Accessibility

You can play wopr without colour, without motion, and without waiting for text to appear one character at a time. Its tests check every game’s screens for the points below.

Meaning in characters, not just colour

Everything that colour shows is also in the characters. So nothing is lost in a terminal without colour, or with NO_COLOR set:

• On Global Thermonuclear War’s big board, outgoing missiles are +, incoming missiles are *, and impacts are X. A > points at the current DEFCON level.
• Every card shows its suit letter (7H is the seven of hearts), and the card that is winning a trick is edged .===..
• Gin Rummy names your melds by their positions in your hand.
• Chess and checkers mark the last move with brackets.

Set NO_COLOR (to any value but an empty one) to turn colour off. Every theme then uses bold, dim, underline and reverse instead.

Reduced motion

--reduce-motion (-r, or WOPR_REDUCE_MOTION=1) does three things:

• It stops the cursor and DEFCON 1 from blinking.
• It holds the front panel’s lights and the PROCESSING dots still.
• It keeps the ending at a steady pace, instead of letting it get faster.

The typing and the animations still play. Add --instant to skip them. With or without either option, nothing ever flashes more than three times a second.

Instant text

--instant (-i, or WOPR_INSTANT=1) shows each line at once, instead of one character at a time. It also draws each strike on the big board at once, and it skips the ending’s self-play and scrolling scenarios. Without it, any key shows the rest of the line that WOPR is typing, and what you type is kept.

Plain text

• Everything on screen is plain ASCII.
• Every prompt with words ends with a question mark or a colon, and the cursor sits at the end of the line you are typing.
• WOPR’s conversation, as in the film, has no prompt text: what WOPR said last is the question. After a list, such as HELP or LIST GAMES, the list’s last line comes just before the empty prompt.
• WOPR writes its moves in words, as well as drawing them on the boards (WOPR: D7D5).
• In Hearts and Bridge, the console says which cards are already in the trick before you play (WEST LEADS 7H. NORTH PLAYS KH.).

Contrast

In every theme’s full colours, text meets the WCAG AA contrast ratio of 4.5:1 against the background. Text that is dim on purpose meets 3:1. In 16-colour terminals, every style keeps at least 3:1 on xterm’s standard palette.

Screen readers

Nobody has tried the full-screen interface with a screen reader yet. Reports are welcome. The printing options (--help, --games, --scenes, --licenses) write plain text, and they work anywhere.