Winboard for the Sight Impaired

[Dave Acevedo]

There is an old release of Winboard 4.0.2 for the blind and sight impaired that utilizes keyboard controls and vocal move announcements called Winboard for JAWS. JAWS is a screen reader.

Problems exist with this release and its ICS support and engine output window is broken and so the blind have no premium software for internet chess or access to engine evaluation.

This is a convenience for them that is long overdue. There is a large community of blind and sight impaired chess players around the world.

It is my great hope that one of the talented and generous programmers here could repair the few bugs and perhaps also modernize this code, which is open source I believe, and still available here: http://www.tim-mann.org/winboard/jaws/J ... Source.exe

I am not a programmer but I have a theory regarding the repairs; As the problems seem Winboard related, might the JAWS elements of the available source code simply be inserted into newer Winboard source?

Further it is difficult to supply engine evaluations accessible to the screen reading software as the evaluation is always changing and very long. Perhaps this could be solved by modifying the "Hint" functionality already inside of Winboard.

Dave Acevedo

[Dave Acevedo]

Hi guys,

I'm sorry if I got all sappy with the talented generous talk, i didn't mean to put anybody off, hehe...

But cm'on now... this is the best possible thing we could do for chess right now. As I say I am not a programmer or it would be done. It's a very worthy project. I expect someone to grab at this, work on it and released it soon.

Thanks
Dave

[Dave Acevedo]

Well I see we are dropping the ball on this one. What a humiliation.

Good Chess everybody.