I am not sure if accessibility and screen readers will work nicely with the Virtual Machine, someone has to test this or reply if they have experience with virtual machine and accessibility in games, but anyway, in order to play properly roguelikes and even Cataclysm alone, I would definitely even dual boot (or triple boot if you are on Mac ) Windows and Linux

Once you download and set up Linux, I believe that you need to download SpeakUp http://www.linux-speakup.org/ , here is the guide http://linux-speakup.org/spkguide.txt , @zkline and other Linux users may explain this better than I do

No, it does not play like a MUD - it plays like a 2d chess-like game - you move via arrows - up, down, left and right, just like in many roguelikes it has a special command in game called look_around which basically allows you to read any tile one by one by moving with your arrows, along with look around the other useful command look_for_nearby_items_monsters that allows you to find the locations of nearby monsters and items along with the distance between you and them - direction in which you have to go to get close to them

Once you press ESC, the look around cursor shifts back to the center - to your character again, so with some effort you can examine your surroundings properly

A completely accessible roguelike, with no need for the ascii graphic sat all, and just playable from the pure text would be a wonderful thing.

If such a thing ever appears on Windows I'd be the first to give it a try, but at the moment trying to virtually run and learn a completely new operating system and screen reader just for one game seems way too much like hard work to me, indeed I'm rather confused given the number of accessible games that play in the console window anyway, the wastes, world of legends, grave wark, warsim, plus many more old dos games from the XP days that sadly won't run under windows 10, why the hell the windows version wouldn't be readable if it's just a matter of reading a console window.

But hay, hope people who do use this obscure linux thing get some good out of this.

Thanks!This is actually good news - that any text/ASCII game is technically accessible as long as it can run from the console, this does bring a smile to my face

It's fine I'm just spreading this for anyone who is interested in roguelikes in particular and can get Linux to run it, some day they will make accessibility for the Windows version as well, I am sure, no idea why it does not work to be honest

Hi.
If the text console itself is accessible with screenreaders, then the game can be made fully accessible. People are playing muds in Windows with screenreaders and on other platforms as well.
I'm not very much into text based console games other than muds. However, I played a lot of text adventures in MS dos back in the 90's.

I'll have to try it with WSL later. The main menu worked fine the last time I poked at this, but it was a year or so back.

Hi,

Unfortunately, I forgot that NVDA has rather poor handling of the cursor in command-line programs, especially compared to Jaws. This is probably the single reason why rogue like games are more annoying to play than they ought to be. It can be summed up like this: NVDA doesn't make it easy to keep the review cursor in a  column when navigating the screen, it always brings you to the left side of the window. Jaws and Speakup both do a better job of this. I'm still experimenting, but not as hopeful as I was for a quick solution.

Hi,

Just as a point of clarification, the comment I made above about NVDA's cursor mode handling applies to using the Linux version in the WSL, or Windows Subsystem for Linux, which is basically a fancy Linux virtual machine/emulator. The native Windows version  does not, unfortunately, work very well.

I wish I had a way to make NVDA's review commands work better, but it would require re-writing the way a core part of the screen reader operates, and I'm not sure how easy that would be.

So, digging through the code and analyzing the font with NVDA on WSL, I've figured out that when you're in a menu (tested with the main menu) the color of the item you have selected changes. When you are focused on the New Game option, the text "New Game" will show as white on blue with NVDA. If you are not focused on that option, just the letter N will show as white on black to indicate that that is the shortcut you can use to access the item. Other letters of the item will be light grey on black. It's incredibly tedious to check things this way so I don't know if it will help anyone, but yeah that's a thing.

Something else I just remembered…

It should be possible to play the game using TDSR, the screen reader written by @Tspivey on this forum for Mac OS and Linux. IT also has decent  cursor navigation support.

Would appreciate any improvements to CCDA on windows or any advancements you guys make on its accessibility. Right now i'm busy with Stellaris so i don't have the energy but CDDA is a very awesome game that i really would like to play!