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Chess.Voice
An estimated 43 million people are blind and 295 million have moderate to severe visual impairment. Chess is one of the few games they play on completely equal terms, because the game itself needs no sight. The software does. Mainstream platforms are built around a drag and drop board, so a screen reader reads out 64 empty cells. Chess.com has been asked for accessibility for over a decade. Lichess built a real blind mode, and it still expects you to type your moves and run a screen reader. VoiceChessmate gets the board out of the way. You hold one key, say "knight to Felix 3", and the coach plays it and says what changed. Ask why a move was bad and you get the engine's own number: "That was a blunder. Queen to Felix 7 gives up about 7.8 pawns. Knight to Cesar 3 was stronger." It says what you lost and what was better, because it can compute both. It will not claim a tactic it cannot verify. Moves are spoken in the IBCA alphabet used at blind tournaments: Anna, Bella, Cesar, David, Eva, Felix, Gustav, Hector. That alphabet exists because B, D, E and G sound nearly identical over a microphone, and that is exactly the alphabet chess uses. A misheard letter is not an error message here. It is a legal, different, losing move. So when the match is not confident, the agent reads back the real legal options instead of guessing. A sighted player undoes a wrong move in a second. A blind player might not notice for several moves. Blindfold mode hides the position and scores you on naming pieces that are not there. Hands free mode listens continuously and confirms each move first. Audio streams as 24kHz PCM16 over one WebSocket to AssemblyAI's Voice Agent API, carrying speech to text, turn detection, the model and the voice on one connection. The agent acts through 18 typed tools run against a real minimax engine, never a description of the board. 618 tests cover it, and axe-core reports zero WCAG violations.
30 Sep 2026
