Blind-friendly Angband

[tangar]

This topic at my blog

Sometime ago I've founded Russian MUD (text based multiplayer games) community in discord and there plenty of visually-impaired people. Some was interested to play roguelikes after listening my stream in Tangaria.

I've googled this topic a bit and found that actually atm there are 3 blind-friendly roguelike games:
http://www.grupolys.org/~jvilares/topplayerENG.html

Good podcast on topic: http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2012/1...-visually.html

Also there is an option for text output description of objects on game screen in Nethack..

And finally I found a topic about Angband ( https://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?p=18550 ) with this quote:

Originally Posted by PaulBlay

3. Introduce a "blind-friendly" option to Vanilla Angband. Drawback is that those maintaining Angband may not be keen on additional options and, again, that large changes may be awkward to implement / maintain.

Maybe it's the time to start working on this option in Angband? As now the game went far forward in technical aspects.. What do we need:

the option to output text description of room - so player will be able to get information about surroundings when they change - in text format. For example.. Player got 0,0 coordinates. All objects around him got relative coordinates. So each turn player will get something like this in Message Window:

"Door 5N3W. Goblin 2S1W. Magic Wand 1N2E"

Also using 'l'ook command player could understand where walls and other static objects located..

Maybe there are better ways to represent surroundings.. Lets brainstorm!

As we already have 'target-close' monster macro which could help to cast spells or use ranged weapons without need to target precisely certain tiles - it's possible to play even ranged classes.