Hi Bryan,

What an interesting post! This Quake Audio client sounds really cool.
Netrek is a more difficult game to pick up with a steeper learning
curve to master the basics compared to some other games. However since
the learning curve for sight challenged players is already rather
high, maybe this won't seem any worse or perhaps be a bit easier to
get accustomed to than the Quake Audio which you said suffered from
having to convey a very high density of information at any time. In
netrek the top half of the screen is broken into two halves. The left
half is the tactical where you do close quarters combat (dogfighting)
and can only see a limited number of ships and planets, and the right
half is the galactic where one can see all planets and players' ships'
positions. Are blind users accustomed to having to memorize a good bit
of information when playing games? If so I thought maybe you could
tell them the position of the enemy planets and their planets
(involving 3rd space planets is not really essential) or setup a macro
so that when you press it the names of the planets closest to you in a
row (or a circle or column or whatever) could be quickly read off
right to left or whatever convention you think is best. When their
ship approaches a planet the user can be told the name of the planet,
whether it is an agri, fuel, repair or regular planet, and how many
armies it has. I would be glad to help out in anyway I can.

By the way, one of the list members, James Cameron, has been working
on a Python client and I noticed there is a Python Braille API library
called python-brlapi:
http://packages.debian.org/sid/python-brlapi

I also found a Speech Braille Server API for conveying sounds which
you may find useful:
http://portal.beam.ltd.uk/xvil/sbserver_api.html

Regards,
Zach

<>< http://www.fidei.org ><>