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1

Programming / Re: Creating an interface for blind players to play rogue like games

« on: December 02, 2015, 10:05:30 PM »

Greetings,
firstly I truly apologize if I dehonested someone's work. I didn't know about possibilities which you are talking about and I will certainly investigate. I thought that all games are similar to nethack/angband/zangband.
Now I am a bit confused. Is there any comprehensive list of rogue like games with some, categorized by type/interface/...
I see that I should explore more before creating something.
Thanks for valuable information.
Best regards,
Vojta

2

Programming / Creating an interface for blind players to play rogue like games

« on: November 24, 2015, 05:50:08 PM »

Dear developers,
my name is Vojtěch Polášek and I am a blind IT student from Czech Republic. I like playing games and I like when blind people are able to play the same games as other sighted people. I have a plan for a project and I would like your help/opinion. Therefore I apologize for length of this post, but I need to clarify what I would like to do. Thank you for reading this.
The first important thing is that it is almost impossible for blind people to play rogue like games. The second important thing; it is not fault of the developers. Blind people use screenreaders which can read contents of a screen and output it via voice or braille. Currently it is somehow possible to play for example Nethack with a braille display, but it is unbelievably painful, because you can see only one line of 40 or 80 characters at the time, and it is really difficult to get an idea of a map through this way. It is also hard to read character information which is displayed at the edge of terminal.
There exist a rogue like game  for blind called Entombed, but it is paid and it misses some features, although it is inspired by rogue like games. It is available only for Windows.
I would like to change this situation.
Basically I would like to create a special user interface for some rogue like game. This interface would be specially designed for blind players. Currently I have not decided about exact working of the interface yet, but this is not important right now. The biggest obstacle is, how to get all needed information from the game it self. I have thought about two solutions.
The first one is to run the game in background and simulate normal player, reading information from a game's own user interface. But I don't like this solution much, because game's interface is not adapted for being processed by a computer and I think it would be rather complicated to get all needed information. If there is no other possibility, I would think about that.
The second option is to get current game state without reading it from the regular user interface. And this is a point where I need your help and information. I am thinking about some kind of "current state file", which would contain all information about current game, or some kind of socket, which would allow me to fetch information from a running game. Do you know about any rogue like game which offers some possibility to get current information without reading them from standard user interface?
Another obstacle wil be controlling of actual game, but I think this will be much easier than this problem.
For your information, I tried playing Nethack, Angband and Zangband. I am a Linux user and I would like to use Python or C++ for my project. I would like my project to be usable at least on Windows and Linux.
Thank you very much for your help. If you have any ideas concerning this project, feel free to post them.
Best regards,
Vojtěch Polášek
PS: I hate your captcha of this forum. It is impossible for blind users to overcome it.