Hi everyone and Thanks for the great Experiences i could enjoy in the closed Beta Phase !!!
With Early Access approaching, I would like to share some suggestions from my perspective as a visually impaired player from the Beta Phase.

I used to be sighted. Today, I can no longer see as I once did, but I still want to play and share adventures with friends. This experience has led me to volunteer my time helping develop accessibility solutions—initially to overcome barriers I encountered myself, but also to make those solutions useful to others.
First, a heartfelt thank you for including autofollow. For someone with limited sight, this is an important accessibility feature. It helps us stay with friends and participate in a shared adventure.
That matters especially in a game called Monsters & Memories. Some of the players who made wonderful memories in EverQuest and EverQuest II now have reduced vision or other accessibility needs. We have grown older, but the wish to explore and spend time with friends has not disappeared.
My aim is not to change MM’s character or remove the need for exploration. It is to suggest a few foundations that could help more people participate.

Chat narration: the most important foundation
An optional chat narrator would make an enormous difference. It would provide access to conversations, group coordination, and social participation. NPC dialogue appearing in chat could also be heard instead of having to be read visually.
As a volunteer, I have contributed to accessibility work on Sku for WoW Classic and FCO Accessibility for The Elder Scrolls Online. Seeing that work help others, and receiving positive feedback, encouraged me to keep looking for practical solutions. I do not speak on behalf of all visually impaired players; these suggestions come from my own experience and contributions.
Those projects illustrate what becomes possible when speech output and useful game information are available. Sku combines spoken information with coordinate-based waypoint and navigation tools. FCO Accessibility uses ESO’s chat narration and provides spoken information about compass elements. Their implementations differ, and I am not asking MM to reproduce their broader navigation systems. They are examples of foundations that allow community contributors to build accessibility solutions. Sku documentation, FCO Accessibility.
In my experience, chat narration was a crucial building block for this work. Combined with supported interfaces, it can enable more individualized assistance for different needs.
Supporting existing screenreaders could be another route. Diablo IV is an interesting technical reference: its launch accessibility announcement described both built-in narration and support for NVDA, JAWS, and other third-party screenreaders. These are features of the game itself; I did not contribute to their development. Blizzard’s accessibility overview.
For MM, passing chat text to a player’s existing screenreader could be an alternative to building a dedicated narrator. Many blind players already have their preferred voice, speed, and reading setup. This would still require integration work, but could let players use familiar assistive software rather than depend on one particular narration system.
Whichever approach is chosen, selectable channels, adjustable speech settings, a repeat command, and a shortcut to stop speech and clear queued messages would be particularly helpful. More speech is not always better: players need control over what they hear.
Optional chat logging as an additional route
Could chat optionally be written to a local text log, including NPC dialogue?
A community accessibility tool could monitor that file and pass new messages to a screenreader. This would require additional software, rather than work automatically with every screenreader, but it could provide a useful starting point without requiring a complete in-game narration system.
Logging should be optional because conversations can contain private information.
A deliberately limited, on-demand location command
I understand that a general map with live positioning and tracking is not the experience MM is aiming for. I respect that design choice.
My suggestion is much narrower: a command such as /loc that reports only my own current position as text when I request it. Even horizontal coordinates without elevation could help.
A friend could request their own position too, and we could share the results to estimate how to move toward one another. Once we meet, autofollow already helps us continue together.
For a blind player, “I’m beside that tree” or “come toward the building you can see” may not be usable directions. A limited location output could provide another way to communicate without introducing a live map, automatic tracking, or route guidance.
It would still require active participation: requesting our positions, communicating, comparing them, and moving ourselves. It would not tell us how to avoid obstacles or replace exploration. It would simply make meeting friends a little more accessible.
MM already has an in-world way to find north through a spell, so I am not asking for an additional compass or heading readout.
An optional idea: accessibility that belongs within the world
Perhaps some future accessibility assistance could follow that same world-fitting approach.
For example, a spell might help a player sense the direction of a consenting friend, or an already known settlement. These are only creative ideas for discussion—not requests for unrestricted tracking, revealing undiscovered places, or automatic travel.
If making such assistance generally available would conflict with the intended experience, perhaps players who need it could discuss suitable options with support. Ideally, this would remain straightforward and respectful of privacy, without requiring medical records.
I would welcome your thoughts on whether something like this could fit MM’s design. Accessibility does not necessarily have to feel separate from the world. Thoughtfully designed, it could preserve the sense of adventure while allowing someone who cannot use visual landmarks to participate. It could also become a positive example of MM finding its own creative approach to inclusion.
Keeping the shared experience open
Article 30 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities expresses the goal of being able to:
“participate on an equal basis with others in recreational, leisure and sporting activities”
Integration of a Mode for reduced Transparency or high Contrast in the Hud where possible
This would help some Eyes and Blind Users Screenreaders like NVDA and JAWS aswell
.But also thank you very much for not using hand written Fonts or other style elements in yout game. This made things way easier for me. Other Games tend to use very nice and lore fitting Fonts which are therefore not easy to read by poor Eyes or detect by a Accessability Screenreader! 🙂

I mention this as a principle of inclusion, not as a legal demand. Being able to spend leisure time with friends matters. United Nations, Article 30(5).
I cannot judge the implementation effort from outside the project. My hope is that these focused building blocks could enable a great deal without requiring your team to build a complete accessibility system all at once. Chat narration—or a supported way to pass chat to an existing screenreader—would be my strongest priority.
I would gladly contribute my experience from those addon projects, concrete examples, and practical testing to help find solutions that fit MM’s intended experience.
Thank you for considering these suggestions, and especially for including autofollow. For me, this is about continuing something I have loved for years: sharing adventures with friends. From my own experience, I believe these foundations could also help others facing similar barriers—so that losing sight does not have to mean losing the chance to make new Monsters & Memories together.

My huge thanks and kind regards to the Devellopers and the Community aswell as my offer for assistance if wanted!

Philip