The real time nature of Fortress mode is what really makes it all but impossible for blind people to play it. What is important for this is mostly the experience of things, not necessarily the exact location of a square of sand or some such, that wouldn't be efficient, it's the engravings and the artifacts and the wrestlers giving birth during sparring practice. Things that can be related quite easily. He'll have to give me orders, what to make, what to build and where in relation to everything else, and I'll have to be as descriptive as possible about what gets done and how. This first fort, Tattoopaint, is mostly a practice run. A simple map.
Should things go well, I'll find another site with Fun and Magma.
Aleric is definitely intelligent, and I'm sure a lot of you guys were mulling over being the one in my position, because a lot of you are very much supportive of anyone wanting to play this game.
The one thing that did want to do that seems a bit out of reach now is using ascii drawings to attempt to render an image that he can interpret on his refreshable braille display, but it's only a single line not the grid needed to make it look proper.
I did a little research on Refreshable Braille Displays, and found them to be more or less the same in that their display methods. There is one in development here,
http://www.tactileresponse.com/refreshable-braille-display.html, that fits what we'd need, but it appears to be in development hell.
If we could find something else similar to that, then the remaining problem is using an ascii character set that's sensible in braille.