Hi Zach. A Python client would be good to use as a code base for an accessible client. I use OSX most of the time now, and had a look at MacTrek. That client is object oriented, and is patterned as model view controller, so I thought I could just rip out the view and substitute kind of an audio view of sorts. Thought that would be the best way to do what I want without having to write a whole new client from scratch, and/or ripping out lots of pieces from a non-oo cllient. However, most blind users are on Windows. Audio Quake is cross-platform, and it would be good if this could be, also. I know of some cross-platform speech libraries for Python, and PyGame would handle most of the type of audio support that I'd need. So, the tactical view I'd present as first-person audio, and I'd present the galactic as a talking and sortable table. However, what do you think about the targeting question? I found James's Python client with Google just now. Hopefully, it is fairly modular, so I can strip out the visual parts. I'd leave them in, but the built-in UI, articularly if its custom-drawn, won't work with a screen reader, anyway. I saw that his Python client also hasn't been updated in almost 2 years. Is it pretty much complete? Bryan -----Original Message----- From: Zachary Uram [mailto:netrek at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 6:55 PM To: Netrek Development Mailing List Cc: Bryan Smart Subject: Re: [netrek-dev] Audio-based Netrek Client 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 ><>