Chess content for the vision-impaired

Ideally, legally blind or severely vision-impaired players will also be computer gurus. This is not always the case.

Some are Luddites: if it’s not on paper, it doesn’t exist.

Others would be happy to consume chess content on (say) an iPad, but the enormous font size they require makes reading on an iPad impractical. (Also, many of these players have diabetic neuropathy, which means they don’t get the tactile feedback most tablet adepts rely upon.)

I just formatted major 2023 events (Wijk, WC, Superbet, and Norway Chess). It took 90 minutes to create a presentable 210-page document in 26-point Franklin Gothic Medium, and I kept thinking to myself that there’s got to be a better way.

In the meantime, shoot me a message with your email if you’d like a copy of the doc.

I can increase the size of the font displayed on my iPhone, but doing so doesn’t appear to change the wraparound, so you wind having to scroll left and right to read text on the same line.

I don’t know if there’s a way to make it more adaptive. I’ll ask on the Discourse meta forum.
Followup: This may be an IOS-specific problem, I don’t have an Android phone/device to test it with.

The USBCA (U.S. Braille C.A.) now has a newsletter. The guy who edits it is David Rosenkoetter (you may have met him, he is from Indiana), and the guy who is responsible for actually distributing it to members is Curtis Cockayne. I will send their email addresses to you if you are interested, and if I can figure out how to do PM’s in this new USCF forum system.

There is also a “blind-chess” listserv, but it is not very active; the last message I got from it was in January.

Bruce