Dear all:
My name is Jesus Vilares, associate professor of the Department of Computer Science of the University of A Coruña (Spain).
One of our students is working on his Ms. Thesis, which consists on designing and implementing a classical old-fashioned roguelike computer game adapted for VI people. For this purpose we will use NLP techniques for generating a text description (in English) of what is happening on the game, so a blind player can use a screenreader for playing. At the same time, a classical old-fashioned graphical representation would be displayed so a seeing player (or someone using a screen magnifier) can play in a more "classical" way. In case you don't know this game genre, I will describe it at the end of this post.
We are looking for a small group (5-10) English-speaking visually impaired volunteers for testing the game. I guess the first version of the game will be ready for testing in a couple of months.
Notice that this is a small academic project (1 student, 2 supervisors), we have no commercial interest; our intention, in fact, is to make the game available as free open source software if possible, so anybody can use or modify it, or even adapt it to other languages.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Jesus
Know, I will briefly describe what is a roguelike game. If you already know them, you can ignore what follows.
WHAT IS A ROGUELIKE?:
Classic roguelikes are "dungeon crawling" role-playing videogames where the player is an adventurer (warrior, archer, magician, etc.) who explores a dungeon looking for hidden treasures and monsters to fight. The game is played in turns, in the sense that every action you make (either move, attack, cast a spell, etc.) roughly takes one turn. Although the most well-known roguelikes were developed by amateurs, they have had a great influence in commercial games.
The most orthodox roguelikes do not have graphics in the usual sense, but they are played on a text MSDOS-like terminal, where the dungeon and what it contains (monsters, treasures, etc.) is "drawn" from above, as a 2-dimension display using ASCII characters. Each character represents a different element: a stone wall, a weapon, a goblin, the player himself, etc. This kind of representation. If you want to represent, for example, a room with a door and a dragon in the center, what you would see on the screen is this: a rectangle formed by characters | and - representing the walls of the room, characters + that appear on the walls representing doors and, at the center of the room, a D representing a dragon.
However, because of the use of this kind of pseudo-graphic representation, roguelikes are not accessible for VI people, either using screenreaders or a braille terminal. This is the reason why, apart from displaying the dungeon on the screen in the usual ASCII-based way (either for seeing people or those who use a screen magnifier), at the same time we will show a text description of the dungeon (for those who need a screenreader), something like this:
"You're in the center of the room, which has two exits: one to the north, behind you, and another one ahead of you, to the right. There is dragon in front of you and, behind it, a magic scroll; behind you see a potion."
This will allow you to play the same game in both ways, thus allowing anyone to play and share experiences.