Guide For Screen-Reader Users

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Guide for Screen-Reader Users

CoffeeMUD has a vast number of features that are useful to those of us playing with a screen-reader. This page will guide you through many of them, starting with built-in features that are available on every client, and continuing with information on setting up particular clients at the bottom of the page.

Built-in Features

Recommended Configuration Flags

CoffeeMUD has many settings that you can toggle on and off, to customize your playing experience. If you'd like to read them all, type config when logged into a character in CoffeeMUD. The following are some settings that we recommend for screen-reader users:

• ANSI COLOR : OFF. To set this, type "ansi off". This will remove various colour settings that a screen-reader won't read anyway.
• BRIEF : ON. To set this, type "brief". This will stop displaying room descriptions every time you enter a knew room. You will, however, still see items the room contains. In order to see the full description, you can still type "look" or "l" at any time. Tip: if items are shown grouped together, and you'd like to see the full contents of the room, "ll" is the way to do that.
• MXP : OFF. To set this, type "nomxp". This will remove colours and formatting that screen-readers do not read. Also, leaving it on may cause problems with MSP, depending on what client you use.
• NOBATTLESPAM : ON. To set this, type "nobattlespam". This will combine combat messages into one damage report per round, to make it easier to follow combat.
• TELNET-GA : ON. To set this, type "config telnet-ga", which will toggle your telnet-ga setting on or off. With telnet-ga on, the MUD will send a special character whenever it's done sending data, so your screen-reader can read it better. It helps in places where the MUD is asking questions, and the screen-reader isn't reading out the choices correctly.
• PAGEBREAK : Disabled. To set this, type "pagebreak disable". This will let the MUD send you large passages of text all at once, for example in help files, without you constantly having to press enter.

The Prompt

Many screen-reader users find that hearing the prompt, containing information about health, mana, and movement, can be spammy and confusing. To turn off the prompt completely, type "PROMPT ^N" and press enter. Next, CoffeeMUD will ask if you're sure; just type "y" and press enter.

The Stat Command

Now that you have your prompt turned off, you need a quick way to find out about your stats, so you can keep track of how your character is doing while you play. The way to do this in CoffeeMUD is with the stat command. To see every value that you can request, type "stat". The most useful options are:

• stat hits: shows your remaining hitpoints.
• stat mana: shows your remaining mana.
• stat move: shows your remaining movement points.

Aliases

CoffeeMUD has an easy to use alias system, built directly into the game! To use it, just type "alias". You'll get a menu showing any aliases you already have, and giving you an option to add a new one. Here are some useful aliases for screen-reader users, that you might want to consider setting up:

• GLOOT : noecho get all gold from. Will help you quickly get gold from corpses, without grabbing anything else you might not want, by typing just "gloot corpse" instead of "get all gold from corpse".
• HP : noecho stat hit maxhit. Lets you quickly see how many hit points you have remaining, and what your max hit points are, by typing "hp".
• LOOT : noecho get all from. Lets you type "loot corpse" instead of the much longer and slower "get all from corpse".
• MN : noecho stat mana maxmana. Just type "mn" to see how your mana levels are doing.
• MV : noecho stat move maxmove. Quickly check your movement points with "mv".
• MONEY : noecho inventory hxswpkmv. Quickly check your money by doing an inventory search on a non-existent word. This alias is nolonger required with the WORTH command.

The Affects Command

To see what affects your character has, for example hungry, tired, etc, type "aff" or "affects". While this information is also shown at the bottom of the score command, typing "aff" offers shorter output.

A Note About Sound

CoffeeMUD supports playing sounds via MSP. However, the ways this needs to be configured are wildly different from client to client. If you know how to configure your client to do MSP, just type "msp" and CoffeeMUD will turn sound support on. If you're not quite sure, guides for particular clients will be added to this page as they are written.

Tips for Clients

Mushclient

If you've tried to configure MSP sound in mushclient, you may have noticed that the default MSP plugin doesn't work if you installed mushclient to your Programs folder. You should uninstall it and reinstall it to an unprotected folder such as Desktop or My Documents, instead.

Next, download the sounds from the CoffeeMUD homepage, and unzip them somewhere on your hard drive. Now, in mushclient, type "set_msp_path $path", where $path is the place on your hard drive you unzipped the CoffeeMUD sounds to.

Viewing the Forums

The CoffeeMUD Forums can be viewed with NVDA screen reader.