[Vinnl]

Great post. When you're reading a Mermaid diagram, do you just happen to have memorised that "dash dash greater than" means "arrow"? I assume the screen reader doesn't understand ASCII art.

And how painful is reading emails? HTML email is notoriously limited compared to HTML (and CSS) in the browser, but it's pretty hard to add structure to a plain text email too. How annoying is it when I do so using e.g. a "line" made out of repeated dashes?

[Neurrone]

Oh boy, don't get me started on emails. HTML emails are such a pain because of the hacks needed to get it to render properly across multiple devices. So I hear a lot of information about the tables being used for layout purposes, which is a pain because the tables are not semantically meaningful at all. And then there are emails that just have one or more images.

For a line of dashes like "-------", most screen readers can recognize repeating characters, so that string gets read for me as "7 dash". If using an <hr> element, then there is no ambiguity about what it means.

[cess11]

Users of the email client mutt has a similar problem, it doesn't render HTML and CSS and displays it as text, so instead they've developed a variety of workarounds like pushing the email body through a terminal web browser before showing it in mutt.

Might work for you too.

Edit: Also, do you MUD?

[Neurrone]

Oh yes. It was one of my formative childhood experiences. My first mud was Alter Aeon, but I haven't played in almost 10 years. I enjoyed myself during the 5 years or so that I played and got to know a lot of people. The first first thing I ever programmed was a bot to automatically heal group members.

Then Empire Mud, but I left due to disagreements with the admin. I loved the concept but it didn't really have the playerbase to support it.

More recently, I was on Procedural Realms. But I was affected by 3 separate instances of data corruption / loss, the last of which resulted in an unplanned pwipe since there were no offsite backups and the drive on the server failed. Years of progress gone due to lack of backups, so I'm never going back.

Ever since, I've been trying to find something else. Perhaps I'm just getting older but I don't have the patience to grind that I once had, which rules out most hack and slash muds. These days, I prefer something with interesting quests, places to explore and mechanics.

What muds do you play?

[cess11]

Neat. I mostly play Discworld MUD, which isn't very often due to small kids these days. It's a good all-rounder, has both fine grind and massive amounts of quests, exploration and crafting. Over the years I've become friends with many screen reader users there, and some of them were the fastest hunting group leaders I've seen.

http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/

[Neurrone]

I tried it briefly but bounced off after the tutorial finished, I couldn't figure out what to do.

Is reading the books required for enjoyment? I haven't read anything from the Discworld series.

[cess11]

After the tutorial, if you choose morporkian as language and Ankh-Morpork as starting location you'll be put in one of the busiest places in the world, outside a bar. Either outside or inside you'll find people who can help you get started. The 'say' command says something to the entire room, and 'tell username message' sends them a private message.

There's also a newbie group chat where you can ask for help, the syntax is 'newbie' followed by your message. It'll go away once you get too many levels in your skills.

A drawback with Ankh-Morpork is that it has cops, they might interfere if you decide to attack something that isn't a rat or cockroach or somesuch, but if you get caught and put in jail you'll eventually be released. Getting killed is a bit worse, you either waste your experience points by getting a raise from an NPC, or send a message to a particular type of priest that can resurrect you.