[camlorn]

But, Ide. Here's the point. Out of those 1.3 million people who can't read newsprint, I'd say over half probably can't read mmorpg chat logs either--so let's say 500000, for simplicity.

Of those 500000, let's say 300000 use screen magnification--you don't need to modify your mud for this. They still can't play graphical mmorpgs, but as for the modification of a mud, it's not needed.

But the remaining 200000 or so would need modifications--they'd be using jaws or the like.

But, of course, those are large numbers and they're not accurate, until you take into account the following which shrink them:

1) Many of them are older people with no interest in learning the computer.
2) A whole group is probably young children.
3) A whole group is probably blind as a symptom of something else, like mental or motor problems.
4) A group of those with no one competent to teach them the computer (I fell into this--I'm actually 100% self-taught): many school systems and the like don't have someone who knows assistive technology at all.
5) Then of course, the group that's not interested.

I'd say if someone targeted the blind community and made an actual large effort to inform people, you could get 5 or 10 thousand--the problem is reaching the whole demographic. I'm talking, like, speaking at conferences here, and the like, as well as posting on blind-only mailing lists and similar. It'd be a really, really large effort, obviously. You'd spend more time targeting the blind community than writing your game and would probably be doing it for all games in general, but there's my thought.

Of the above statistics, I'd say 50000 are "potential" mud players--they don't have the alternative of mmorpgs and they have the computer and typing skills to make it work. But the 5-10 thousand grouping is probably more accurate as an underlying wish to play muds as opposed to, say, going outside needs to be present, and you can't exactly just give someone that desire.

One final point. Of those 5-10 thousand potentials, many of them probably don't know about the blind communities on the internet--you kind of have to explicitly be looking for this kind of thing. It doesn't jump out of google, as it were--if you're not searching for blindness specifically, you'll never find it.

Finally, I'm probably being very optimistic. But I'd say 240 blind players is really rather small--with the clusters of alter aeon, star conquest, and miriani, the community is already close to that if not over. There's no accurate way, basically, to come up with either of these numbers.