Eric: 00:11 Welcome Jinu, Outsiders, Children of the Sun and glorious representatives of the Egalatarian Alliance of Sentients one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts, Eric Oestrich Danny: 00:22 and Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld Eric: 00:25 And we have with us today the one and only Lindsey, the veritable Agamemnon of the text gaming world. We're breaking tradition a bit today as we have a second guest, Ruthie, both Ruthie and Lindsey come to us from Star Conquest. We're going to talk a bit about Star Conquest today, but a lot more about accessibility, how Star Conquest achieves it and what we can all do better towards that goal. So welcome to you both Lindsey and Ruthie. Ruthie: 00:49 Thanks. Lindsey: 00:49 Good to be here. Danny: 00:50 So before we get into accessibility, why don't you tell us a bit about how both of you got into the world of mudding? Lindsey: 00:59 I actually started really young. I had access to computers in the early nineties as a kid because I grew up inside of a university basically. And when you have access to Unix and you want to know how to play a game, eventually you sort of stumble into muds like that. And so the first text game, the first mud or mush that I played was Tiny Tim. I was just hooked on building. I just built so many things endlessly and I guess I've just never really stopped. Ruthie: 01:30 I have been a computer user since I was gifted an Atari 800 when I was probably 14, mid-ninties, and quickly progressed to windows, the current computer at the time. I did not discover mudding until another game. That was a hack and slash in the mid two thousands in my twenties introduced by a friend and about 10 years later, same friend said, I know you didn't like that when I played, but I dunno, you might try this one. I don't think you'll like it, but you can try it. So I tried it and got hooked. I had been bored out of my mind and needed something to do and the roleplay aspects of Star Conquest is probably what hooked me the most. It's a game with amazing mechanics, but probably even better roleplay opportunities. Lindsey: 02:24 Whoa, whoa, whoa let's not say amazing, we have mechanics. Ruthie: 02:28 Okay, yeah well let me say it this way. I have tried out quite a few other similar games just as curiosities and couldn't get into them for more than a couple days of messing around because I always came back because it fits me, I'll just put it that way. Whether that's true for everybody, I don't know, but I stuck around and don't know what I'd do without it anymore. Really. I have no boredom in my life. Eric: 03:00 All right. So how did you Lindsey become involved with star conquest? Lindsey: 03:04 Well, I was stuck to the keyboard as a kid and so I was always trying to build things, but it was also trying to find new games, like trying to find something cool that I hadn't seen yet. And sometime in late 1998, maybe early 1999, that was when I first discovered Star Conquest. It had just opened, it was just Jason, Derek, and uh, Gordon, three of the other hosts at the time. I think I started playing and then I stopped. And then a year later I started playing again and I've just never really left. Eventually sometime in 2004, I uh, started building in one of our games, Fortharlin, uh, which is no longer open. That has a very special place in my heart. Yeah. Now I'm part of Star Conquest. Danny: 03:59 Let's talk about Star Conquest itself. Um, it started quite awhile ago as many muds did, uh, what is, what is Star Conquest's history, uh, and how has that brought it to where it is today? Lindsey: 04:12 Star Conquest's history isn't very deliberate. We didn't intend to be where we are now and we've gone through a few different eras in the 20 years we've been around. We went from all those completely cited to having a strong visually impaired base since about 2015 with being roughly 80%, visually impaired. We've gone from not very serious about role playing to requiring character profiles and putting serious work and having a consistent setting. Our ringleader and general driving force is Jason. The very core of our gameplay started out as a game on his calculator in high school. You can move a dot around on a coordinate grid, shoot other dots, salvage random debris, all that stuff. Lindsey: 04:54 Jason met the circle of people who'd become the early staff on the uh, old simutronics game Modus Operandi. They moved around and eventually started their own moo called speaker and he decided to recreate his old math class calculator game and expand on it a bit. This new version of that game was a kind of loosely inspired by a book called Voyage of the Starwolf. It's Written by the same guy who wrote the star trek episode the trouble with tribbles, it was a lot more like a sub hunting than space dog fights, but ships now took three players to fly a pilot, a gunner and an engineer. You can only see things close to you, but you can drop probes and get reports when something came near them. And this little mini game got pretty popular. So Jason decided to turn it into a full moo of its own. Lindsey: 05:44 And that's the creation of star conquest. And in a way it's how the game has continued to develop as well. We're just a collection of mini games inside a larger one. The first real version of star conquest was two dimensional flight only. There were five ship classes for varying numbers of people and the limited sensor range was dropped and there were 30 sectors that you can jump through. Role playing was really light if it happens at all. And there was a lot of teenage drama. We didn't consider accessibility at all at that time, but the barebones nature of the moo helped a lot. There was no ansi color, there were no artists, so there was no fancy ASCII art apart from the sector map, but that had holistic coordinates at the end so a screen reader could just skip to that. And that's probably why I approached making a game accessible as more trying not to add inaccessible features more so than add features that cater to people with accessibility needs. Anyone and everything can work with a paragraph with plain text and going beyond that is flashy and cool and it's fun, but it's just not very accessible. We generally build new mechanics and instead of expanding existing ones. So the stuff we started with is still pretty much the same. Now there's just more of it. There's more wild places to see more activities, more starships and starship accessories. Peak and average players have been pretty consistent over the last 10 years. So whatever we're doing seems to be working. Eric: 07:29 Do you have anything to add Ruthie? Ruthie: 07:32 I was not around until about three years ago so all I know about all of that I learned from Lindsey and from Gordon and uh, uh, Elena, you know? What I know, I know from them, so not really, no. Eric: 07:56 Okay. So let's get right into accessibility. What does start conquest do to make it more visually impaired friendly? Lindsey: 08:04 Not all that much, actually, I think a big part in being an accessible game is how much you leave out. A lot of games that don't strike me as too accessible, tend to focus a lot on having a lot of color cues or having a lot of ansi art or just having, you know, things that look cool and because when you look at us fairly primitive, we're just sort of barely color text streaming down a screen. That makes it very easy for people using traditional VI clients and tools to work with. Danny: 08:45 As we know muds are pretty much all about the text, uh, but what tools are available, uh, for the visually impaired to help them experience muds and to help them experience other games in general? Lindsey: 08:58 All right, well the big one that's the most commonly used now is a screen reader, which is just a program that reads anything on your screen, uh, there's one built into windows, I forget what it's called immediately, but there's also commercial ones. There's JAWS, there's NBDA, there's a few others. And they just help someone who can't see the screen navigate around by telling them you know, where is the cursor? What is this window? What are you about to type into? In the case of helping people play muds. There's a VIP mud or VIPMUD, uh, which is designed entirely around the visually impaired player. Then for games in general there's sound packs which is just a big collection of triggers and sound effects that slice out long pieces of texts that would take a long time to read on a screen reader, replaces them with the sound effect like you shoot your laser at person could be replaced with you know, a very short fast laser sound effect then a name. I'm on other things I think it a fair amount of consoles 'have accessibility tools, not so much in the way that screen readers, but they tend to have sound cues so that you know where you are in menus and things like that. Ruthie, you want to add to this? Ruthie: 10:25 Firs the one in Windows is call Narrator. Lindsey: 10:25 That's the one. Ruthie: 10:27 Which has improved drastically over the last, really the last three to four years. Back when narrator was first introduced, it could barely read dialogue boxes. It was almost nothing. You had to depend on a screen reader that cost $1,000 a pop. I would say that in addition to with what sound packs do, they not only just replace texts with a sound, you can alter text so that like if I have a sentence that says your target is Alpha Kappa Delta and it's to your east, you could replace that so it turns it around. Your target is to your east and is Delta, Alpha, whatever the heck I said so that you get the relevant information first which is something that they actually did. Lindsay, was it 2016 you guys shortened target tracking? I am a low vision user. I sometimes use a screen reader, but mostly I use large text which can make things difficult because I have to make my text larger. I ended up splitting lines and the relevant text I couldn't trigger so that I can actually pull it out and see it. So when they introduced that, I was able to put the relevant information first, even if they hadn't that can be done with a sound pack. There's all kinds of other things sound packs can do as well. Ruthie: 11:52 Repeat information you have missed that can't get back. This allows you to just shift tab and arrow through texts in the window. Whereas like the client I use much does not. Some other various things like that. There's a lot of other stuff too. I've dealt with the one that I think most people now are using and the same but I mean that's, that's the basics of it because if you have a screen reader and you have all the texts in the game and it literally reads every single word and things can move by too fast, you're going to miss things, so you have to be able to pull out things. I actually have things 'set up in mind where it will read me a direction in a text. Please call the voice in a voice anyway, so that way I don't miss it with other things and that's something else that this can do. Lindsey: 12:40 Maybe one of the greater tools that is available to the visually impaired that helps them experience games is that the clients that they tend to use to access muds are extremely scriptable and flexible so that they can parse to however they need it parsed. Ruthie: 12:55 Absolutely. Not just the clients themselves, but screen readers are also scriptable. So you can do it on two things on two different ends. Make the client work better and make the client work better with the game. Eric: 13:09 One large aspect of gaming can be a competitive mechanic, player versus player. What aspects of the game can provide an even playing field? Lindsey: 13:17 Well, we started with some rules. Everything has to be typed by your own hands, so no triggers. If the machine types something for you, then that's against the rules. And the other rule is that everyone does have powerful scriptable clients that allow you to parse your input into fantastic things, but going overboard on that gives you an edge over other players. So none of that. Most of the commands that we have do you want to type very quickly or have very short aliases built into them. To make the game even it's enforce evenness of input, but make it convenient and enforce sort of some evenness of output for accessibility reasons people have to be of course what they see, but making sure that they don't go too far on that I think goes a long way. There is some other games that the visually impaired play that may have other rules. Um, I think the big ones are Alter Aeon, Materia Magica. Ruthie help me out here. Ruthie: 14:20 You really want to go into the blind space moos? Lindsey: 14:23 Okay, well I wasn't going to list those. Ruthie: 14:33 Those are probably the two big ones I can think of. I mean I would tell you that one of the things is most blind people when they read their use, their screen reader, listen to it pretty fast. Faster than if you were, um, and some faster than others. But if you were reading every single letter on a screen, you could not compete. There are people that listen to their screen reader at upwards of 200 words a minute. They actually, I would say have an advantage at certain mechanical things over those who are actually literally sitting there looking at the text. Especially if you can shorten things out. It's an advantage that literally is scalable. I mean, if you can read really fast, you can compete and not everybody can read that really fast, either visually or in audio. In Star Conquest generally during combat you don't get information you don't horribly need or can't easily filter out. And that makes it so that even if you are listening fast or if you're a fast reader, you're about level. Providing text maps, which I think the one thing I can think of that's not like that is one, one activity that a text map just doesn't help in general games that provide text alternatives levels the playing field from ascii maps and things like that. Lindsey: 15:54 So evenness of input, evenness of output, avoiding ascii art... Danny: 16:01 What about non mud games or non-text games for that matter. On the occasion we have people coming into the community, into the discord, uh, even into the coder;s guild presenting I wouldn't say high graphics games like retro, not even always retro Graphics Games, but they are graphical games with a graphical output. Is there anything that, that any of them do or that can be done better? Uh, with some of those? Ruthie: 16:36 There are some starting to, Madden is one of them, that's the one I think of off the top of my head when somebody mentions it. There are some other pretty big titles that are starting to include more audio. They are starting to include... Lindsey: 16:50 The fighting game community has a fairly decent history with the visually impaired. Ruthie: 16:54 Yeah. Lindsey: 16:55 They've always been around. Mortal Kombat specifically. Lindsey: 17:01 That's the other one? Ruthie: 17:02 Yeah, that's the other one. Lindsey: 17:05 Yeah. Mortal Kombat has included audio cues specifically for the visually impaired in their design for quite some time. Um, a few years ago a blind player even won a street fighter tournament. I think his name was Sven. Ruthie: 17:20 Yeah, I know who that is actually. Lindsey: 17:22 But is there anything that can be done with low graphics games? Mostly add sound if you can't play the game with your eyes closed. Yeah. Usually a visually impaired person can't play it and I feel that the more sounds you add into a game, just subtle things, the better the game feels overall. A good example of that in my mind is in old Nintendo style games where you're walking with a top down view. When you try to walk into a wall, you'll hear a little sound effects that go boom or something that tells you you're trying to walk into a wall. And this allows someone to slowly map out a space in their head even if they can't see it. And I think it's a little things like that that go a long way using more senses than just your eyes. Ruthie: 18:14 They're also starting to do things like the adaptive controllers that make most of those are for limited mobility. If you hold a controller in your hand and you can't even with muscle memory, be sure what you're doing it's going to give you a disadvantage. So some of it is making controller so they're easier to handle when you can't see them. And then you've got the games that are made primarily for audio players as well. So which is a huge genre. Eric: 18:46 So normally we'd have a word from one of our many sponsors today, but we're just going to go over some of the resources for the differently abled Gamer tnstead. We've been talking a bit about VIP mud, which can be found at gmagames.com. We'll include a full link in the description, the JAWS screen reader, which comes to us from Freedom Scientific. And I'd like all of our listeners when you get a chance to visit the National Federation of the blind at nfb.org or to look up your local chapter of the Lighthouse for the Blind, a charity which began in 1902 in San Francisco but has grown to give assistance to the visually impaired nationwide. Danny: 19:26 How do games exclude like game mechanics? How do they exclude the visually impaired and how can we mitigate that in design specifically going beyond just the inclusion or exclusion of audio cues. Ruthie: 19:43 Let me think. I mean from my end, some of it has to do with colors. If everything looks the same there's no way I can compete. If I can't change other aspects, any texts that displayed if it doesn't stay long enough, if it isn't large enough, things like that. Menus have always been an issue. Every game has been menus, muds being everything in text anyway but talking non textual game. If your menus are graphical, if your menus don't have some way of speaking what is in them. If everything is feed based, based only on visual reaction. Even if you have some sounds, I mean even discord. Okay, let's, let's go. Let's go there. Discord has caught a lot of criticism for a long time because their app has in general been inaccessible. Ruthie: 20:40 Screen readers, depend on items to be labeled in order to read them correctly and if you label a button 026QNRV okay, what does that, button what does that do. If you make it so that is not easy to move with the keyboard between frames. Um, your user lists, your whatever. Okay. Same with games. If you leave unlabeled buttons, if you leave areas that cannot be accessed through nontraditional means like say you're talking about a PC game where you use a mouse and keyboard. If you cannot move to where you need to go with a keyboard, you're going to have problems. Or if you don't label it in a way that makes them, those are some humongous pet peeves. Lindsey: 21:38 So mitigating that in design. I think the one thing that I've seen in muds that think about the visually impaired, they tend to have a screen reader mode. And that will do something like it will turn off all the ansi art, it'll turn off all the ASCII and extensive formatting and as well, and it tends to turn off something that Ruth has already mentioned, uh, which is formatting in menus. A common thing that I've seen games do you specifically in shops shops is they'll try to list everything out in a columized or tabled format that looks really nice and it's easy to read, but it's absolute hell on a screen reader. So having an option to turn your menus into something that's ugly but just delivers the pertinent information goes a long way I think. Something else that I think would help players a lot is pathfinding. A common complaint that we hear is this place is a maze. Everyone else can type map and have a good map of the area, but the visually impaired can't. Lindsey: 22:39 So, uh, we have a command called find where you type in the name of the room that you want to find and it will give you directions on how to get there, which I think that goes a long way. People seem to use that a lot. Something else that seems to trip people up a lot is a circular designs. The most common thing that causes someone to say this place is a maze is when an area isn't shaped like a tree. I'm not going to say that every area should be shaped like the tree, but if you have a lot of loops, even if you think it makes a lot of sense to you, it could become very inaccessible very quickly. Eric: 23:16 What is your source of motivation for championing accessibility? Lindsey: 23:22 Championing is a strong word. I have some opinions about this and every time it comes up in discussion on reddit or in the mud discord, I'm always saying we should remember the visually impaired player. That's because this is an old form of game and everybody wants to modernize it now. The people that want to modernize it a lot are sort of forgetting who the community is. There's, you know, people that want to play cheap free games, but there's also a core community of people who for the most part can't play other bigger, more graphical games. This is a community of people that depend on us. In modernizing our games we're leaving behind that core group of people who rely on how simple muds and text games in general are, and so I think we have a duty to respect the people in our community and make our games accessible. Even if it makes them a little less flashy and a little less cool it's not very glamorous to say, hey, maybe you should make this web mud accessible via like the tab button. Nobody wants to write a bunch of code to make sure that you can tab around everything smoothly, but I think it's the right thing to do. Ruthie: 24:43 The more people you can include, the more players you're going to have. IIf you exclude people you're going to be missing out. Danny: 24:51 That's fair enough. I like to take closing here to thank you, Lindsey and you Ruthie for coming out to the podcast today. It's been enlightening in a lot of ways. Um, and, and I hope, uh, I hope people, mud owners, designers can take some advice from here and hopefully be a bit more inclusive than perhaps they were planning. Lindsey: 25:15 Well, thank you for asking me on to talk about some things that I enjoy ranting about Ruthie: 25:21 And thank you for having me appreciate being here and being able to talk about this. Inclusion is very important to me and glad to be able to inform people.