[MUD-Dev] Custom Server Roll Call?

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Thu, 6 May 1999, Jon A. Lambert wrote:

> On 6 May 99,, Greg Munt wrote:
> > 
> > 2. How are you proposing to support handicapped people, specifically the
> > blind?
> >
> 
> This should be a snap, really, to provide support for the blind to ALL 
> existing telnet text-based muds.  I don't know what the state of text-to-
> speech and voice recognition software is on *nix systems, but IBM has 
> released some excellent advanced software in this area which will run on 
> OS/2, MAC and Windows platforms.  I would postulate that one could 
> provide support solely through a new generic voice Telnet client.  I'd 
> even bet that some IRC voice clients are currently out there.  

Unfortunately, speech is a different medium from text. Just as wheelchair
basketball has different rules from regular basketball, a mud that truly
accomodates the blind cannot just out-right translate all text received by
the user into speech. If you actually read every word of every bit of text
you received in most muds, you couldn't keep up or move around at a decent
pace, and in any mud with any sort of fast-paced combat system, you
wouldn't be able to read all the text. Now imagine having it spoken at
you. Players survive lots of text, in my experience, by learning to pick
out the important patterns. Text-to-speech programs cannot do this. 
--matt




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