While your points are to a large amount valid, when reading your post it seems that you are under the impression that a MUD with the features like you describe is rare, or doesn't exist at all, and that MUDs are largely unplayable for screenreader users. This is to a large degree a false assumption.

Let me go through some of the points you state and give you my thoughts:

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\- ASCII Boxes: While these do happen in MUDs, they are not quite as prolific as the blog post seems to suggest. In the large majority of MUDs I've played, and I've played quite a few in my day, these ASCII boxes were abscent. In the ones that did have them, they weren't all that distracting, as no sane screenreader user would play a MUD with their punctuation setting set to "Read all". Setting this setting to "Some", which for a lot of people is the default, in your example only the + character would be read, while the line of dashes would be ignored entirely. Screenreaders in a well-configured MUD client can also read line by line, so we can tell the screenreader to initially don't read the line with special characters at all and just arrow past those offending lines. Given you would usually look at your score sheet when things are quiet, e.g. when not in combat, this tends to work pretty well.

In several big MUDs, the admins have figured out that blind people are actually a very valid demographic for this kind of game. So often, a screenreader config option will exist to get rid of most of these annoyances, including liberal use of ASCII and only indicating various things using ANSI color, rather than textual descriptions, which I would argue is a bigger issue.

\- Things happen fast. Valid. However, a lot of what happens during combat can be safely disregarded as long as you don't get in trouble with your health and mana in the vast majority of MUDs. A proficient MUDder will set up triggers to alert them when their health/mana gets low, and just hit the ctrl key liberally to cut down on the spam, as a basic measure. For a game that is well-loved by the community, an effort will be made to create a soundpack for the game which essentially gags a whole lot of the messaging surrounding various activities, and plays sound effects instead. For an example of this look at the Mush-Z pack for Alter Aeon.

In games where combat requires a significant amount of strategy, rare but certainly a thing in some (particularly PVP-heavy) MUDs, this gets trickier, as in those cases it DOES matter what every round of combat does. This would require quite a bit more work to make playable, in which case I absolutely agree with the sentiments expressed here.

\- Requesting specific information: Most bigger MUDs will have a way to do this already. While a sighted person can absolutely skim large amounts of text quicker than a screenreader user, the fact that a huge giant list scrolls other stuff off the screen is and remains a problem. Therefore, if theres 1000 skills in the game, you can be sure that there's ways to filter them, as nobody wants to go through such a long list.

Quickly retrieving hp, mana, movement etc can be rare. There's ways of getting around this; gagging the prompt string but pulling out the variables so they can be pulled up with a hotkey is a pretty foolproof way of fixing that one, for example.

\- Being able to mute things: Communication and announcement channels can be muted in pretty much every single MUD I've ever played. Interactions from mobs, ambient messages and weather messages are a different story, but communications can almost always be muted.

\- Maps: Some MUDs implement ways of finding/zooming to a particular place quickly, or at least get textual directions or a general line-of-sight direction your requested area is in. Most MUD areas aren't all that wickedly complicated either, making it relatively trivial to learn the routes when required. When running through a mob-invested area in order to grind, maps aren't all that important anyway except for making sure you've gotten every room, but using a bit of structural navigation usually gets you there, if not most of the way there.

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So yes, MUDs can have access issues, for sure. In fact, the MUD I am lead coder on, Starmourn, runs into the things moving fast problem to a degree and it can be tricky to balance fixing those issues in a way that works for everyone. And yet we have a few blind players who make it work for them, and I am working on accessibility-related fixes whenever I can.

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Disclaimer: I am a blind developer who's played MUDS for the majority of his life and now work on one myself :)

My mother would love this! And it would be something we could do together! She used to do LARP back before my sister and I were born and loves fantasy games, but she lost most of her sight about 4 years ago.

I would recommend that the game should be containing the audio files.. this way it can be multi language with no issues of the users..
I like the idea, if it has interest to get it to like german, arabic and danish, please let me know. You can catch on this mail: $1

Im part of a danish project that has interest in gaming and accesibility.

For starters let me start by stating that I've never played a MUD blind and in fact have only played one space-themed web game since joining the blind club.

As strange as it sounds, I do think that something with a semantic visual user interface works best. I'm not sure about Windows screen-readers, but VoiceOver has this concept of a rotor where you can choose what kind of element you wish to jump to. On web pages this rotor has the usual Headings, Landmarks, Links, Form Controls, etc., with configurable QuickNav key bindings, but this functionality isn't limited to HTML elements, as applications are free to create rotors for any kind of app-specific element type. For example I'm making an iOS app for the aforementioned game where I use a custom rotor to allow users to quickly jump to sectors with open hyper-gates, so instead of having to browse 27 sectors, users can quickly jump to the 3 or for sectors to which their current sector is connected, and while blind people like me cannot see the map, I added accessibility regions to it so that users can kind of feel it by dragging their finger over the screen.

The turn-based idea is good, but I think it could be even better if there was an easy way for the player to script the combat. I'm not talking about writing Python scripts or anything like that but rather simple event-based instructions like the Tactics skill of Dragon Age: Origins, which allows players to build progressively more complex scripts based on that skill's score. However unlike in Dragon Age, I don't think that the player should have the ability to intervene during combat. The tactics interface should be presented to the user in a similar fashion to the rules in many E-mail clients.

Finally, I do appreciate the fact that, while not being blind, you seem to be aware of some of the problems we face with technology, something that I was completely ignorant about before going blind myself.

I read the article it would ve a great game and i will love to play a game like this