As a programmer, what occurs to me as a solution to the
technical problem of doing this as a mod would be:
1. Writing an app that samples the screen bitmap for GalCiv 2 at a settable rate or when the user indicates it is to do so
2. The app would then use an optical character recognition library (common and available) to read the text it can find on the GalCiv 2 screen to decide which screen it's looking at
3. Knowing which GalCiv 2 screen it's looking at would then let it decide how to present the information on the screen to the text buffer for the audio reader program.
4. The information that the app sends to the audio reader text buffer would also include the distance of the mouse to the nearest button and whether or not the mouse is over said button?
Now, how to describe a map to a blind man I'm at a loss. Maybe someone can explain how to do this.
Another thing is that GalCiv 2 appears to be very open in its file formats. Maps and save game files can be parsed for info. The save game can be set to save every turn, which ensures the save game file is always current and parseable for current information. Combining screen scrape and save game file parsing would let you do some nice things.
Perhaps the map can be described as "The Drengins are to the northeast and occupy 34% of stars on the map. Their influence occupies 42% of the map. Their star systems are named blah blah blah and blah and they are closest to your star systems named blah and blah. Your border systems with the Drengin are considered to be blah, blah, and blah. The mouse cursor is over Battle Group 25 which is near your star system named blah and is selected". Maybe this could be a start? With how I've outlined, this could be done.
As far as funding goes, the US Federal Government gives away tons of my money as grants to fund development like this. Just a suggestion to Stardock
Matt
(edited)
