[camlorn]

Did someone remove my post? Lol, I wrote a miniature essay on this subject, but I guess it failed to post or something. Anyhow, the highlights:
-almost no one uses speech dictation.
-Vipmud is becoming the most popular client for the blind, is non-free, and I hate it. Mushclient is 100% accessible but most blind people have trouble with it for some reason.
-There are 4 windows screen readers that are prominent: Jaws, Window-Eyes, Hal, and NVDA. Only the last is free. NVDA is gaining in popularity, and I recently switched from Jaws after 10 years. Screen reader doesn't matter to the mud designer, except that someone could test using NVDA because it's, like, free. NVDA works only with Mushclient atm, without some groundwork, and the plugin is called Mushreader.
-The mud clients are calling the screen readers directly via a bridge, which is different for each screen reader. The screen readers have no way of telling that the mud output window is special and don't automatically read it. The bridging API, built into VipMud and accessed via a plugin in Mushclient, fixes this.
-The screen readers speak insanely fast. I've not heard of anyone using braille for mudding. Recording myself mudding is on my to do list, so that I can point at just how fast it really is.
-Depending on skill level, aliases and triggers can be involved. I personally only use one: it assigns a prompt (the most recent line to begin with status: ) to a variable, hiding it from normal output, and making it readable with a hotkey. Others use more or less.
-If you provide telnet access, you're probably at least marginally accessible. Web clients can be made accessible, but no one's actually done this yet, except for Bedlam's which works only with windows 8 narrator. This would be interesting, because various solutions exist on the web to problems posed by ascii art, mainly using html tables for the same information and words instead of symbols. This would only work for smallish maps, 5x5 at the most.
-Ascii art is bad.