Since we've lost lots of players to graphical MMORPGS we concentrated since then to focus on a part of the a potential audience that was forgotten before. We have got a number of blind people playing in our mud and they're enjoying it tremendously. They are a very enthusiastic and interested folks which will never switch to any graphical MMO.

So we added some extra features to our mudlib, esp. for communications but most important to turn off ascii graphics and provide textual presentations of the content instead. Same goes for removing decoration from displays like lists, books, scrolls etc. It worked out very well and is even used by many other players as they don't like ascii graphics that much.

So I'd like to suggest to add such a Variable to the Extended MSSP Variable list:

ALT_TEXT: Full, Partially, None
 alternative texts for ascii images for the visually impaired (blind people)

WDYT ?

Mesirii @ morgengrauen

mesirii@chaos:~> telnet mg.mud.de
Morgengrauen: one world, no umlauts, 15000 rooms, 7 races, 13 domains,
10 classes, 84 quests, uncounted exploration points and thousands of npcs
2 gods and a bunch of crazy people

existence: 17 years and 149 days, uptime 376 days, 5 hours

elefantos

Seems like reasonable idea to me. I think there might be more potential for exploring how well a MUD plays with screen readers in general, also. I imagine that ASCII images aren't the only things that pose problems. Color, for example, is typically used to distinguish things, but if using a screen reader one wouldn't get that; in that case, perhaps headings of some sort might be useful.

perhaps then the naming should be: SCREENREADER(_FRIENDLY): ASCII_ART; ALT_TEXTS; COLOR