Anacreon and the blind

[zkline]

Hi All,

I'm not sure where I ought to ask this, so figured general discussion was a good place to start.
I stumbled onto the Anacreon beta yesterday, and was surprised to see that an old favorite game from the MS DOS era was back again. I'd previously had the Windows version, but was never entirely satisfied with it.
I happen to be totally blind. Consequently, computer games are harder to play. By happy coincidence the DOS, and less so Windows, versions of Anacreon were almost completely playable.
I'm writing to see what, if anything, might be done to make the web/MMO version so as well. At the moment it seems rather graphical, which is problematic. But I'm hopeful that if at all possible, screen reader support could be added.
I don't know a lot about the underlying technologies being used, but thought I'd post just to get this question out there. I hope the developers monitor this forum.

Thanks for your consideration.

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

Hi zkline,

George, the developer, is on here periodically but Anacreon is kind of on the back burner right now.

I knew that the original Anacreon isaccessible to the blind, since it was entirely in ASCII, but I don't really know much about the mechanics of how the interface is accessed with a reader. Would you be willing to describe exactly what the experience is like? Does the reader speak out each line on the map, something like A - - L - K -, next line, - - P - K -, etc? How do cursor selection and planet detail screens work? How time-intensive is it?

One limitation to accessibility for the web version is the sheer size of the universe- it's really, really big; far larger than the biggest maps in the DOS game. A universe that size is so large that reading out the position of each star sequentially would take ages; moreover, the game is conducted in real time, with fleets moving all over the place and conditions on planets changing continually. I'm just not sure that the core gameplay paradigm that made the original Anacreon accessible is still present in the web version, sad to say. My gut feeling is that making the game as it exists now accessible would require great effort and would not necessarily result in an enjoyable game experience.

Only George can really answer your question, though.

[george moromisato]

Watch TV is exactly right, unfortunately.

But there is one possibility: Unlike Windows Anacreon and unlike Transcendence, this web-based version of Anacreon is cleanly separated between client and server. It would certainly be possible to create a blind-accessible client (probably in HTML) by calling the same APIs and without rewriting the server.

Unfortunately, I don't have time on my schedule to work on this, but I would be happy to help someone else to do it--for example, by documenting the back-end APIs.

[6cef]

So, I'm not sure I would be willing to commit to making a blind accessible client, but I could commit to documenting the API calls, which I think would be useful for anyone who wanted to do that but also for many other purposes.

I probably have the right mix of interest, experience, and marginally open schedule for this.

Please let me know!

[george moromisato]

So, I'm not sure I would be willing to commit to making a blind accessible client, but I could commit to documenting the API calls, which I think would be useful for anyone who wanted to do that but also for many other purposes.

I probably have the right mix of interest, experience, and marginally open schedule for this.

Please let me know!

Wow, that would be great! It's not going to be easy, unfortunately. But I'd be happy if you gave it a shot. I've attached a text file for the server code which handles each of the API calls that the JavaScript code makes. This is just some middleware which dispatches to the actual server (which is in C++, and too complex to upload here). But at least it is a complete list of all APIs used by the game.

Next, I would go into the JavaScript code and see how the code uses the APIs. You might need to debug the JavaScript to output the content of structures, so you can see what various APIs return.

Please do not experiment on the live server, though! It's fine to debug the JavaScript on the live servers and see the outputs, but be careful about modifying the calls sent to the server. The server has not been fully tested to handle hostile, degenerate, or even non-standard clients.

If/when you have questions, you can post a new thread here and I'll try to answer it.