Accessibility features and the UI

[Stuntofthelitter]

So, I had a brief conversation with FearCatalyst in IRC tonight. The gist of it is that without Marson's UI addon they are unable to really play the game. A lot of people have expressed sadness when 1.4 launched and the addon died. Marson, as far as I know, intended to update it but has so far not. There has been some discussion in the past around integrating some of his UI work and I think this is a conversation worth revisiting.

Marson created his UI addon in part as "An attempt to make 1920x1080 easier on my decaying eyesight". I didn't use the addon itself but I DID use his dev addon. Partially for extra features but the larger text size in the console was GREATLY appreciated. My eyesight isn't the best and is just getting worse over time, and at 1920x1200 working in the console to tinker with saves is a bit harder than it was pre-1.4.

I realize that it's not trivial to implement changes and that we have a finite amount of dev time and will. It's possible we could fairly easily integrate some bits of what Marson did but I wouldn't be surprised if other parts were sort of hacked together solutions that don't have a directly elegant implementation. People more familiar with the UI code than me can make that call.

From the conversation:

Code: Select all

<FearCatalyst> Text scaling, tall object compression, some color coding for color blindness, a few other things

<FearCatalyst> http://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/basic 

<FearCatalyst> Pretty much anything under vision and motor

<FearCatalyst> The things I really loved using: Addon to remove tile overlap that obscured units/items, UI Size scaling, color highlighting for important skills/skill names, stopping the flying text [with optional hide/show in realtime], color reassigning for ease of reading

<FearCatalyst> Hell, sometimes I have issues navigating my mouse around panes to read shit without accidentally highlighting other skills/races

<FearCatalyst> So maybe an effective toggle, etc

These are really good suggestions in general. I don't know what percentage of our player base needs or desires these features but they are reasonable requests. Other than time/complexity there aren't reasons to avoid general accessibility features. It would be great to improve the accessibility of the game in general, and not just from this standpoint; I've considered the idea of overhauling the tutorial and making getting into the game easier for new players, or making a knowledgebase of sorts accessible in the menus. Alternatives to relying on an external wiki to understand some mechanics could go a long way.

Obviously these aren't things we can just snap our fingers and accomplish but I believe it's worth considering.

[Marson]

It's possible we could fairly easily integrate some bits of what Marson did but I wouldn't be surprised if other parts were sort of hacked together solutions that don't have a directly elegant implementation.

You called it. Some features would be a snap, like disabling background sounds. Unfortunately others, like the text scaling, are hacks on top of hacks. Increasing the text size alone is really simple: you can just add in one or more additional font sizes to the option list. The problem is that the dialog boxes aren't designed to scale to that degree and won't accommodate the font size that I personally need. If I remember right, they scale to screen size rather than font size. I had to munge the dialog box code in a way that I'm sure would make darkgod cringe.

I really did have the best intentions of keeping my addons up-to-date even after I stopped playing the game, and that lasted for a while, but my health has continued to decline. I go for long stretches where I have very little energy for even the things that need my attention at that moment. Trying to update an addon for a game I no longer play ends up falling rather far down the list. I hate that friends like FearCatalyst may be no longer able to play the game.

One of the complicating factors is that I don't use superloading. Many of the things that I need to modify are buried deep in the main routines of the files I edit, which makes superloading mostly useless. I can't just modify a variable pre- or post-execution; I have to modify what core engine functions actually do.

I had wanted to break out parts of the UI addon so that at least some portions might continue to work even if others fail, but at this point, I doubt I'll be able to do much. I had also wanted to submit the cleaner portions to the main code base. I had installed GIT and had started to take a look at the process, but didn't get far. Thankfully Shibari handled a few pieces I had given him a while back, but then my energy tanked.

I can't make any promises, but I might be able to help someone get some of this working again. It's not likely to happen if I try to do it solo.

[darkgod]

Hey marson!

First off, don't worry I'm sure people realize you can't keep doing that forever anyway and are just grateful for the (awesome) work you already did!

Now as you say sadly the non superloading stuff is very hard for me to merge because I cant even easily identify what changed; though it still is on my list to try
In any cases if people could list (in details) what particular feature they miss most and why they felt they were needed/useful I can also try to fix some of them.

Thanks, and take care friend !