Blind Accessibility - JAWS & possible FEs

[SayGoodbye]

Cross post from the officials. If anyone has any helpful ideas please reply and I'll pass them along.

Hey everyone,

I've been tearing my hair out here trying to figure out something to allow me to play Gemstone IV again. To make a long story short, I've been playing for more than a decade though a recent IRL illness has caused me to lose my vision and I now rely on a screen reader to play. Considering GSIV is text-based, I didn't think there'd be so much of a problem in getting GS to work with my screen reader, but the past weeks have been full of frustrations.

All of Simutronics' official front ends do not work with JAWS, which is my screen reader program. Wizard FE WILL work, but it is clunky and almost impossible to even play the game normally, as incoming text is not read out automatically and I have to constantly keep checking for new text, which can be hard even after squelching certain text phrases from appearing.

I tried ZMUD/CMUD, but neither of these is compatible with JAWS either and require the same clunky workaround to get any text to read out, plus the added frustration of not being able to scroll back through old text if anything runs past the screen height. I have not found any scripts to make JAWS work with this, either.

My question is that I am wondering if anyone knows of any blind players that have gotten something to work correctly to connect with Smutronics games? I have heard ther is some manual way to connect and honestly I am willing to try anything to try to have some sort of enjoyable way to play again.

Some other things I have tried:

- GMUD has a script that allows some semblance of working order with JAWS, but it does not have any pre-written scripts to connect to the Simu server in order to get the appropriate infrormation to allow me to get into my account. I know there might be a manual workaround to this, but I have no idea what that might be. There is also another MUD client that is designed specially for screen readers, but does not have the appropriate coding yet, either, but according to the company they are working on it for the next release but that could be months.

- I also have heard of the Genie client, but the client itself does not have a demo so I have no way of testing it to see if JAWS will work with this. Does anyone use this in particular and know if any keystroke commands work with it such as tab and shift-tab to switch between the command line and the output? That would usually help with JAWS being able to get back and forth through things.

I have made repeated inquiries about this to the email on Technical Support and out of 5 emails, I have only gotten one reply, which seemed to indicate that some users use GMUD, but I couldn't figure out how. I was given host/port names for use with likely ZMUD/CMUD but neither work for me.

Mreh. I am at the end of my rope and I have no idea what to do. I can only hope that perhaps Simutronics will take pity on us blind players and perhaps design an accessible client in the future. eScape and the Java client don't work either, if people are wondering. eScape has more issues than the Wizard and you need to be able to see to click on the button to start the Java one.

Thanks for any help and apologies for the long post, as I've just had so much research over the past week and a half that I've accumulated a lot of stuff that I've tried. ;)

- Livdera's player.

[Mathari]

I don't remember ever using GMUD with GS, but the following method has worked for me with various non-Simutronics MUD clients:

1. Log your account in at the GS website and go to the "Go Play!" page.
2. Select the character with which you wish to play. Don't log in to the game yet.
3. Select either the Wizard or Stormfront as your client.
4. Click the "Go Play!" button. When you do this, your web browser should hopefully attempt to open a file ending in .sal. Save that file to your disk.
5. Open the saved .sal file in Notepad. The most important lines are the last three lines, starting with GAMEHOST, GAMEPORT, and KEY.
6. Now go into GMUD or your client of choice. Enter whatever comes after the '=' in the GAMEHOST line as the "Host" to which you want to connect. It should be storm.gs4.game.play.net. (This may be different if you're Platinum.)
7. Enter the GAMEPORT (it should be "10024"; again, this may be different if you're Platinum) into your client's "Port" field.
8. Connect to the game. The client will connect and then appear to hang. What it's doing is waiting for your KEY and your front-end choice. We'll enter that in the next two steps.
9. Copy whatever comes after the '=' in the KEY line of the .sal file directly into the MUD client and hit enter. This will send your key to the Simu server; it will seem as if there is no response.
10. Now type into your MUD client the following (and then hit enter): /FE:JAVA

That should connect you to the game. Good luck!

Edited to add: The GAMEPORT and GAMEHOST lines should remain the same in the future, so you can save that information if GMUD allows you to do so. Your KEY will update every couple of hours or so, though -- I think? -- so if you log out and then attempt to log in again after your key has expired, you'll need to go to the website and get the updated .sal file using the above method. (If anyone knows of a less inconvenient method, that'd be nice!)

[SayGoodbye]

Thank you Mathari, she says that its just what she was looking for. :)

[Mathari]

Thank you Mathari, she says that its just what she was looking for. :)
No problem! Glad to hear it, and glad to be of help. :)

[Joseph]

As a suggestion that would probably make life a little bit easier..

http://lichproject.sourceforge.net/ is a modification to the stream that allows your frontend to connect to the play.net server. It allows the usage of the programing language "Ruby" to write scripts for the game. With some help from tutorials You could set up a quick little script to write information from the game "including gs tags" to a separate text file that is read by JAWS. This would allow for exclusions of some things that are oft repeated and you would "rather not" hear, as well as inclusion of some information that is sent via GS tags, but not game displayed text.