The MUD That Got It Right: How Erion Makes Text Gaming Accessible

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I wrote last year about gaming as a blind, neurodivergent, chronically ill woman. I said MUDs should work for me because they’re text-based, but they usually don’t. The problem is topographical agnosia. Room-based navigation without explicit directions means I spend more energy trying not to get lost than I do playing the game.

I’ve been playing Erion for two days now. It’s the first MUD I’ve played where I’m not fighting the interface to access the game.

This isn’t a WCAG audit. It’s a report from someone who is blind, autistic, has rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue, and topographical agnosia, and who has tried more MUDs than I can count. Most of them lost me within an hour. Erion didn’t. Here’s what it does differently.

Erion has a screenreader toggle built into the game. You can turn it on during account creation or with a command after you’re in. It’s not a token gesture. It changes how the game sends information to you.

When screen reader mode is on, the game:

Silences room names and descriptions while you’re running to a destination. You don’t hear every room you pass through. When you arrive, the game automatically shows you the room.
Strips symbols from room names so they read cleanly.
Turns off mob flags like (E) for Evil that add visual noise without adding information.
Condenses combat messages into short single lines instead of multi-line spam blocks.
Turns off the side map, which is visual and useless to me.
Replaces important punctuation with words. Help file references show as “Help 3 dot class” instead of “help 3.class” so screen readers that ignore punctuation still read the instruction correctly.
Moves door states before exit directions: “Locked East” instead of “East (locked),” so the information comes first instead of after the direction.
Replaces ASCII art with text. The level-up graphic becomes a text message. The hangman game replaces its ASCII gallows with text.
Turns off login notifications so you’re not interrupted by “X has logged in” messages.
Enables tell buffering so messages wait for you instead of vanishing before you can read them. Type replay to see them.

That’s not one feature. That’s a dozen features, all designed to reduce spam and present information in the order a screen reader user needs it.

There’s also a tts command that toggles speech on and off. When I type tts, NVDA says “speech off” and the game stops speaking through MUSHclient. I can still type commands and manually review the output buffer, but I’m not hearing every line of game text in real time. This is useful when I want to listen to music or talk to someone without leaving the game.

The Soundpack #

Erion ships with a MUSHclient soundpack that you download from their blind support page. It’s not an add-on someone in the community built three years ago and stopped maintaining. It’s part of the game, and it has an installer that sets up both Git and MUSHclient for you. You download, unzip, double-click installer.bat, and you’re ready to play.

The soundpack gives you:

F11 and F12 to turn volume up and down.
F10 to switch between volume categories: sound effects, ambiance, and music.
sound off and sound on to disable or enable everything.
sound ambiance, sound music, sound combat, sound weather to toggle individual categories.
sound toggle <keyword> to disable a specific sound you don’t want to hear.
sound print to identify what sound is currently playing, so you know what to toggle off.

That last one matters. If a sound is annoying me, I can find out what it is and turn it off without turning off everything else. That level of granular control is more than most mainstream games offer.

The soundpack also supports custom sounds. Drop a file in the custom sounds folder and it plays when your custom channel receives a message. You can add sounds for community-created channels without modifying the core soundpack.

Under the hood, the soundpack uses MSP, the MUD Sound Protocol. Erion detects when your client supports it and enables it automatically. The protocol triggers sounds based on game events, so the audio feedback is tied to what’s actually happening, not just ambient noise.

Hotkeys That Respect TTS #

The soundpack includes hotkeys that report game state:

F1 reports HP as a percentage.
Shift+F1 reports hitpoints in full.
F2 reports mana as a percentage.
Shift+F2 reports mana in full.
F3 reports experience needed to level.
F7 recalls you to safety.

Here’s the part that shows someone was thinking. F1, F2, Shift+F1, and Shift+F2 all work even when you’ve toggled speech off with the tts command. So I can mute TTS to listen to music or a conversation, and still check my health and mana with a single keypress.

The accelerator keys go further. The soundpack keeps a history of events like channel messages, and you can replay them:

Alt+Left/Right moves between category buffers.
Alt+1 through Alt+0 reads the 1st through 10th latest message in the current buffer.
Alt+Up/Down moves through messages in the current buffer.
Alt+PageUp/PageDown jumps 10 messages at a time.
Alt+Home/End jumps 2000 messages at a time.
Alt+Space repeats the currently selected message.
Alt+Shift+Space copies the selected message to the clipboard.
Alt+Enter opens URLs in the current message.
Pressing a message key twice within half a second copies the message to the clipboard. Three times pastes it into the command window.

This means I can go back and read something I missed without scrolling through the output buffer. The game keeps the history for me, organized by category, and I can navigate it with keystrokes that don’t conflict with NVDA.

This is the feature that made me stay.

runto <area name> automatically walks me to any area from any room. I don’t need to know the path. I don’t need to build a mental map of rooms and exits. I type runto holy grove and my character runs there.

The dirs <area name> command prints out a list of directions to any area from my current position. So if I want to learn the path, I can. But I don’t have to.

stop halts the run if I need to interrupt it. toggle open makes the runner automatically open or unlock doors along the way.

In my earlier gaming post, I said that without a dirs command, I spend more energy trying not to get lost than I do playing the game. Erion has both dirs and runto. Problem solved.

Waypoints let me save locations for fast travel. waypoint save in a waypoint room. waypoint <number> to travel there. waypoint recall to set my recall point. I can build a travel network without ever needing to visualize the world map.

Text That’s Structured for Screen Readers #

Room descriptions, items, mobs, and exits all follow a consistent format that NVDA can parse linearly:

Room name on its own line.
Room description as a paragraph.
Items on the floor with counts in parentheses.
Mobs with level labels: (x1)(Level 13) A doe is here, munching on grass.
Exits in brackets: [Exits: north east south west up]

Nothing is hidden in visual formatting. Nothing requires me to interpret a graphic or parse a table. Everything reads in order.

Commands Designed for Keyboard Efficiency #

Erion has small features that reduce typing and cognitive load, and several of them seem designed with disabled players in mind.

Spells have numbers. showspell magic slash shows me that Magic Slash is spell number 832. I can cast it by typing cast 832 instead of cast 'magic slash'. Shorter, faster, and easier to remember once you learn the numbers.

The autoskill feature automatically executes a skill or spell in combat without repeated typing. The help file says: “Inspired by players concerned about carpal tunnel.” That’s the first time I’ve seen a game acknowledge carpal tunnel in a help file. With RA, not having to type the same spell name every combat round is the difference between playing for an hour and playing for twenty minutes.

The errand system tests game knowledge through multiple choice questions typed as errand solve c. No interactive menu. No visual selection. No timed response. Just a question, four letter options, and a typed answer. I can pull up the relevant help file, read it, and answer at my own pace.

Help files are numbered. help death shows a list of related help topics. help 1.death opens the first one. In screen reader mode, the game writes it as “Help 1 dot death” so my screen reader reads the number correctly instead of skipping the punctuation. I don’t have to guess exact keywords or type long filenames. The number system means I can navigate help files with single digits.

The db command lets me search for equipment without memorizing where anything is. I set preferences and run a search:

db prefs minlevel 40 db prefs maxlevel 50 db prefs slot shield db search

The game returns matching items from across the world. I don’t have to remember which area drops a shield I need. I don’t have to ask other players where to find gear. I search, I see results, I go get it. For a blind player who can’t build a mental map of the world, this is the difference between being self-sufficient and being dependent on sighted players’ knowledge.

A Community That Knows We’re Here #

Erion has a client channel specifically for soundpack and MUSHclient questions. The blind support page on their website has the soundpack download, an installer, update instructions, reset instructions, and troubleshooting. When someone asked on the global channel whether the soundpack was only available for MUSHclient, another player responded with help.

The screen reader help file ends with: “If you use a screen reader and have suggestions for how we can improve the game for you, please let us know by writing an idea note.” They’re not just tolerating blind players. They’re asking for our feedback.

I’ve been in MUDs where accessibility is an afterthought someone mentioned on a forum once. Erion treats it as part of the game.

Why This Matters: A Brief Contrast #

Alter Aeon is the other MUD that comes up when you search for blind-accessible text games. It’s popular in the blind community, and it has a custom MUSHclient soundpack called Mush-Z. On paper, it should work for me. It doesn’t.

Alter Aeon has no runto or dirs command. Navigation is manual. You walk room by room, or you use a movement pad that maps Alt+I to north, Alt+K to south, and so on. But knowing which direction to go is the whole problem. With topographical agnosia, I can’t build a mental map of rooms I’ve been through. A movement pad gives me a faster way to type directions I don’t know.

The Mush-Z soundpack turns Alter Aeon into something closer to an audiogame. Health is communicated through heartbeat sounds that speed up as you take damage. Mana, movement, and experience have audio prompts that replace text. Battle music changes based on your health or your enemy’s health. There are death quote voiceovers and condition alert sounds. For some blind players, this works. For me, it’s sensory overload. I can’t process that much audio information at once, and I can’t read the text when the soundpack is filtering it out.

There’s no equipment database search. If I want to find a piece of gear, I either remember where I last saw it, or I ask other players. In a game with thousands of items spread across hundreds of areas, that’s not a minor inconvenience. It’s a wall.

Mapping in Mush-Z works by recording your directions in a notepad window as you walk. You can copy those directions later to create speedwalk aliases. That’s a manual workaround for a problem Erion solves with runto. It assumes I can explore without getting lost first.

I’m not saying Alter Aeon is bad. It has a dedicated blind community, and Mush-Z is a serious piece of work. But it was built for blind players who navigate by audio and can build spatial memory from repeated exploration. I can’t do either of those things. Erion was built for someone like me: blind, yes, but also disabled in ways that make audio navigation and spatial memory unreliable. The difference is that Erion didn’t assume one kind of blindness.

What Other MUDs Could Learn #

Most MUDs are technically accessible because they’re text-based. A screen reader can read the output. But “technically accessible” and “actually playable” are different things, and the distance between them is where multiply disabled players fall through.

Erion closes that distance with features that aren’t complicated:

A screen reader mode that changes how the game sends information.
Pathfinding that doesn’t require spatial reasoning.
Equipment search so you don’t have to memorize the world.
A soundpack with granular volume control and an installer.
Hotkeys that work when TTS is off, plus message history you can replay.
Commands that reduce typing for players with joint issues.
Help files and answers that don’t require timing or visual navigation.
Punctuation replaced with words so screen readers don’t miss instructions.

None of these features are hard to implement. Most MUDs already have the text infrastructure. What Erion has that others don’t is the awareness that blind and disabled players exist, and the willingness to build for us instead of waiting for us to figure it out.

I’ve been playing for two days. My character is a Spark Mage/Witch following Aura, the goddess of change, magic, and alchemy. I’m mining ore in the Holy Grove, running errands for the Quest Mistress, and exploring a world I can actually navigate.

For the first time in a MUD, I’m playing the game instead of fighting it.

Screen Reader Mode That Actually Changes Things #