Randy Laptop

1. An introduction to MUSHclient and accessibility2. JAWS: primary speech Plugin

MUSHclient is software for playing MUDs and their derivatives. It wasn’t developed for the blind, but because it uses standard window controls and has fabulously powerful plugin support and a great developer, it is a very simple matter to make it speak well with many of the mainstream screen readers on the market. Find out why I love it and what you can do to make it work for you here.

I’ve played MUDs on and off for years, and hopefully will continue to do so until I’m too arthritic to navigate a Qwerty keyboard. I Started by using windows Telnet, moved on to GMud32, played with Monkey Term, ZMud, WinTin, Mud master, and many others before buying MUSHclient some time before it was released as freeware in 2007. It was one of the best purchases I’ve ever made and I am glad to have supported the author’s immense efforts, if only in a small way.

You might want to know why I saw fit to pay for it when there were a profusion of free clients already out there and easily downloadable? I suppose the best answer to that is I was impressed.

The first thing to impress me was the detail and accessibility of the program. the interface is very “standard windows”, and each dialog box and tab sheet has a superbly detailed help page describing what it does and how it works. Secondly, whenever you have a question, the forum is such a quick and convenient way of getting support that you never feel lost. I’m able to say with confidence that this hasn’t decreased with the free release of the software, and both the community and author of the program are very responsive to questions.

With all that said, there is absolutely no reason why a mainstream product should read perfectly with a screen reader, especially not one as diverse as a MUD client. Standard things - menus, dialogs and the like - yes indeed, and in MUSHclient’s case, all these work fine. many applications can work with nothing but these type of controls; but a MUD client isn’t one of them. This is because no screen reader understands a control designed to update itself with new text, and there’s no windows control to do the same. What most, if not all MUD clients do is to use a “static” (or read only) text area on the screen, and amend it whenever new text arrives. Historically, you can use scripting within the screen reader to announce this new text. JAWS has a read All function and a scripting language, but there are drawbacks to using these methods (which apply to other screen readers too).
MUSHclient is powerful enough that rather than scripting your screen reader to work with the program, you can adjust the program to work with your particular screen reader. This gives you a few advantages - you don’t lose speech if you’re out of the window, set-up is quite an easy affair, and in general, upgrading your screen reader has little impact on performance.

The pages in this article provide you with downloads for various screen readers.

Most of the things you can download from here are MUSHclient Plugins. A Plugin in MUSHclient is similar to one for winamp or anything else you can think of - designed to extend the abilities of the software. From this article you can get a number of “primary speech” plugins, which will read any output from a MUD using your screen reader of choice. There are Plugins here for JAWS, Window Eyes, and Microsoft’s SAPI5 interface, as well as a list of further MUSHclient resources.. if you use System Access, NVDA, Hal or anything else and know how a plugin might be implemented, please drop a comment to let people know about it.

All of the primary speech plugins will read new text from a connected world, as well as the completed word if you use MUSHclient’s tab completion feature.
Plugins are XMl files, so you may need to:

1. Save the file by write-clicking the download link and choosing “Save Link as”, “Save target As”, or your browser’s equivalent.
2. You can add a plugin to MUSHclient on a “per-world” basis, or “globally” (meaning it will work on every game you play). for Primary speech I’d recommend a global insertion.
3. To add a global plugin:
   • From anywhere within MUSHclient, go to the file menu and select “global Preferences” (Shortcut G).
   • Navigate to the Plugins tab, it’s the second from the right.
   • Click “Add” (shortcut Alt+A).
   • Find the file you saved, which depends on what screen reader you’re using, and choose “open”. The plugin should appear in the global Plugins list.
   • if all has worked correctly, next time you open a world file or create a new one, the output from the world should speak automatically.
4. To Add a plugin to a specific world:
   • With the world file open and active, go to the file menu and choose “Plugins” (or press ctrl+shift+p).
   • Click “Add” (shortcut Alt+A), and navigate to the file (as above).
   • Remember that the plugins here only work in the selected world and no others, unless specifically added. Certain MUDs have plugins written for them, and certain plugins are useful in all worlds.
5. The above installation procedures should work with any Plugin, not just those from this site.

The remainder of this article is split over several pages. Each provides a specific download or a further topic of interest (such as a list of external resources).

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 11:59 pm and is filed under software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.