A demo of Virtual Chess Board, an app designed to accessibly watch chess.
Uploaded by: kavya
Upload date: 12/2/2025
Description:
Hey everyone, super excited to announce the release of my chess app!
The demo gives you all the details, but here's a short summery.
The app functions just like a regular chess board, but with features to set up positions and most importantly watch games.
You can copy FEN or pgn files into the app and have it set up the positions or the games, letting you go back and forward through them, explore variations and read comments.
The app comes with several builtin files of youtube videos, which you can watch alongside the app.
Important note: These videos were created by grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky, a truly great player and teacher who abruptly passed away this october. These files, and this whole app, are my small contribution to his memory in the hopes that I can help his amazing content reach more people.
These videos mostly comprise of him playing chess games against chess players at the beginner level and explaining his moves and the mistakes his opponent is making. He has hundreds of these, playing all level of opponents. Please check them out, they're intuitive, helpful and entertaining!
Also I've included a lesson he recorded about endgames, which contains one of the most fasinating endgames I've ever seen! That's for the slightly more advanced chess players among you, let me know if you want more content from that series.
Download link: https://kavyapriya.itch.io/virtual-chess-board
Please leave comments telling me your thoughts, suggestions and especially your feedback on the videos I included and the viewing experience you had. Many more videos are planned, and if you want me to work on something else, either a video or something like a puzzle book, let me know!
G00N - 12/02/2025
Thank you so much for this app I think it'll be a great help. If I might ask, how is this different from an app blind people traditionally use; like winboard? I know lichess serves a different purpose to play competitively practice etc. Not saying it doesn't, genuinely curious and I think there is quite a potential for a11y in this area. Especially crosss platform.
Kavya - 12/02/2025
Hey, thanks for the interest. I've never actually heard of winboard, I was looking for tools like this and couldn't find much stuff apart from lichess. One thing about this app which I've not seen in other apps (though I might be wrong) is how it lets you watch games, letting you quickly look through other variations written in the pgn, and reads out any comments. Also the feature to set up your own positions manually instead of copy pasting a FEN, as most websites seem to want you to do. I built this app to help my overall project idea of making more chess content for blind people viewable, either from youtube videos, books, articals, anything. Its a large task and will take a long time, but it is the plan. So if people wanna see something they've always wanted to read but can't, let me know. Anyway because of that, the app also has the capability to load multiple games and example positions from the same file and lets you choose which one you want to watch from a menu. This way you could have files with multiple games, files with multiple puzzles, and even have the solutions from those puzzles built in. I didn't get to touch on this in the demo but the app lets you load a game that starts in a custom position instead of default, letting you watch games from the middle etc. As for cross platform, again if that's something people want let me know, and let me know the platform you're on. I'll try and do whatever it takes to get it on there!