Hi hamster007
It's intriguing to hear that some work is being done in this field. There was quite recently a thread started here about a student making a similar game as an academic project. In case you missed it, here's a link:
http://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=4772.0I have little knowledge or experience with blindness, so take my comments with a grain of salt, but just thinking aloud: I would believe that a roguelike for blind players should be designed from scratch, scrapping any of the traditional features if they make the interface too hard to work with. For instance, the archetypical tactical grid might be difficult to design in a pleasing way. It might be easier if the layout of rooms and corridors is designed way more regular than in most roguelikes. For instance, let's say a small room is always 3x3 tiles big. The game would easily know if the player is standing in the center of a room or next to one of the walls, and it would probably be easier to implement some sort of "status repport" command, where the game tells you eg.: "You are standing in the south-eastern corner in a small room. There is one kobold at the western wall. There is one goblin right next to you, to the north. There is a treasure chest in the middle of the room. There is a door on the northern wall."
Of course, you could also have templates for "big rooms" or "long rooms" and such, but you might want to exclude angle-shaped rooms, complex field of vision-calculations and so forth.
Perhaps you could even leave out the tactical map altogether and try to design a system that is easier to navigate without having to remember a detailed list of which beings and features are situated on which coordinates. There are some roguelike-inspired games that take a cue from interactive fiction and the like, such as Kerkerkruip and Anamnesis (I don't know if Anamnesis can be played with a screen reader, though a similar game could certainly be designed with visually impaired players in mind). There have also been some stabs at one-dimensional Roguelikes, where you can see which enemies or features await up to a certain distance, and still have to fiddle with turn-based resource use, simplistic positioning tactics, etc. I also come to think of a 7drl released this year, called Malleus Goblinficarium, which consists of a series of one-on-one battles against various foes, where you have to weigh your opponent's stats against your own stats and equipment. That game is in a way reminiscent of how combat is handled in your typical japanese console rpg, and could at least serve as a point of referance. Although, again, it relies on graphics to be played. Thread on this forum:
http://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=4547.0It's a shame that so many games which could undoubtedly be designed to be quite playable for blind people, aren't, simply because sighted developers forget to take that into consideration. I'm very much guilty of this myself. My current project uses graphical tiles on a hexagonal grid, so I'm not even sure if a terminal version would be easily played by the blind. But I'm very interested in learning more, for future reference, so please do keep us posted.
edit: Sorry if I'm missing the whole point of you wanting to write an interface for existing games. Heh. Concerning making good use of a 80 character wide braille display: Maybe it could be used to render the contents of a 9x9 square centered at the player's position? Regarding taking an existing game and parsing the "game state" to a file or a string, it probably depends heavily on how the game is designed at the outset. Tidy developers might make games where the program itself has a clear enough idea of what's going on that it would be manageable, but I'm sure some games consist of too much spaghetti code for this to be feasible.
As always,
Minotauros
