Topic by apepers 2016-05-19 22:23:06

  • Registered: 2016-05-19
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Hello,

I’m a student from the University of Calgary, and I’ve been working on a research project investigating how roguelike games could be make more accessible for visually impaired people.

I’ve created a version of Nethack which has had changes made to try and make it more accessible, and I’d like anyone interested to try it out. This Dropbox link contains the .zip file for the folder which has the game (runnable on Windows), and also contains an “README” file which explains the accessibility changes in the game, as well as license information.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/biwnbu1xv4i4g … k.zip?dl=0

I’m also conducting a survey to try and learn if the changes were actually successful and how they could be improved. If you do play the game, please consider taking part in this short survey. Your responses will be confidential, though the online survey is being administered by Google Forms™, an American software company.  As such, your responses are subject to U.S. laws, including the USA Patriot Act.  The risks associated with participation are minimal, however, and similar to those associated with many e-mail programs, such as Hotmail™ and social utilities spaces, such as Facebook™.
I'll post a link to the survey in a second post, since I'm only allowed to post one link per post.

If you have any questions you can ask me here, or email me at [email protected]
This study has been approved by the Conjoint Faculties Research Ethics Board at the University of Calgary.

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Reply by apepers 2016-05-19 22:24:28

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Here is the link to the survey: http://goo.gl/forms/icgEs5WRuF
To reiterate, feel free to just play the game if you'd like, but it would be appreciated if you'd consider taking part in the study by filling out the survey once you've tried the game out for a while.

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Reply by Dark 2016-05-19 23:03:43

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Hi and welcome to the forum.  Nethack access is something of a bug bare sinse while the game is all text, hearing your screen reader saying "dash dash dash dash dot at dash dash hash t dash dash dash bar" isn't too informative.
A braille display can help (for those who have them), though sinse a braille display only displays a 40 or 80 character line (and costs a bomb), even then screen review of something as complex as most roguelikes is a tortuous business.
Then again, I'm fairly suree access could! be added by a few informative text messages and directions as to what is where, so I'm really interested to try this project out as having full access to as venerable and complex a game as Nethack would be great.

I am however having a miner problem. I'm afraid the download link is not working, I get a dropbox page with a "download" text but clicking on it does no good and for some silly reason I can't sign in to dropbox either. could you please post a direct download link to the file?

Sorry if I'm missing something.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

Dark's Website

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Reply by mojsior 2016-05-19 23:16:22

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Hi dark you can download this game without clicking.
Open the download link go to the address bar, and change theere dl0 to dl1 and press enter.
Tese character are in the end after .zip word.
After that hit enter and it should start downloading

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Reply by apepers 2016-05-19 23:37:02

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Thanks for the welcome Dark! Yes, I was very impressed that some people do play games like Nethack using screenreaders, and the thought behind the research was that hopefully a few changes to give better text information might be enough to make the game playable. I'm very interested to hear what you think of the changes I've made!

Sorry the link isn't working too well, if mojsior's suggestion doesn't work I think this might work as a direct download link:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/biw … k.zip?dl=0

If you're still having trouble let me know and I can try hosting it somewhere else as well.

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Reply by stewie 2016-05-20 01:37:22

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this is an awesome project. the changes do work particularly well and you can get information on what is around you. Is there the possibility of making your changes open source? I was thinking you could fork the official (if there is an official nethack Github repository.)

I noticed that the lines of text giving information on nearby tiles appears on the same line as other event text does, so it does not always show up. I don't really know what you can do about that though.

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

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Reply by firefly82 2016-05-20 03:11:38

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Hey hey!
Very very nice idea! I like this type of games.
But i am having a little trouble with the exploration and navigation. I saw something about a extended dirlook command to find the nearest unexplored places. Could you explain how to use it?
I think i will play this for a very long time if i find out how to manage the navigation stuff. For example i liked crawl stonesoup very much. This crawl had a autoexplore feature. Yes, i know this makes navigation maybe too easy. But i liked to focus on charactermanagement and fighting skills.
Oh, one more thing.
I think i can remember nethack allready had good soundpacks. Sounds make handling often faster and better for us. Could you include this soundpacks into your Version?

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Reply by apepers 2016-05-20 03:47:55

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Stewie: Thanks, I'm glad you're liking it! Luckily, the changes already are open source, as Nethack did indeed have a public repository. I'll post a link to my public repo, right now since I'm still in the process of conducting my study I'm not making more changes (for the sake of my study results being useful I need to try and make sure everyone answering is playing the same version of the game), but when the official study is over I'll likely make a few more improvements based on suggestions and then hand it off to anyone who might want to keep improving it.
https://github.com/apepers/NetHack
Yes, it is a bit annoying that the tile information text is part of the same text as events and things. I wasn't able to find a way around it, though it sure would be better that way!

firefly82: Thank you, I love these games too smile
Sure, the dirlook command is actually not quite as helpful as that unfortunately, but the way that it works is that you type #dirlook and then it will prompt you to give a direction to look in, and then it will tell you how many tiles away the nearest wall or unexplored tile is. So if you are in a room like so:
#..@..#
And do #dirlook to the right, it will tell you the wall is 3 tiles away.
I do know that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's autoexplore is very useful for navigation, I kind of wanted to try and find a way to make navigation easier without making it quite that easy, but maybe it would be worth doing in the future. You might try out Nethack 4, which is a fork of Nethack that has an auto explore function, as well as some other changes.
I actually thought that playing sounds in Nethack wasn't a working functionality anymore, I played with it a bit but couldn't get it working and it seemed to not be used very much. It might be that I was wrong, I'll have to look into it further!

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Reply by firefly82 2016-05-20 08:26:44

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Hi apepers,
Maybe you could add two extended commands wich could be usefull.
First: A command wich will show you the coordinates where you are.
Second: Maybe a command wich shows you the path to the nearest unexplored place.

I tryed to download nethack 4 but i only found the surcecode wich you have to compile first.
Could you give us a link with a compiled version? Maybe the autoexplore-feature is good enough to use it in your version too.

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Reply by Dark 2016-05-20 12:21:38

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Okay apepers
, I have the file now thanks.
I have some work and other things to get on with this morning but will give it a try later today.

The only roguelike I've ever played extensively is Angband and some of it's varients, and those more through a combination of my screen reader, my remaining vision and the large 32 or 64 graphic tiles, (sadly not a game accessible without use of said graphics).

I've tried nethack but found that the screen reader load of information was too problematic, and the graphics not quite as contrasting as  angband, so it'd be great to have a way of playing just using info messages that would be accessible to everyone.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

Dark's Website

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Reply by Dark 2016-05-20 16:05:04

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Okay, I'm having a look at things now.
First, great job on extra commands and distance info with v. the problem I'm having however is that the directional look command rather cumbersome to use typing #dirlook, which you will need to do a lot.

it'd be nice if it could be mapped to something like shift ctrl direction or something else usable.

I like the description of walls and what is in the immediate surroundings, but one other element I did wonder about is giving the player a shorthand of what sort of dungeon feature they were in, ie, a corridor or a chamber and a rough idea of it's layout, eg, a 5x3 corridor north to south. I presume th game hs drawing code for drawing the different dungeon features, though whether it distinguishes between rooms and corridors I don't know.

I'll be back with more when I've had a more extensive look at the game and also got a bit more used to all the various commands.

Edit: okay, I've found a bug, when using the pickup command and hitting a to pickup a wand I got an application error message which was annoying.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

Dark's Website

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Reply by apepers 2016-05-20 22:56:01

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firefly82: Hmm, you mean like your coordinates for the overall map? I wasn't sure if that would be helpful since the coordinates of everything else are relative to your own location. Listing a path to the nearest unexplored place might be possible - though at that point it wouldn't be too hard to just move you there as well tongue
This link should be a download to install Nethack 4, for Windows Vista and newer:
http://nethack4.org/media/releases/neth … -beta2.msi
I haven't actually played Nethack 4 myself so I can't say if it's accessible in general, I just happen to know that it has auto-explore.

Dark: Thanks for trying it out! It's interesting that you find the graphics less contrasting than Angband, I wonder if that could be changed, every symbol in Nethack can be changed to a different one just using the options file.

Dirlook could definitely be remapped, though I'm actually surprised that you find you use it a lot. When I was testing things out (which I would do by making it so the map wouldn't draw, since I'm not visually impaired and was trying to simulate it somehow), I found dirlook to be not very useful, since in hallways you get the information around you, and when I did need to figure out what was around me in a room I would use 'v' and the semicolon command to 'feel' it out. If you could maybe tell me a bit more about how you use dirlook that might be helpful for me to understand better how to make things easier, but I'll also make sure to remap it when I do an update.

Yeah, giving a description of the layout is something we talked about in this project, the trouble with hallways is that they aren't really drawn/generated in a standard way and can be changed in gameplay, so it's tough to give a useful description of one. Rooms though are always rectangles, so I could definitely add something when you're in a room at least that would say it's a 5x3 room or something. Of course all of this goes out the window in the weird levels like the dwarven mines that don't have rooms, which is unfortunate, but my hope was that at least I might have made things easier in general.

Thanks very much for the feedback, I'll be presenting this work in June with the Canadian Game Studies Association and am hoping it'll give some guidelines to inspire more work on making roguelike games more accessible. I am only able to test it so much as someone who isn't visually impaired, so feedback is really appreciated.

Sorry you ran into a bug, I will look into it. If you possibly have a text file in the Nethack folder called 'paniclog' and could tell me what it says that would be useful. If not I'm sure I can figure out how to replicate it somehow.

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Reply by stewie 2016-05-20 23:01:51 (edited by stewie 2016-05-20 23:17:25)

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I think the direction look command being remapped would be extremely useful, especially as the auto tile announce thing on movement gets overwritten a lot. Wit the far look command, I think announcing the coordinates of the focused tile as well as the objects on it would be useful.

When a screen reader interacts with a command prompt, it reads any changes to a given position it detects, for example only reading the first line when it updates. therefore if you made it read the coordinates of the tile after announcing the object name, it would always note that first line change and read the coords on empty tiles instead of just reading the ascii or "blank". I can see it being an issue if there are enough objects to exceed the length of the line, though.

Also, could you possibly include an option to stop the game printing the ascii map?

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

stewie's Website

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Reply by apepers 2016-05-20 23:30:36

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That's a good idea stewie, thanks! I didn't realize the screen reader would read it that way.

A question related to that I'd actually like to ask in general, when it comes to giving coordinates we thought about a few ways to do it. The shortest is to give Cartesian type coordinates like (1, -2) meaning one north or you and two to the west. We decided that would be confusing so changed to north/south east/west but that's much more verbose. Maybe just using N/S and E/W might be a middle ground, so it would say 1N, 2W. I'm curious what people would prefer.

I could look at putting an option in game but that can also be done in the option file fairly easily. If you open the defaults.nh file in a text editor and just copy and paste the following test into the end of the file, it will replace every character with a blank and essentially not draw the map. If you have trouble with that let me know and I can just put my options file up somewhere to download. And I'm curious, do you not want the map drawing just so that the screenreader doesn't try and read it out?

Text to copy into defaults.nh:

DUNGEON=  032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 \
          032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 \
          032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 \
          032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032
TRAP=     032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 \
         032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 \
          032 032
EFFECTS=  032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032         \
          032 032 032 032                         \
          032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032         \
          032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032
OBJECTS=  032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 \
          032 032 032 032 032 032 032
MONSTERS= 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 \
          032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 \
          032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 \
          032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 \
          032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 \
          032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032 032

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Reply by Haramir 2016-05-21 00:58:17

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The first letters of a direction looks fine to me. Like e, s, w and n.
Best regards, Haramir.

The true blind is the one who refuses to see.

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Reply by firefly82 2016-05-21 03:51:39

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Hi apepers,
Sure you are wright with what you are saying about the path. But i realy think that there is no other way for transfer useful informations about the map.
About the other question, i like to have north, east, west, south, instead of n e w s. It doesnt make such a big difference. For example north is as short as n.
OK, another thing: I am not sure but i think the game is often crashing and i cant see why.

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Reply by Dark 2016-05-21 16:26:46

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Hi Apepus.

Not having the ascii map drawn would be very helpful, sinse then the screen reader wouldn't read a lot of symbols etc each time and if you did go with something like letter abbreviations for directions it'd make more sense.
The point of a directional look command is often to fix position of a player, eg, you know by looking n and w that your in the top corner of a room, though if room info was added that would help too sinse it'd be easier to tell where things were at least for most of the game, otherwise the look command would be likely what is used. Actually if room size info could be included that would do a lot for access, it always struck me with Angband this was the main problem, not being able to get an idea of immediate dimentions of the surrounding area.

As to coordinates, there are different strengths. Using the far look curser to examine tyles and having a 5 north, six west type of approach (with or without letters or words), gives much more spacial information and could be very helpful in battles, however having the player's individual coordinates mentioned gives an idea of where you are relative to the hole map and also a way of tracking the dungeon mentally, eg, I didn't explore down that passage at 22-34.

I'd suggest therefore personally going with the relative coordinates for things like the v object views, but having a status command for the look curser or player position to report the absolute coordinates when used, say ctrl p.

I'm afraid I can't find the paniclog file in the angband folder. The error occurred every time I used the extended pickup command to try and pickup an object.

More access in roguelikes is a great idea, indeed so many roguelikes are on the verge of being accessible with their use of screen reader text, but it's just a question of output.

Btw, I tried angband four, but some of the text was a bit weerd reading wise and i recall the graphics didn't contrast as well as they should in other games, particularly sinse the graphic tyles were much smaller than those in Angband, then again low vision access is a different kettle of fish and if the game were accessible just! with the text it'd be good for everyone.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

Dark's Website

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Reply by aaron77 2016-05-22 13:14:25

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I just started playing this a couple of hours ago, but not sure if I've gone far enough to comment on the accessibility features.  I use v almost constantly, as well as the ; command.  I've gotten to the second floor, but certain things have caused it to crash, causing me to lose my progress.
1.  Arrow and dart traps:  whenever I encounter one, the game tends to crash shortly after.  this probably has nothing to do with the accessibility features, but then again maybe it does.
2. the ',' command to pick items up  causes my game to crash.  It's only happened once or twice, and I haven't quite figured out why it happens.  I believe it may have to do with being on the same tile as the item I'm trying to pick up (when I have the auto pick up disabled.)
Is there an error log that I can paste here so we can determine whether this has anything to do with the accessibility changes or if it's just the game being a little unstable?

Thanks, and thanks for trying to make this project accessible.  I am loving the game.

Discord: @Aaron_Stormerr

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Reply by Soul Keeper 2016-05-22 15:44:10

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Hi,
pasting the ascii map removal code to the end of the defaults.nh file doesn't work for me, I get an error about a acutes and 032 and the map remains.

Go, balloons. I don't see anything happening. Go, balloons. Go, balloons. Go, balloons. Stand by, confetti. Keep coming, balloons. More balloons. Bring them. Balloons, balloons, balloons! More balloons. Tons of them. Bring them down. Let them all come. No confetti. No confetti yet. No confetti. All right. Go, balloons.

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Reply by apepers 2016-05-22 23:02:51

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Thanks for the feedback everyone! I'm gonna really try and work out where this crashing bug is coming from today and hopefully get a fixed version out. Sometimes when the game crashes it will generate a file called paniclog in the same folder as the executable, if it does and you could let me know what it says that would be very helpful, but I'll try and track down what's happening myself either way.

Here's a direct download link for a defaults.nh file that has the map essentially turned off, hopefully that will work and make things easier. It still draws kind of highlights over the player and pet, I'm not sure how much the screenreader will pick up on this, but it should at least be better than having the whole map there.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/eix … ts.nh?dl=1

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Reply by firefly82 2016-05-23 03:48:35

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Hi apepers,
Another general thing for maybe some blind players is to get only one information by pressing one key. For ;v; it is OK. But for example it would be nice to use control+up to check the visible tiles to the north. Control+down to check how many visible tiles to the south.
In many cases you only need one information and not 4, 5 or more.
This would speed up gameplay for us a lot.
Hope you get my point. English is not my mothertounge.

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Reply by aaron77 2016-05-23 13:10:56 (edited by aaron77 2016-05-23 13:11:20)

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Awesome, I don't know if I've ever been this excited for an update for anything else.  smile

I keep getting to the second level or sometimes the third and then I encounter a trap and *crunch*.  sad

Discord: @Aaron_Stormerr

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Reply by firefly82 2016-05-23 14:01:19

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@Aaron: Yes, me too! Nothing is better than participate in games for normaly sighted people.
Did you mean you found the stairs or have you explored the hole first and second level?

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Reply by apepers 2016-05-23 22:48:16

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I've been looking into this crashing bug, but I can't seem to make it happen reliably on my own system. I've made a version of the game that plays the same but which outputs a bunch of debug messages to the paniclog, so if anyone hitting the crashing issue would be willing to play this version and then as soon as the game crashes send me the paniclog file, that would be really useful in figuring out what's going wrong! The paniclog will get written as soon as you start playing because it writes messages whenever you pick things up, so if you send it to me right after the game crashes it should tell me what was happening that led to the crash. You can download the debug version here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ulh6n7ojvwkdz … g.zip?dl=1

Easiest is probably to email me the paniclog file, my email is at the top of this thread, but to repeat it's [email protected]

firefly82: Yeah I think I get what you mean, I can definitely see that trying to have single key ways to get information would be best!

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Reply by aaron77 2016-05-24 00:26:49

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@firefly82:  I meant explored both first and second levels.  I made it to the fifth today but had to use save files to deal with traps.
@Apepers:  I will do that.  I will also try to give you a save file where I've saved right before the crash.
I'm not sure how close this is coming to an auto explore feature, but it would be nice if we were told that we had already explored a certain area before.  I don't know how this would be done, or if it would require modification of core nethack code, but it would be extremely useful.  I've been managing for now by writing on the ground and dropping objects to act as landmarks but that only gets you so far, especially after you've run out of things to drop.  sad

Also, can anyone with more experience offer tips on the best times to search?  I've been finding secret things on occasion when I reach dead ends or corners, but I am hesitant to spend two or three turns searching every time I move; the lack of food will usually cause my horribly painful death.

Discord: @Aaron_Stormerr

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