Wilderness travel and directions

[Xandrea]

I've found that traveling in the wilderness without the compass can be massively disorienting. You cannot tell if you're next to a mountain because room descriptions will not mention surrounding tiles. You cannot peer at H tiles. Thus if you cannot 'see' the compass you cannot know you're next to mountains unless you're constantly probing and trying to walk into them. Which could be frustrating for screenreaders. Sure they can eventually learn the pathing through trial and error but, that's not very fun is it?

If there was some description of obstructive land (Such as tall mountains) or rivers (impassible) then some descriptor of sorts would be nice.

A mountain range looms from the east, Southeast.etc
A river runs along the West vertically
A river runs along the northeast diagonally

It might indeed bulk up the text but, since wilderness descriptions are auto-generated I don't feel this is much of a problem.

Then we could say follow the river North and instead of knowing it's flow from only the exit directions there would be a quick, short description saying where it is and even better if we can tell which direction the river's flowing! When using the compass to navigate it's easy to distinctify these tiles but, not when you cannot navigate via compass. I'd be willing to even describe each of these tiles myself if I had to.

This isn't only about following impassable rivers and mountains. Being able to tell if you're in the forest beside a plain and vice versa can be a powerful thing for giving someone unique directions where no roads go or if they're off a beaten path, "Walk the roads out to the Abandoned Village Eastwards. Once you clear the village keep on the road eight leagues and skirt the forest just besides the plains and walk alongside that forest until it's directly infront of your path Eastwards. Push through until you find a river flowing South, then follow the river north." This isn't an exact instruction you can follow in game. (Mostly because I didn't make it fully accurate to reaching Blackwater. It's just an example.)

[Rias]

Expanding the wilderness auto-descriptions to describe nearby terrain and such is a good idea, as long as it doesn't get too crazy long. Hmmm. I could have sworn I had rivers mentioned already, but it looks like not. ... oh, I see where I broke it. I'll fix that.