I am right now working on a tutorial on using lichess for those with low vision. Here’s a sneak peak:
Rough draft of using Lichess with low vision #
Prequisites: #
This tutorial is for those who already know how to play chess and already know how to notate their games. If you don’t know either I recommend you take the chess courses offered by Hadley Institute. Wikipedia also has a great article on algebraic chess notation. You will also need a tactile chess board. This can be inexpensively purchased from Amazon. I think if you take the Hadly course, they will provide a chess board for free. Finally you will need a screen reader as this menu option cannot be accessed without one.
Playing the Game #
You don’t need a Lichess account to use the site.
This tutorial uses NVDA but the lesson could probably also work with JAWS.
Head over to lichess.com. The preferred browser is Chrome although Firefox or Edge will work just fine (I don’t know about Safari). Tab over to the accessibility button and hit space bar to select. You may have to shift tab to go back to the accessibility button if NVDA is too far down the menu. Accessibility mode will make the site easier for screen readers and easier to navigate.
There are many different ways you can play chess on lichess. Some examples: you can play with friends, with strangers or with the computer. For the purpose of this lesson, we are going to play with the computer.
Go to the the tree view by hitting insert plus f7. Right arrow into Headings. Tab into the Headings menu. Press the down arrow until you hear “level one play 2 of 15”. Hit enter to select. Tab into Create a Game. Continue to hit Tab until you have reached Play with the Computer. Hit the space bar. For simplicity and brevity we are going to go with the default settings. Tab until you’ve reached Create a Game. Select it by hitting the space bar. You will immediately be brought to a text input box where you may enter your moves. By default, the speach output reads in “Anna knight takes felix 3”. You can change this by going into the tree navigation with insert plus f7, hitting the down arrow until you reach “Settings” and then tab into the move notation box. Use the up and down arrows to find the notation reading that works for you. I prefer Literate: Knight takes f3.
Happy playing! In the next tutorial, I will walk through a game where I intentially try to lose to the computer to fools mate.
This still needs a lot of work and I do plan to expand the chess series to other topics like challenging a stranger and maybe even solving chess puzzles.
On Math, chess and other games. #
In Chess, you note where your piece has moved with a coordinate system that consists of letters for columns and numbers for rows. For example, the starting position for White’s king is e1 (where e is the column named e and 1 is the first row) and for Black’s king, it is e8. The movement of any given chess piece can be evaluated as an equation of a line-something taking the form of mx+b. A programmer probably wouldn’t use something that primitive because it would be tedious but the point that I’m trying to illustrate is that everything can be abstracted in a way that doesn’t require sight. You can make any game that can be fit into a coordinate system into a game that is accessible to the blind.
I only recently started getting back into chess and I think it’s amazing how accessible the game is not just at the casual level but also professional. Obviously I still think there’s a lot that can be done (like pressuring chess.com to be more accessible).
But this got me to thinking about other games like Scrabble. The same techniques a blind person uses to play chess I think could also be used for scrabble. Scrabble has 15 columns going from a to o and 15 rows from 1 to 15. I think in some ways making an accessible scrabble game should be easier than chess as the pieces are stationary once placed on the board. Similar to a line in chess, you can think of each scrabble play as creating an array of characters. For example, suppose you placed the word jupon, this could be interpreted as a1a5 jupon. The array starts at (includes a1) where j is placed and ends at a5 (includes a5) where n is placed. You can gleam from this that jupon is a vertical array with 5 characters.
Anyway an accessible verison of Scrabble does exist from rsgames and here’s a good review of it.
The point is I can’t really think of any board game a blind person wouldn’t be able to play. Go? Why not?