Visually Impared

Rackham

I'm asking this after quite a few frustrating novice interactions. Which is not to say the novices themselves are frustrating. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it's just as frustrating for them as it is for me.

Mainly, I want to know what the hangups are for screenreaders and the like. I point novices to help scrolls, and they don't seem to be able to read them. I send them tells that seem to get ignored. Some have flat out asked the same question repeatedly, and seemingly ignore certain responses. They'll ask a question, I'll answer it, and later they'll ask more urgently, as if I've ignored them.

So what is the hangup, and how do I help provide guidance to those using screenreaders, or who are elsewise visually impaired? Is it a matter of the screenreader they're using being faulty? Is it a disconnect between what the screenreader can do and what Achaea provides as information to it? Not having ever used one, I wouldn't know where to start to help tweak the experience. Are they unable to read help scrolls? Do tells just not get read if they're moving somewhere?

I'm aware there's a VIP clan. But outside of that, I don't want to just spam the same tell to a novice assuming they've missed it entirely for one reason or another. I'm doing what I can, but at a certain point it's just not within my patience to spend literal hours trying to talk somebody through very basic things only to find out they've not even received half of the things I've said to them.

What can I do to improve this experience?

Rhivona

Rackham said:

I'm asking this after quite a few frustrating novice interactions. Which is not to say the novices themselves are frustrating. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it's just as frustrating for them as it is for me.

Mainly, I want to know what the hangups are for screenreaders and the like. I point novices to help scrolls, and they don't seem to be able to read them. I send them tells that seem to get ignored. Some have flat out asked the same question repeatedly, and seemingly ignore certain responses. They'll ask a question, I'll answer it, and later they'll ask more urgently, as if I've ignored them.

So what is the hangup, and how do I help provide guidance to those using screenreaders, or who are elsewise visually impaired? Is it a matter of the screenreader they're using being faulty? Is it a disconnect between what the screenreader can do and what Achaea provides as information to it? Not having ever used one, I wouldn't know where to start to help tweak the experience. Are they unable to read help scrolls? Do tells just not get read if they're moving somewhere?

I'm aware there's a VIP clan. But outside of that, I don't want to just spam the same tell to a novice assuming they've missed it entirely for one reason or another. I'm doing what I can, but at a certain point it's just not within my patience to spend literal hours trying to talk somebody through very basic things only to find out they've not even received half of the things I've said to them.

What can I do to improve this experience?

Probably the very first thing you should make sure they do is CONFIG SCREENREADER ON

Skye

I feel like that should be a thing when creating the character tbh. Like, it's but the work of a moment to type yes or no to needing the screenreader config on when creating the character.

That said, I was told been told one other issue with screenreaders is that they can't deal with ascii art and other weird formatting like fancy tables and stuff. Someone with actual VI could probably better advise, but that was what I was told at the time, that's why I removed a lot of fancy formatting from my ads and stuff. 

Rackham

the screenreader config was a huge help. Already idead sticking that into character creation, cuz that's a good one, rather than having to struggle to find it. Didn't know you could have them JOIN VIP either, so that's huge.

Morsul

For tables, remember that for VIP it's better to read across rather than downwards

like,

CategoryA  ElementA.1 Element A.2 Element A.3
CategoryB ElementB.1 Element B.2 Element B.3
Category C Element C.1 Element C.2 Element C.3


reads more coherently than

CategoryA CategoryB CategoryC
ElementA.1 Element B.1 Element C.1
ElementA.2 Element B.2 Element C.2
ElementA.3 Element B.3 Element C.3

Caelan

This is great info.

I made an effort to convert all the Order Help files into screen-reader friendly sources but at the time I couldn't get much info about what helps and what hurts other than that "Ascii art is the devil".  I also made it a point to do the same thing with the Scion files when I was House leader which took a lot because a bunch of that had some really cool art but it was all trees and stuff, so it took up half a journal page. 

Such a fine line between OOC consideration and IC culture/art.

I am curious, if I CONFIG SCREENREADER ON, will it auto-gag certain things?  I'd be curious to see how much it strips out and was considering getting a screenreader just to make sure future works are supportable.

Veldrin

You also have to remember you can read faster than the screenreader can read aloud since you can skim the text for valuable information. A VIP has to hear it all, discard the useless information and first then act on it, anything else that the screenreader then reads out they also have to listen to cause you can't know if what's coming is important.
It's not always so easy to just 'scroll back' either. Then you also have to consider which clients can they use, cause Nexus and Mudlet doesn't work very well (if at all). Mushclient is powerful but can be a pain to config initially. The client recommended by IRE itself is windows only as far as I can tell so that locks out Mac's and Linux users unless they start up wine (which has it's own share of problems)

The best thing you can do is be patient while they figure things out and how their specific clients work.

As far as I can tell what the screenreader does is turn off ansi (so no colors) and make it possible to remove all the prompts

Rackham

Few other things I've found help with VIP.

So, I -have- had to tell them to slow down while we work on things. So many just want to run of and start their adventure, but are frankly just not prepared for it. Things -do- get lost in the spam of running through rooms, or hunting.

You can do HISTORY <CHANNEL> <NUMBER> to only read through a certain number of previous posts. So instead of HISTORY CT, and then hitting MORE to reach the bottom (with the screen reader spouting off the whole time) they can HISTORY CT 5, and have a more reasonable scrollback.

Far as I can tell, there's nothing similar for tells, but TELLS <PERSON> will trim it back only to a certain person's tells, at least.

I think that turning on the screenreader config option made help scrolls easier to read? Unsure of the specifics on that.

In general, just try to limit the information coming in while you work with them, and try to get them to slow down for their own sake. Everybody wants to jump into the action, but taking a good chunk of time to prepare them with ways to handle the flat out information spam is the best I've been able to do so far.