Bay 12 Games Forum

100 votes is not that bad of a start.

This post is written with most punctuation missing because screen readers are imperfect  to put it politely.
I have been slowly reading through this entire thread since your last post bumped it on the forums.  Thank you for bumping it.

I don't have the solution for you  but I wanted to join the conversation.  First  I will give you my background information.

When I was a teen  one of my best friends was a 30 something year old man who had lost his sight and much of his dominant right side function in a car accident 15 years prior.  In 1988 or 89  he bought an IBM XT clone computer running DOS 2 and running a screen reader named Arctic.  Arctic was full of weird quirks.  My friend could not find a text editor which was useable for him  so I wrote a text editor program which specifically interfaced with Arctic.  It looked like trash to anyone who saw it on the screen  but it was perfect for him to write letters.  I had to spell some words on screen in a specific phonetic way so that Arctic would speak correctly to him.  When his monitor died  it was like I too was now blind.  I did not own my own computer yet.  I wrote utilities on his computer which would beep at me in certain patterns to tell me what I needed to know by interpretation.  During that time  I also learned to finger read Grade 1 braille, and bits of Grade 2 braille.  With that background  you can see that I have perhaps a useful perspective and interest in this thread.

The biggest challenge I see with this project idea for an interface for the blind user  is really the same issue as for the Dwarf Fortress interface in general.  The issue is that the game interface is incomplete.  It is massively inconsistent in implementation at this time.  Toady has stated that he does not intend to put significant effort into reworking the interface until some distant future time.  In the mean time  I wonder whether your interests are better served by focusing on some smaller subset of the interface.  Specifically  I wonder if outputting the map information would work well enough for you to play?  Does your screen reader allow you to navigate most of the menus without much trouble?  I ask these questions because my limited understanding is that d f hack provides access to almost all of the necessary raw information from the map.  Stone sense pulls enough detail from d f hack to recreate the map display in 3 d.  I think there is enough raw data available from d f hack so that a program could pull from it and then output audio information in various ways.

The second challenge I see with this project idea is finding someone capable and available enough to dig into building on top of d f hack and perhaps using the Stone sense code as a starting point.

The third challenge I see is developing the actual auralizer and it's algorithms which includes deciding how to represent specific components on the map  as well as the whole new concept of how to condense the mass of information into more useful audio chunks.  Perhaps HungryHobo could provide some reference links to the auralizers he mentioned?  I could not find any links  but I am familiar with a network traffic auralizer which converts various network activity into certain animal sounds  so that it sounds like a rain forest.

After this sentence  I complete my post by listing a few web links for reference  in no particular order.
Wikipedia article on Braille
Wikipedia list of screen readers
Disabled World list of screen readers
Research on the converse concept of converting speech sounds to visual animations
Converting a printed picture of a gramophone record into audio
Peep the Network Auralizer
Stonesense forum thread
Stonesense source code

I've kept this page open as a tab since I first found it.  I'm really surprised the poll hasn't received more love.

Cool. I think if we find and annotate the general things it makes sense to annotate, ....

Nameless Archon is just about to wrap up his 24-hour marathon.  Are you planning to start a thread for the annotation, or shall I?

He hopes to have the first parts on youtube perhaps on Sunday evening.

Edit:  I plan to begin working this morning on the basic text for his pre-embark video from last night, based on the twitch video.

Hmm, here is another, similar, announcement:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=145051

Just over 3 hours to go!

(Unfortunately, I must sleep during the day, so after the first hour or two, I will out on the miss the live aspect until later this evening.)

Quote from: Andres on October 23, 2014, 07:02:37 pm

Granted. It kills your pet dog instead of you.

I wish El'laborator's dog had a better master that actually loved it and didn't kill it by feeding themselves instantly lethal pie.

Granted.  Andres now owns a dead dog.  I wish to be granted, without corruption, a second wish.

Granted.  You wasted a wish!  I wish to laugh, healthily.

I work at a board game store in the Pacific Northwest near Redmond and we're doing a 24 hour board game marathon for Extra Life. I am going to see if we can get this running on one of our TV's for the event. Thanks for the info!

Cool!  What game(s) are you playing?  Do you want to post info here about your broadcast?