Hi gjp1311.

Generally  for screen readers, trying to display any sort of information in a spacial way doesn't work, because screen reading programs actually speak the text.

For example if you wrote a three x three map like this:

Corridor, pit, staircase,
Room, pit, corridor,
Room, entrance, pit.

The screen reader would just speak all the words together in a line e.g

Corridor, pit, staircase, room, pit, corridor, room, entrance, pit.

Thus a person would have to mentally break down the list of things and put them into a map which is pretty difficult when you get to very large layouts.
This btw is also why ascii roguelike games are extremely difficult to play since having to listen to your screen reader say dot hash dot dot dot at dot m dot hash line isn't exactly illuminating .

Even if you include coordinates on the map you run into a similar problem, especially if  the map is very large.

what it's best to do, is have ways for the player to find out where they are and what is around them in the map from the room they're currently in.

Thus, have a way to speak the coordinates of the current room, be told what exits the room has, and be told whether they've been in that room before or not.

You could also include some ways of pinpointing specific rooms, if the player gains information throughout the game, so for example if the player uses a "detect monster" spell the player could be told "goblin four east one south" or if the player has found the xit they could be told Exit ten east seven north"

You could even optionally include abilities for players to get the exact route to a given thing on the map, e.g "nearest fountain is five north, two east, one south, three west and one north" though this would be more a luxury than a necessity since most blind players are well used to working out routes from the basic directions given information about where they are and what is around them.

Hth.

would be cool if you could press a key and open a top down map view, even if just for the quadrant, with a dialog where pressing left right up and down would show you different rooms, with letters indicating the type of room, kinda like a spreadsheet.
I'd say just make it work with screen review and leave it at that, but not sure if you can go left right up down easily with the narrator or Jaws virtual cursors in the same way you can with NVDA, so maybe some kind of basic text box would be better.
something like:

-NMNI
INNMM
NIQIN
NNMII
INNN+

This represents a 5 by 5 grid, with (N) standing for normal room, (M) for room contains a monster (I) for room contains an item (Q) for room contains a quest element and (+-) for up and down staircases respectively.
You can indicate the map borders by making a standard windows ding when you hit the edge, much like in word pad, and change or add symbols as your game requires, such as (P) for passage or (T) for trap, or by removing the (M) for monster on a higher difficulty and replacing it with a (?).
This also has the added benefit of working with a braille display, which some blind people still like to use, especially for text games.