As far as I know, the most difficult part of playing Roguelikes with a screen reader is interpreting the map. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup supports setting a fixed random number generator seed, and pre-generating the dungeon using that seed. This means it would be possible to print embossed maps in advance. It would make the game easier by removing the "fog of war" exploration, but it would probably still be difficult enough. Possibly the code could be modified so the monsters and items remain random even when the map is fixed.
What's the current state of the art of embossing printers? Does this sound feasible?
I don't know of any roguelikes that implement this but there are MUDs with some degree of baked-in accessibility. The one I used to play was in the LPmud family and had a significant contingent of vision-impaired players.
Those also depend pretty heavily on ascii maps and the solution they implemented was having a "written map" output option. So instead of like |--@-c your "map" would read "the end of your vision is three rooms west, a child is two rooms east" etc.
It gets very verbose when you have a lot of data in both dimensions but is fully legible to screen readers. In the mud-specific case too it can be sent out of bounds through GMCP or similar and handled in client-specific and user-configurable ways. I don't know what a similar UI would be like in a roguelike, but MUDs also move a lot faster than RLs so it may not be a problem that needs to be solved.
Not so much (long time slashem player here). IF and MUDs are better.
The Nethack devs could patch the infamous 3.4.3 version in order to be much more accesible for the blind with a similar interface like the one done for Pokémon Crystal.
They could use flite as a library so it could describe items, menus, help files and surroundings.
What's the current state of the art of embossing printers? Does this sound feasible?