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Author Topic: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind  (Read 26969 times)

cameron

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #75 on: August 08, 2011, 09:39:54 am »

the water and magma at least can be changed via the init file to blue and red numbers which represent their height from 1-7
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Niccolo

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #76 on: August 08, 2011, 10:13:29 am »

Hi,
Your amazement amuses me.  Computers are one of the biggest advances for the blind community since Braille was invented, and games are just one aspect of that whole picture.  It's easy for mainstream companies to ignore us, but indie titles like DF are another matter.

Most of our amazement comes from the simple fact that we have working eyes. We're so used to the idea of relying on our eyes to interpret things for us that the idea of not using our eyes is somewhere close to unfathomable.

And since the primary method of interacting with a computer for us is by, well, looking at the screen, it's just a little amazing to think that, hey, there's this guy who can't see, yet can read perfectly well on a computer and we wouldn't have even noticed the difference if you hadn't told us.

I hope I'm not coming across as insensitive - that is far from my intention. People who aren't blind are just incredibly reliant on our eyes that we find it pretty awesome to see other ways of, well, looking at a situation (I swear I'm not making a pun xD).
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What's wrong with using magma? That's almost always the easiest method.
I have issues channeling it properly to do that method. I end up flooding the fortress with magma.
Check out my RtD!

kaypy

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #77 on: August 08, 2011, 10:43:09 am »

Ok, so I got speakup running, and abused my ears for a bit.

One thing I note is that it seems that speakup only runs on the direct ttys and not in any windowed terminal. I had been hoping to bolt things onto the side of Dwarf Fortress via the window manager, which I will need to rethink...

Speakup seems to do OK on look mode, except that the text in the look description is often repetative, and speakup doesn't like to repeat itself. So, for example, if you are scanning across the landscape and go over a tree, it will mention the tree, but wont mention that the next tile is empty ground again. And wont mention trees again for a bit. There's probably a 'say it all again' hotkey, but then you will get all the title bar gumf.

Here I was hoping there was a way to convince speakup that some subportion of the screen was the interesting bit, and to read it back again while ignoring the rest.
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zkline

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #78 on: August 08, 2011, 10:52:19 am »

Hi,
Niccolo, you aren't insensitive in the least.  I can't really imagine what it's like to use eyes, even though I know you do so.  No offense taken.
Kaypy, glad you got Speakup working.  There is actually a way to at least set up that important region of the screen.  I think you can use the "Window" functionality to do that, with Speakup-f2 through f4.  By the way, speakup-f1 will get you into help mode.  Sorry I neglected to mention its tty-only nature. 
Hope this helps,
Zack.
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DrPoo

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #79 on: August 08, 2011, 11:09:38 am »

It must be horrible to be blind, atleast if you have ever had sight. I can kind of guess that it isnt nearly that horrible for a born blind person, i was born without any ability to read body language. I cannot tell an angry person from a smiling at times.. and i dont think its very bad, i mean i do not feel harmed by it.

The only thing i could think would be some kind of sound system, so you can atleast hear when that monkey is stealing all your pig tail clothes..
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Jurph

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #80 on: August 08, 2011, 12:17:09 pm »

Here I was hoping there was a way to convince speakup that some subportion of the screen was the interesting bit, and to read it back again while ignoring the rest.

A lot of the screen-plotters like Stonesense read DFHack info in order to populate each tile... so why not read out the DFHack info for a tile into a pseudo-TTY server?  DFVeinDig and other utilities have cursor awareness and could tell you the XYZ coordinates of your cursor. 

Your idea for autodetecting special cases is interesting... you could fairly easily scan the map and come up with regions of interest:
  • Bodies of water
  • Transitions from surface-to-underground
  • Transitions from cavern to tunnels
  • Hotkeyed points

At which point you could report proximity to each area, or you could report what's going on at each spot, like so:
"SURFACE REPORT.  Bomrek Zifoltubor went aboveground to cut wood.  Urist Hazmat is hunting a deer at 5,41, 113.  Bomrek Zifoltubor chopped wood at 15, 10, 112.  Bomrek Zifoltubor hauled wood to 22,45,101."

The first report would be triggered by Bomrek passing from the underground to the aboveground zone; the transition would check his labor to report his job, and ... not sure how it would figure out where he actually chopped the wood.  The second would be triggered by the creation of a combat report.  Urist has the Hunting Labor *and* generated a hunting report *and* the other creature in the report is a deer; read out the deer's grid location.  The third and fourth readouts would be similar to the first... which is to say I don't know exactly what you would have to read, but it's in the realm of possibility.

It almost seems like the tool we need is a Verbose Game Log dumped to a relational DB; then the TTY could connect to the DB and read out events that match the frame of reference.  This seems... extraordinarily ambitious. Megaproject-type stuff.  It may be beyond the scope of what we can accomplish. TTYing into a window that refreshes the existing gamelog.txt might be an easy hack in the short run.
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Dreambrother has my original hammer-shaped Great Hall.  Towerweak has taken the idea to the next level.

zkline

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #81 on: August 08, 2011, 02:37:26 pm »

Hi Jurph,
AMbitious is definitely the right word for what you're suggesting.  I can't comment on its feasibility, but I will say that if even a little of what you propose could happen, it would be great.  I've not played DF enough to know how detailed the logs are at the moment, nor how much information a tool could extract, but it's a nice fantasy. 
Best,
Zack.
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DrPoo

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #82 on: August 08, 2011, 03:44:34 pm »

zkline? how do you read this forum? I mean, i guess it would be pretty annoying to listen to names of avatars, signatures, quotes, forum announcements, etc. You must be a very patient person.
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DrKillPatient

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #83 on: August 08, 2011, 04:10:54 pm »

If the screen reader is made to take input from DFhack for auto-reading, perhaps you can make it exclude commas and periods. That would cut out the ground, and leave only items, buildings and creatures as far as I know.
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"Frankly, if you're hanging out with people who tell you to use v.begin() instead of &v[0], you need to rethink your social circle."
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turboferret

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #84 on: August 08, 2011, 04:18:45 pm »

can you pipe df output when using textmode in linux?
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zkline

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #85 on: August 08, 2011, 08:50:17 pm »

Hi,
Turboferret, I'm not sure you can, unfortunately.  DF uses Curses to draw its text mode, and I've never tried piping the output of a curses-based program before.  If it used standard i/o that would be different, of course.
DrKillPatient, that's an idea, though one more suited to Jurph's ambitious database proposal than anything else I think.  For now, ground tiles will probably have to stay.  Keeping track of and excluding those dynamically would be a nightmare…
Best,
Zack.
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Jurph

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #86 on: August 09, 2011, 01:16:28 pm »

Hi Jurph,
AMbitious is definitely the right word for what you're suggesting.  I can't comment on its feasibility, but I will say that if even a little of what you propose could happen, it would be great.  I've not played DF enough to know how detailed the logs are at the moment, nor how much information a tool could extract, but it's a nice fantasy. 
Best,
Zack.

I'm busy tonight, but later this week I'll post a link to a game log file and you can pipe it into your reader.  I suspect that it will be missing tons of detail, but at the same time I think it will be an interesting reality check for you.  If the game log has most of the details you're interested in, then a good first step would be a script that reads out events from the gamelog as they occur.  I suspect most of this functionality already exists in SoundSense.
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Dreambrother has my original hammer-shaped Great Hall.  Towerweak has taken the idea to the next level.

zkline

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #87 on: August 10, 2011, 02:39:50 pm »

Hi Jurph,
I'm looking forward to seeing your game log.  Mine are always nearly empty.  Is there a setting to increase the verbosity of its messages?
Best,
Zack.
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Jurph

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #88 on: August 14, 2011, 09:21:48 am »

Alright, zack.  Find below the output from a single season of a fortress. I've got about 50 dwarves and there is some trading and a goblin invasion happening, so all in all, a pretty normal autumn.  I've hidden it in a spoiler tag and a code tag in order to make it easy to copy-and-paste to a text file.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I noticed here that the number of identical or nearly-identical reports is huge... so if there were a parsing program, we'd probably want to teach it how to drop most of these.  As for verbosity, you can make adjustments to Announcements.txt in the INIT folder in order to determine the behavior that you see.
« Last Edit: August 14, 2011, 09:54:01 am by Jurph »
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Dreambrother has my original hammer-shaped Great Hall.  Towerweak has taken the idea to the next level.

zkline

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Re: Alternative Interfaces, or, DF for the Blind
« Reply #89 on: August 14, 2011, 12:31:10 pm »

Hi Jurph and all,
THis is quite nice indeed.  THank you.  I see what you mean about identical messages, they could get annoying rather quickly.  I do notice that occasionally the game seems to recognize that there are identical ones and indicates so, but it seems inconsistent.  Of course, location information is missing from these, which I'd have to find somehow.
The combat log was fun to read, and quite gruesome in places.  Overall, I think this provides a lot of very good info, and is probably a great place to start. 
Thanks for posting.
Best,
Zack.
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