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[Armok]

if new hardware was an option one of those tongue-mounted electrode arrays are a much better choice.

[Rinnix]

I could see it happening, but a lot of the game's mechanics would probably have to be changed.

But, heck, I don't know, most every one at this forum are geniuses, they seem to have some rather liable theories on it working.

[Diicc Tater]

Right, time to register and post.
So, orientation is a problem. I can see that (no pun intended) as I have the same problems sometimes and I have pretty much 20/20 vision...so for me it's more of a failing at DF than just of sight.

How does using the hotkeys affect your gameplay? The F1 key is set to bring you to the spot of embark. Will this throw you off the scent, so to speak?
Perhaps, if you don't already use the "zoom here" markers, it may be a step towards getting ideas on orientation arrangement.
Armok knows I still fail A LOT, and I've been trying to be Dwarf since a few years back.

[rarborman]

Yeah orientation in DF is often a "where did I leave my fortress' 'such and such'," issue but it has menus that let you find buildings, creatures, dwarves, a few other things; so its more a learning to use the menus thing.

Also not cool with those puns.

[Baughn]

The text mode is broken on os x, yeah. This is partially for technical reasons, and partially because I don't have a Mac.

That aside, if there's anything reasonable I can do to help count me in,though I can't immediately think of anything.

[JoshBrickstien]

Even though this thread is 6 months old, I'd still like to point out that a large quantity of RAW edits could reduce the Df "alphabet" to pure ASCII. I hope Zack here is doing well and all that. Perhaps soon he'll remember this old thread and stop back in?

[zkline]

Hi All

If thread necromancy is frowned upon here, I apologize. It has been a long time since I thought of DF. I was unfortunately caught up in some personal turmoil for the past few years, which has only recently begun to settle down.

Now I am back, more or less, and thinking about this game again. My ambition to try and play it somehow is as strong as ever, and I'm writing to check and see if there is still any interest in helping me.
I hope the community around this game is still going strong. Someone posted a tweet in my timeline this afternoon, mentioning the newest release, so I assume it is at least still maintained after a fashion. :-)
Is there anything new to report on the mod front? From looking this thread over again—I forgot just how long it became, especially in my absence, it looks like DF Hack was a popular suggestion. Is that still a going concern?

If I am better off opening a new thread for this, please tell me. I'm more than willing to do so.

Thanks much,
Zack.

[scriberman]

This post is written with most punctuation missing because screen readers are imperfect  to put it politely.
I have been slowly reading through this entire thread since your last post bumped it on the forums.  Thank you for bumping it.

I don't have the solution for you  but I wanted to join the conversation.  First  I will give you my background information.

When I was a teen  one of my best friends was a 30 something year old man who had lost his sight and much of his dominant right side function in a car accident 15 years prior.  In 1988 or 89  he bought an IBM XT clone computer running DOS 2 and running a screen reader named Arctic.  Arctic was full of weird quirks.  My friend could not find a text editor which was useable for him  so I wrote a text editor program which specifically interfaced with Arctic.  It looked like trash to anyone who saw it on the screen  but it was perfect for him to write letters.  I had to spell some words on screen in a specific phonetic way so that Arctic would speak correctly to him.  When his monitor died  it was like I too was now blind.  I did not own my own computer yet.  I wrote utilities on his computer which would beep at me in certain patterns to tell me what I needed to know by interpretation.  During that time  I also learned to finger read Grade 1 braille, and bits of Grade 2 braille.  With that background  you can see that I have perhaps a useful perspective and interest in this thread.

The biggest challenge I see with this project idea for an interface for the blind user  is really the same issue as for the Dwarf Fortress interface in general.  The issue is that the game interface is incomplete.  It is massively inconsistent in implementation at this time.  Toady has stated that he does not intend to put significant effort into reworking the interface until some distant future time.  In the mean time  I wonder whether your interests are better served by focusing on some smaller subset of the interface.  Specifically  I wonder if outputting the map information would work well enough for you to play?  Does your screen reader allow you to navigate most of the menus without much trouble?  I ask these questions because my limited understanding is that d f hack provides access to almost all of the necessary raw information from the map.  Stone sense pulls enough detail from d f hack to recreate the map display in 3 d.  I think there is enough raw data available from d f hack so that a program could pull from it and then output audio information in various ways.

The second challenge I see with this project idea is finding someone capable and available enough to dig into building on top of d f hack and perhaps using the Stone sense code as a starting point.

The third challenge I see is developing the actual auralizer and it's algorithms which includes deciding how to represent specific components on the map  as well as the whole new concept of how to condense the mass of information into more useful audio chunks.  Perhaps HungryHobo could provide some reference links to the auralizers he mentioned?  I could not find any links  but I am familiar with a network traffic auralizer which converts various network activity into certain animal sounds  so that it sounds like a rain forest.

After this sentence  I complete my post by listing a few web links for reference  in no particular order.
Wikipedia article on Braille
Wikipedia list of screen readers
Disabled World list of screen readers
Research on the converse concept of converting speech sounds to visual animations
Converting a printed picture of a gramophone record into audio
Peep the Network Auralizer
Stonesense forum thread
Stonesense source code

[scriberman]

Double posting because I suspect zkline is reading this via e-mail.

I forgot to include links regarding echo location.  The Wikipedia page has a handful of notable examples of people using and teaching echo location.  Ben Underwood was the first I heard of:  "He used it to accomplish such feats as running, playing basketball, riding a bicycle, rollerblading, playing football, and skateboarding."

As awesome as echolocation is by itself  can you imagine how powerful a Dwarf Fortress auralizer would be as it provides hundreds or thousands of unique sounds to create a sterophonic landscape?  Think of the stories to emerge from that style of play!

Wikipedia article on Human echolocation
20 20 documentary on Ben Underwood

[zkline]

Hey there,

Actually, I ended up creating another topic for this, since I didn't get much response when I resurrected i initially. I wonder if there's a way to merge the two…

There's no need for the little disclaimers in front of your message, incidentally. Modern screen readers can handle punctuation well enough. I am reading the messages as they come in via email, but can also check the forum when appropriate.

As for echo location, I'm kind of meh on it in practice. I think it's certainly a nice skill, but I've never had the strong interest to develop it, and I think it gets overhyped and over publicized. I don't know of anybody who uses it regularly myself. As for how it could apply to DF, I'd have to hear a demo, I'm afraid.

The new thread is here I don't mean to come off as dismissive of your posts here, by any means. I'm sure some kind of workable solution can be found, though I'm not sure who might be able to supply experience for it.

[Armok]

Hmm, random idea, not sure how usefully this'd be or how hard it'd be to pull of; what if you simply made a button that when pressed took the 5x5 ascii around the cursor, did a sort of unwrap to polar coordinates, and played it as an audio spectrogram? I suck at explaining things.