Alexei Pepers - Accessibility
16This talk is from the 2016 Roguelike Celebration: https://roguelike.club/event.html, re-uploaded 2021.
This talk examines how features of the roguelike genre relate to accessibility for visually impaired players, using Nethack as a case study. Several changes were made to Nethack to make it more accessible, and the feedback from this case study provides several lessons as to how roguelike games in general can be made more accessible, as well as what aspects of them pose the biggest challenges to accessibility.
Alexei Pepers is a graduate of the University of Calgary, who is now working as a programmer in the games industry at Beamdog. She has loved Nethack since childhood and always wanted to know how it ticked, so in the final year of her degree conducted a research project on introducing accessibility for visually impaired players to Nethack, under the supervision of Dr. John Aycock. John Aycock is an associate professor at the University of Calgary, and the author of Retrogame Archeology: Exploring Old Computer Games.