Re: Roguelike Radio ep on designing for VI
The thing is, and I'm not sure why we haven't really seen this, we could make accessible front-ends. The entry barrier to playing a Roguelike as a blind person is high, exceptionally so. I have not managed it myself, despite trying. Even so, I'm surprised no one has tried to stick something on it-even an easier method of examining the map would be a major jump forward, at the least. Perhaps I will at some point. If the map is very regular, it might be possible to capture stdout and feed it to a terminal emulator that can get everything into a hugely big array, and then read stuff off from it, or just use regexps. If the roguelike is open source, you could just replace the displaying functions or something. idk.
If I were to give any advice to a roguelike dev, I'd say this: you've got the code, and making a talking front-end isn't so hard as all that for this type of thing. Not at all really. An invi
sible map examination cursor and pushing text to the screen reader are the big ones. The latter is necessary because, if you're printing to the console and providing a front-end through same, we're probably going to want to let your game handle all speaking for us. The rest is just added stuff. Keystrokes to speak important info are a plus, but not necessarily needed. there is at least one C/C++ screen reader speech API that abstracts the problem of which one is running, at least one of the same in Python, and actually writing your own is under 100 lines.
Does anyone know how well-formatted Nethack output is? That might be a place to start on a project like this. I've heard Nethack described as a game of exceptions rather than rules, but so long as it isn't in terms of displaying, it might be workable.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.ph p?pid=165677#p165677
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com http://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
