TriadCity

TriadCity is a city made of words: an interactive literary world in continuous composition since 1998. Because the world is made of language, screen readers are the native way to play. TriadCity has become something rare: a virtual world where roughly 80% of players are blind or visually impaired, participating on fully equal terms with sighted players. It has been free to everyone, blind and sighted alike, for its entire history.

The work's literary foundation is recognized in university courses on digital narrative and in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press), which cites TriadCity as an example of emerging literary forms. Roughly a quarter of the world is contributed by participants themselves, a fact which points to what we're building next. The existing tools for writing in this medium were built for sighted authors and aren't accessible. Today, none of our authors are blind. Our funded initiatives will change this. We'll develop accessible, screen-reader-native authoring tools, plus training and mentorship for blind authors. Contributions and grant funding support this work, including the infrastructure that keeps the city running, and our commitment to keeping TriadCity free for all.

TriadCity is created by SmartMonsters, Inc., a two-person independent studio that has sustained the project for more than twenty-five years.