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[Dirst]

Sadly, even if a cheaper display were available, you need a screen reader to  interface with them, typically. The way most of them do it is braille what's spoken, with custom support for special cases sometimes. It's more trouble than it's worth I'm afraid.

That being said, I'm intrigued by your secretiveness, mifki. I wish you every success with whatever this project is.

Yeah, mifki had a strange mood that produced the Text Will Be Text plug-in, and is now a Legendary Understater.

Given the expense of Braille boards, it's not feasible to stack a bunch of them to depict the map.  But one could still be an indicator independent of the reader.  Something like continual display of the cursor's coordinates, or some status toggles, or the title of the current screen.  A real attempt at an interface for the blind should not depend on specific specialized hardware... but there's no point in ignoring it if it's there.

[dwarf_reform]

I hope that this succeeds! I'm no coder and have already been mind-blown by trying to imagine true blindness and how that changes the ways you interact with things.. Concepts like color perception.. anyway! I thought I'd link this here, just for its informative value (plus the guy is awesome..): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCld5SlwHrXgAYRE83WJOPCw?spfreload=10 A link to his youtube channel..

Through my mostly useless brainstorming on the concept of playing a game with no visuals I've started to think of an all-audio game.. It'd be a roguelike, of course, with randomized equipment, monsters, quests and map gen and character building.. You would start out in the center of a 3x3 grid with the option to travel in any cardinal direction (some could be blocked occasionally as well, depending on location), and as you walk new areas are created and areas outside the 3x3 grid are 'unloaded', so you can never go back, but you're also never lost.. New towns would generate (they'd be a randomized name plus shops and quest givers) and quests would reward on completion so you wouldn't have to return to town, dungeons would teleport you out on completion..

The basic idea is to add plenty of mini-events that have good, bad, and neutral outcomes to influence which direction you travel, like hearing a rustle in the woods that may be a hidden enemy, or nothing, or a friendly NPC or quest-giver hiding in a bush.. Or seeing the glow of a campfire could lead to a recently-vacated campsite to rest at, or a merchant or other traveler, or a group of scruffy goblins standing over a couple dead humans) Each feature that would normally use a UI (equipment, stats page, level-up page) would have a very clear and easily accessible audio help command that quickly details the available options..

And then imagine integrating a Dwarf Fortress-clone combat targeting system..

Patrick Stewart or Micheal Caine can do all the voice acting.. Just imagine Jean Luc Picard saying, "You slash the giant swamp leech in the body with your elemental serrated broadsword of plasma +14 and the part disintegrates. Your foe falls and the battle is over. You gain seventy-three experience points and need two hundred and seven to advance. Your skill with broadswords grows and you feel more competent."

Is there anything like this out there already, roguelike or otherwise? And if not, then why not? Its no more complex than interactive 'choose your path' books, just out with text and in with spoken word (and a focus shift away from storytelling and towards loot/level-ups/monster-killing).. If ascii graphics are attractive to devs for their ease of use and simplicity, then what is there to say about no graphics?

I don't want this post derailing the glorious goal of this thread at all, though, just wanted to throw the idea out there in hopes that it may inspire someone who has the power to create it (and without starting an odd thread about an all-audio game out of nowhere)

[My Urist Eternal]

Some of these more complex ideas sound great, but I suspect zkline would be pleased to have a simple mod that just used the Mac's VoiceOver feature to read off what was on the tile. It's not the best solution but it seems like it would get him started and also give him the ability to provide feedback on what works and what doesn't, what is useful and what isn't.

[zkline]

Yes, exactly. I'd love to start with a simple solution and work upwards from there if needed.

The problem right now is that the interface isn't really useable for me. I would love to see the text mode implemented in OS X, perhaps, or at least a way to get started on the world generation and embark process. I feel like starting  simple is probably more practical anyway. We can always build up.

[My Urist Eternal]

It seems to me that if DFHack/VoiceOver combined could read aloud what was on the menus and whatever is revealed by K on the map tiles, that it would be enough for you to go in and start fooling around with the game. It would be crude but it would work. And then, once you got an understanding of how things are laid out, you'd be in a much better position to start suggesting better, more workable solutions.

EDIT: As far as embarking goes, it would be easier for one of us to create and send you a nice 1x1 embark to start with. Later on we could think about how to set things up so you can do your own embarks. But I suggest keeping everything dead simple for phase 1.

[Button]

I think the most basic version would also require a way to read out what screen you're "looking" at, too. (For main screen, it should say the Z level you're on). Also, the menu reading should have two modes: one which reads everything, and one which reads only what's selected. And there needs to be a quick and dirty way to see if you're paused or unpaused, because yeah.

How moddable/expandable is the logging on DF? SoundSense already plays sounds based on log events - would it be possible to log the user's keypresses or the text on the screen? That would make a basic version trivial to implement as a SoundSense pack.


The vanilla Hotkey system seems like it would be a boon for blind players, and expanding it could be extremely helpful.

The existing DFHack prospect tool could also be very useful, if you added ways to filter what you're looking for to avoid information overload. An interactive prospect tool could let you select the e.g. ore you're looking for and zoom to it.

[BoredVirulence]

This is an interesting problem...
I'm going to ignore a lot of problems, and assume some solutions have been found. Lets assume we have a utility to print the map, contextual game information about each tile may or may not be imported, and its implementation shall remain abstract.

There is a serious problem about how to, in as few words as possible, describe the scene. If we could provide a description of the scene, we could automatically create points of interest, which is very much what our eyes do, skim through the details. What about something like a 2D regular expression engine? What I mean is a way to define 2D shapes that can quickly be searched through the map, and match to specific phenomenon. Workshops and multi-tile buildings are a good example, geographic instances such as rivers or more complexly, hill slopes and canyons. Instead of playing a tone or saying "grass" for each tile just to express the map, we could have a few words spoken about that hill, those goblins, the bridge, and that forge. It wouldn't negate the need to vocalize tiles with the look command, but it would reduce the tedium involved with painting the scene.

There are details to argue about, such as having different "views" for the vocalization of the scene. Maybe a geographic oriented "view" that specifies all geographic phenomenon in explicit detail, such as shape of the hill, height, distance from other hills, distance from cursor, angles involved, material covered in, etc...
"There is a hill covered in grass approximately 30 tiles northwest of the cursor. It is 8 tiles high. It is 20 tiles south of a canyon that runs east-west The canyon is approximately 55 tiles north of the cursor."
A threat or unit view that generalizes groups of units, their general location from the cursor, their general location from nearby units or groups of units...
"There is a pack of wolves approximately 90 tiles east of the cursor. The pack of wolves is 15 tiles north of a sheep. The nearest dwarf is 120 tiles northwest of the pack of wolves."
There could be other "views," even a general view that tries to stitch together details from all of the views. Maybe even levels of detail. And I think it would be very important if each pattern were parameterized and named when a view is vocalized, and their "name" could be used in conjunction with some menu/hotkey to move the cursor between them. Maybe even an option to save the "name," because it might not be saved when a view is vocalized again. That way we could easily switch back and forth between our militia and the invading goblin squad, or quickly switch between workshops and that hill you're building a tower on.
Another useful feature would be flood functions. Its annoying to find the whole in a wall you thought secure when you can see. It would be useful if we could perhaps set to flood markers, and see if they can touch each other, as well as trace the route between them. That way you could set a marker outside your wall, and inside your wall, lock up, and see if there is a path. If a path were found, it would be vocalized, and there would be an option to trace along it. Perhaps, for the sake of geo-spatial recollection, the tracing function would force the cursor to stay on its path while tracing, but would allow the user to use the number pad to manually trace, having a tone for a successful trace, and a tone for choosing a wrong direction. In addition we could have a similar feature allowing you to "look" at the surrounding tiles without tracing (or failing to trace) there.
Example: A marker is set outdoors, a marker is set indoors. The pathing function states there is a path.

Example continued: Curious where the path is, the player uses a hotkey, and the tracing function begins. Using '.' it traces to the next tile, using any of the 9 keys on the number pad, it attempts to trace in that direction. The player hits '8' repeatedly taking the cursor north (towards the entrance) until it fails to trace north. Curious about whats in the way, the player "looks north" with alt+8, and sees a tree has sprung up in the walk way. The player, not caring about it at the moment hits '.' to skip past the tree, then continues north with '8'. Eventually the path veers to the west, until after 9 tiles west from where the path veered. a diagonal path is found through the wall.

[eccentric]

Unfortunately, yes, sound does suffer from that limitation. Somebody mentioned an interactive fiction-style interface in the original thread, I don't know if it was mostly intended as a joke. Text overviews of what can be seen are another way to go, I suppose.

I suggested an interactive fiction style in the original thread. It's a long term goal.

I do have a suggestion for a possible quick fix if you're up for it.

As discussed before OSX can't play DF in TEXT mode but you still can sort of. The idea is to remote login to DF running TEXT mode in a tmux session on a linux box. Hopefully VoiceOver can read terminal. Setting this up might take some time depending on you computer skill level.

tmux it's a terminal multiplexer enabling a number of terminals to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen. tmux may be detached from a screen and continue running in the background, then later reattached. But tmux more than create a persistent DF game in TEXT mode to access on your mac.

tmux allows multiple clients access the same session viewing the same output and interact in real-time. This will allow collaborative games to be played. In addition to a fun game with multiple human player clients. A non-human client can connect to session to screen scrape data to assist game play.

The long term interactive fiction idea is possible if you are scraping data already. Counting the number of leaves/tree trunks, ore, gems, workshop, natural formations, characters, creatures and be able to put a description together based on % and location of those tiles on screen.

Non-human clients can send inputs too. Putting together a more verbose description than you'd expect.

Take an example starting fort. The computer client moves up and down a few z-levels sees the trees are in fall colors and see they are pears and cherry. Scans back and forth with look noting which dwarves are on screen, references the units list for their current job. A quick check the status screen for the date/stats and you have a story if you fill in the gaps.

Composed it's something like this; It's Mid-Autumn on the 11th of Sandstone in the year 250. Two groundhogs are in the North under the dense cluster of pear and cherries trees which are in in their full autumn colors. Fath the Miner is sitting idle while Onol the Carpenter is in her workshop making barrels. Tun, Fikod, and Uutok are busy storing items. The Broker, Zasit prepares so see off the caravan before the winter closes trade routes. But all is well in Shootdabbled because food and drink stores are strong.

That's a long term goal for now lets see if VoiceOver plays nice with terminals. First is setting up the linux box. If anyone has a server they can setup DF on that would be awesome. Otherwise it's a virtual machine on mac or possible installing linux or running it off a liveUSB install from a old PC.

After thinking more there are probably better ways to do all that. This wouldn't be a bad first step.

[zkline]

That sounds intriguing at least. VoiceOver can read Terminal well enough. I haven't touched Linux in quite a while… if anybody else is up for setting up a server I'd be much obliged. I think there was already something like that over ssh, maybe using a custom hack of Gamelaunch? I can't find the thread this early in the morning.

[Scoops Novel]

So what can be done first? Don't want Zkline to wait another three years before anything happens

[AernJardos]

I used to play Achaea, a MUD (completely text based game), a few years back and I know several people that had incredibly well-known characters are blind. The reason I mention this, is because the Wilderness maps look and act basically like the DF world map. I remember when seafaring was introduced a person was complaining about the waves ^^~~~^^ yelling at him. The combat is also very complex, real-time, no pauses, PvE and PvP. Tanris used to be insanely good, top headhunter if I recall correctly. Sailing is also impressive, as it involves navigating a changing maze of waves, that read like DF (ASCII style).

I thought I recalled a discussion on the programs used, but it has been seven years or so, so it's going to take me a while to see if I can find it again (no promises). Regardless, the fact that it can be done might be a starting point at least. Lusternia and Imperium, also made by Iron Realms, similarly have visually impaired folk who play them. Best of luck to you.

[smeeprocket]

I used to be a god in Achaea. I wouldn't recommend the IRE games since Jeremy took over though.

One of the other gods was blind actually. You need a reader, they are not cheap. But it works because the text can be read. I can't think of a way to make it work with an ASCII game.

[zkline]

I've played IRE games off and on before, never had a lot of interest in going long term, but I know they are popular among a certain set of bind people.

As far as ASCII games go, I've had great success playing NetHack, Adom, and other rogue-likes with screen readers. I think the basic principle is sound. The pausable realtime nature of DF makes things harder as we've seen, but…

Has anybody been able to set up a lInux server by any chance? I can at least try that in text mode and see what happens.

[smeeprocket]

The IRE games are, imo, the best of the MUDs I have played. I say that will minimal fond memories after leaving, and while advising people avoid them.

Achaea is particularly toxic. We had a blind player (incidentally) who three known griefers plotted to rape IRL. The producer merely gave them a stern talking to instead of, you know, deleting their characters and banning their IPs and reporting them to the police. People overheard this stuff too, and though later some of them went to the blind player and apologized because they heard it, they never spoke out publicly about it. That was the kind of behavior in Achaea. There were a lot of players I liked interacting with, but there were also a lot of bad apples.

I played Aetolia and Lusternia for awhile. I loved Aetolia, but the population is small, and getting a functional "system" is almost impossible. People want you to pay money for absolute garbage when you are used to the systems available in Achaea.

Lusternia's problem was that there were only a few select ways to steal, and everyone acted like it was griefing. I love playing a thief, that's my thing. I'll ransom most stuff back to people, I just want to steal and be hunted. Plus, the system for handling cause facilitated pvp less than the mark system from achaea, which I found preferable. Population, ability to steal, and mark system were the highlights of achaea and the only redeemable factors imo.

[dwarf_reform]

http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=8042.0 Thought I'd leave this here.. A post from the CataclysmDDA forums about a MUD game called Infected, which specifically mentions that it was made with limited-sight usability in mind Figured I'd throw it out there, in case it sounded appealing and you hadn't heard of it..