Help System

NAME
sight-impaired players - information for sight-impaired in Materia Magica

DESCRIPTION
When beginning your journey into the world of Materia Magica as a sight-
impaired player using a screen reader, there are a few things that you will
want to do in order to insure you will have an enjoyable gaming
experience. Make sure various settings within the game are set that are
geared for those who use a reader to make the game more accessible for
you.

The commands are:
SET COMPASS OFF - This turns off the graphical compass that displays
room exits.
SET SHOW-EXITS ON - This turns on the room exits display, so you will
get information as to where you can move from your current location.
SET EXTENDED-PROMPT OFF - This reduces the size of your prompt so that
it does not show your current hit points, spell points, and stamina
information (you can view this information via use of the REPORT command,
or by typing SCORE, or you can turn the prompt on and off again).
SET SHOW-COLOR-ALTERNATIVES ON - Materia Magica uses symbols and text
displayed in different colors in order to notify the player of certain
things within the game that might be important. When this setting is
enabled, any information that is normally presented by various colors
will be represented by simple text that can be read by a screen reader.

For example, the SHOW-EXITS display will normally show adjacent rooms
that are "dark" (have no visible light source) or player-killing (PK) rooms,
in different colors. With the setting enabled, these colors become text
tags. Another example is the various spell affects that are active
on other characters will be displayed using simple text instead
of colors.

SET BRIEF ON - This causes room descriptions not to show up when moving
through rooms unless you explicitly request them, by typing LOOK.
Instead of BRIEF, you may want to SET SUPERBRIEF ON - this performs the
same function as brief, with the added elimination of descriptions of
NPCs and PCs being displayed when you LOOK at them.

In addition to the general BRIEF settings, there is an additional setting
that can be toggled during combat by typing COMBAT MODE BRIEF. This
will allow you to not see the combat rounds of other fights taking
place in your room or, when you are in a formation, will allow you
to just see combat rounds as they pertain to you, not what your form
members are doing, which will greatly reduce spam and is beneficial for
those using screen readers.

Sound Triggers
You may want to set up various sound triggers to help notify you of
important events as they occur.  These can help dramatically while
playing Materia magica since there will be times where it is not
feasible to sit there and have your reader read off every line
of text as it scrolls onto the screen, even at a higher speed for
your given reader as you won't be able to react quickly enough.
For times like this, it is a good idea to setup various sounds
that will trigger when various messages scroll onto the screen
to allow you to react in a much more timely matter and possibly
save you from dying.

Since everyone has their personal preference for MUD clients, this
will provide you the basic idea of how to set up some of these types
of sound triggers so that you can take this info and create whatever
sound triggers you desire later within your client of choice.

The first example of a line of text that comes in very handy is the
line that scrolls when you have successfully fled from combat.
The line for this would be the following: You pant and gasp, trying
to catch your breath.  To setup a trigger for this line of text, you
would go into your triggers menu for your given client, and when it
asks for the trigger text that you want to have play the sound you
want to notify you, copy the line above into your client then just
attach a sound for this trigger and you are set.

Most of these examples that follow are for combat, since that is
primarily when you want to be notified of various things immediately
that are done to you, or you have done to your opponent, in order
to react appropriately.

When you get webbed, the line for that would be the following:
You are enmeshed*.

When you successfully land a spell on your opponent - for example,
casting and landing 'web' on your opponent would be the following:
*is enmeshed in thick webbing produced by the spiders!

All of these sound triggers allow you to determine what exactly
is going on to you or to your opponent while in combat without
having to wait for your reader to read each and every line of combat.

There are of course many more sound triggers that can be made, but
once you have gotten a handle on creating your first sound trigger,
you can then expand upon them as you come across events that you wish
to be notified of.

SEE ALSO
Guides