Low Dexterity Chess

Inspiration

As a child, I enjoyed playing chess with my grandpa. However, he has Parkinson's, and now his hands are frequently shaky. This isn't too much of a limitation when playing on physical boards, but I don't get to see him in person that much. I haven't seen a version of online chess that accommodates this, but I have seen online chess with auditory descriptions that enable blind or low-vision people to play on their platforms.

What it does

Allows someone to play chess with only two input keys: F and J, or Tab and Return. F and J were chosen because of the tactile nub on these keys on all English keyboards I've used. Tab and Return are alternative keys chosen since they are about twice the size of other keys. Only requires downloading the folder and writing (or copying) a single command into the command line to run the site on localhost.

How I built it

Integrated the chess AI known as "Stockfish" as the opponent. Stockfish is used in multiple popular online chess platforms to evaluate positions and determine best moves. This uses existing code libraries for the chessboard. Creates a list of all possible moves and sorts it in an intuitive way for the user (when viewing all moves instead of a subset).

Challenges I ran into

Determining the order to display the moves when viewing a limited number of moves rather than going through all possible moves. I used Stockfish to determine best moves, added some random moves, then mixed up the order (so someone doesn't automatically know from the order of moves which move is the best).

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Making the entire thing in just JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Making it easy for a person not that familiar with computers to use this was a priority. I'm also proud to have made a website, since my skills are more focused on back-end development.

What's next for Low Dexterity Chess

Ideally, this would have more auditory cues/descriptions and an actual website rather than just running on localhost (127.0.0.1). This has potential to be worked into existing online chess websites, or enable multiplayer separately.