client
VIP Mud
A commercial Windows client built for blind players from the ground up. It names seven screen readers — and publishes almost nothing about its protocol support.
https://www.gmagames.com/vipmud.shtml · Windows
Capabilities
3 of 10 established from the project's own documentation
Read off each project's own documentation, not measured by us — a client has no handshake for us to observe. "unknown" means we looked and did not establish it. It never means no.
| capability | documented | source |
|---|---|---|
| screen reader | yes | www.gmagames.com |
| TLS | unknown | we did not find one |
| UTF-8 | unknown | we did not find one |
| MCCP | unknown | we did not find one |
| GMCP | unknown | we did not find one |
| MSDP | unknown | we did not find one |
| ATCP | unknown | we did not find one |
| MXP | unknown | we did not find one |
| MSP | yes | www.gmagames.com |
| scripting | yes | www.gmagames.com |
VIP Mud is the one client in this section whose entire design premise is accessibility. It is commercial — thirty dollars, with a thirty-day full trial after which it keeps working with a reduced feature set — and it is a Windows program.
It is the strongest accessibility claim here by a distance, and unusually it is specific. The product page names JAWS, Window-Eyes, System Access, NVDA, Cobra, SuperNova/Hal and Microsoft SAPI as working out of the box, and describes features that only make sense if you have thought hard about the problem: different voices per window and per output type, gagging spam from speech while still showing it, and several methods of suppressing ASCII art — which is the single most hostile thing a MUD sends to a screen reader.
Why the rest of the table is empty
Because the vendor publishes a marketing page and not a manual. Nothing on it mentions GMCP, MSDP, MCCP, MXP, ATCP, TLS or character encoding; it describes the product as "a Telnet-based client" and leaves it there. Nine unknowns in a row is not a verdict on the software. It is what a matrix looks like when the only available source is one page, and publishing it as nine noes would be a lie about a product that may well do all of it.
Two further things we could not establish: any release date for the current version, and whether it is still under active development — the vendor was acquired in February 2025, and the product page carries a 2016 copyright.