Mike, I played D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder with a blind player for years. I've admittedly never run a game whilst blind, but I've run sessions with no materials, so it's definitely possible to DM without looking at books or die.
I will record an HPR episode with more detail and thought, but here's a quick summary: D&D core rulebooks are available as audio books. D&D Beyond is apparently accessible to blind users. [Untested] Thoughts about what traditionally is made possible by vision: * No adventure module necessary: Make up an adventure in your head, on the fly. Reacting to players is what makes you a player yourself, otherwise you're just a referee, and that's boring. * You need to know, or at least have a feel for, monster stats. You can have players read stats and features for you (assuming one of them has a Monster Manual), or you can memorize stats from the audio version, or you can just invent your own -- although making stuff up that's fair takes some practise. People say players shouldn't know the stats of monsters, but I've never played a game of D&D without at least one player knowing a monster's stats _from memory_ better than I do. It just doesn't matter. * Tell your players to buy some graph paper and map their progress through a town or dungeon. I don't know about you, but I don't have a cartographer following me around in real life giving me directions, so don't think a DM is obligated to map everything out for the player characters. * Theater-of-the-mind instead of battle maps. I don't want to bog down my analogue game with technology, so I don't tend to use mapping software in my online games. Combat can get fuzzy as a result, but stay flexible, don't be too strict about movement speed, describe the combat layout frequently to keep everyone on the same page, and it works out fine. * Have players manage initiative order and damage. * Have players roll your die. As a DM, I never conceal rolls from players, so it doesn't really matter whether I roll or not. Just tell a player to roll a d20 for you, or a d6 for damage, or whatever. Frankly, there's a certain sadism to this, too. Players have to roll to inflict pain upon each other or themselves. It can be more fun than the DM rolling. * Alternatively, you can just "pre roll" your dice. Generate a list of random numbers, and progress through these rolls in whatever accessible way you prefer. That's it! It's not at all a major shift, but a slight adjustment. If you ever want me to run you through a one-shot game and talk through the process, let me know. HPR episode forthcoming.
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