Blind Luck MUD Development Diary, Entry 6: Blind Mode

If you want to start from the beginning, the first entry is here.

This text-based online fantasy roleplaying game started with the idea of making a game that is as accessible for the visually impaired as it is for anyone else. In the previous entry in this Development Diary, I added custom pronoun support to be welcoming to people who want to play as a character that perhaps doesn’t have a “traditional” gender identity — and in this entry, I will showcase what I’ve done so far to enable the visually impaired to play on the same terms as everyone else.

Image by Author, using www.inkarnate.com.

Brief mode

To develop this game, I’m using the Python programming language, and the Python MUD-making library Evennia. Evennia has been surprisingly apt to this task and has managed to strike a great balance between providing the things that I need, while not having features that I don’t want and have to spend time removing. One thing that Evennia lacks out-of-the-box that most MUDs have, though, is “brief mode”. In order to explain what brief mode is, let me show you what it looks like when you move from room to room on Blind Luck MUD (in MUDs, all “locations” — discrete places your character can “be” — are called rooms, whether they are indoors or not):

This spooky cemetery seems to be largely abandoned. 
    There are…