they're meant to be? For instance:

..SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS..
..-SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS-..
..---SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS---..
..-----SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS-----..
..-------SSSSSSSSSSSS-------..
..SSS-------SSSSS--------SSS..
..SSSSS-------S-------SSSSSS..
...SSSSSS-----------SSSSSSS...
.....SSSSSS-------SSSSSSS.....
.......SSSSSS---SSSSSS........
.........SSSSS-SSSSS..........
...........SSSSSSS............
.............SSS..............
OOC: This is a blue V-shape on
. a white shield.

I guess the question would be whether the above is more annoying to sighted people than it is frustrating to blind people not to have a description. Yes, there are ways to brute force one's way through some ASCII art if one knows vaguely what the thing's meant to be in the first place, has a very strong eidetic memory, and has a screen reader capable of reading character-by-character and of announcing color (not all of them can). It usually takes me a half hour or more to identify each of the shields in that quest, for instance, but I have the patience (stubbornness) and time to do that. Not everyone does, and not everyone is going to be able to even if they do have the time. And yes, a blind player could if they wanted take a sighted player questing with them purely for the benefit of osays explaining these things in real time, but they shouldn't have to, least of all in one of the only mediums of gaming in which blind players don't need to lean on sighted friends.

So what do people think? If you're blind, would the above be any help to you (if not, how could it be made more helpful), and if not, does it grind your gears (if so, why and how could it be made better)? Do people think the quests should be so described but the art elsewhere should be left alone for some reason?

The other, more difficult question is whether someone's willing to add these in. I would be willing myself, maybe with one sighted partner to help confirm that I get things right, to go through the game, area by area and quest by quest, to find and add descs to whatever instances of ASCII art I find. But I'm not going to spend that time without knowing that my/our efforts were to be added in some form.

Thanks in advance for feedback!

[Harroghty]

If the goal is to make it more accessible to a screen reader, then I think the best way to do it is to hide some blacked out text. This would be, like an image's descriptive name on a website, read by a screen reader but unseen by any other user. Happy to make some tweaks if you send me a list.

[Areia]

Aha, that's perfect. Sighted users will not even see it. Thanks for the thought!

I'll start looking into these, then. More feedback's always welcome.

[Grenwyn]

Good advice to keep in mind for areas in progress. Thanks.

[hasryn]

Does the screen reader also state if a word is in color or bold or what have you? Something for those areas that hint that you might want to look at something is noticeable to people who aren't blind. I know some things have hints ie coloring or some sort of way to make the descriptor stick out just a little. Is there something that can be done that works with the screen reader that might aid as well?

[Areia]

Yeah, it's sort of the same trouble we have with the mem list and really anything color-coded.

Some screen readers can't detect font/color/attributes at all, while others can, but for some that can, the user has to choose between constant announcing of color changes, which far more often than not gets the changes wrong or does not detect them at all, and entering a keystroke whenever they want to know the color of the character the cursor is currently placed on, which is much more accurate but forces them in most instances to have to read letter-by-letter or word-by-word.

Over the years since having discovered FK I've tried to write JAWS scripts for zMUD to get it to announce things like color more clearly and less obtrusively, with no success. I've mostly fallen back on scripting zMUD itself, but really all that's good for is gagging combat spam--the color issue persists, given the way that the game sends its ansi color codes in some of the major instances like with the mem list (I'll not bore you with the details). Of late I've been seriously considering writing up a MUD client of my own dedicated to screen reader users that isn't ridiculously shotty and pay-to-use like VIPMud is, but yeah, it would be a big project.

There's not really much the game can do surver-side for that particular issue. A black-on-black line under ASCII art is, while admittedly not ideal for the builders who have to add all those in, not overly distracting visually (I hope). Doing something like, say, putting important words in a room's desc in all caps, or adding an asterisk after them, is not only ugly and painfully obvious to sighted users, but it also might not even be caught by screen readers depending on the user's settings. I don't have JAWS announce all-caps text myself because it's really annoying.

Fortunately most rooms are little enough an issue. I have a small alias that turns '/something' into 'look something', and that makes it really quick to just try looking at whatever nouns might strike me as outstanding in a room.