Feature Request: Stone Position Announcement

OGS Development
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I am legally blind. I can still see a bit and use vision to play Go. When I’m playing, if an opponent plays in a spot I don’t expect (which is often) I have to scan the entire board to find where they played. This can take anywhere from 5 seconds to a minute. I will often eat through an entire byoyomi just looking for the move.

I’m currently working on a little script I’ll dump into the console that will announce the moves position for me with audio.

I was wondering if there would be any benefit for a feature similar to this to anyone but me. I would also be happy with text at the top of the board that said the position of the last move.

20 Likes
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How does it work with coordinates?

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Hopefully it would work with currently implement coordinate systems, and be set up to add new voices and coordinate systems in the future if someone volunteered to do so

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Audouard might be a good option to add, given as it was designed by someone with severe vision impairment

Other corner-relative systems would be cool, but aren’t as popular

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The script I have now is very hack-y. it just listens to the websocket and if it’s a move message, hooks into the browsers default text-to-speech API and announces that.

A full featured version would want to be built in and toggle-able and such.

That coordinate system is interesting. I do like it better as well. I do have to do a lot of mental conversion in my head to understand where the move is (if it’s not in the upper left)

Writing a conversion to that system would be trivial.

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Yeah, corner-relative systems are easier to visualize, and Audouard Coordinates are a corner-relative system designed to be intuitive to non-math people

Honestly, 80% of the reason I use Japanese (aka “1-1”) style coordinates on OGS, is because even though it’s not corner-relative, it’s the one that is most similar. If Audouard Coordinates were implemented, I’d switch to using those

I’d like if the audio was recorded by humans, and available (pending volunteers to record, of course) in multiple languages/voices

2 Likes
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Does OGS allow keyboard input of moves like lichess does? that could pair nicely with this for true can’t-even-see-the-empty-board blindfold play

note some very important facets of the lichess feature:

  • Flexible: if possible, input should be accepted in all implemented coordinate systems, and if there is a true conflict, then compromises such as tying it to board coordinates chosen or letting it be independently selected should be used. Extraneous separator characters should be stripped if possible
  • Hear Time: typing “time” or “clock” should read out the amount of time and byo-yomi periods both players have left, starting with your own (since that’s more urgent to know)
  • Hear Last Move: typing “last” (maybe different word could work better?) will read out the coordinate of the last move again (respecting format settings for that, of course). This is useful if you’re not sure you heard it right the first time
  • Focus: the move input box can be reliably focused just using the keyboard, without needing to see the screen

See the penultimate section of that link for a few things I missed

1 Like
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Yes, I imagine a script like this would be very useful to other players. If you are interested, there has been some discussion on GitHub:

There is still a lot of work to be done, but OGS recently added an SVG board, which should be a easier to add accessibility features (such as tab focus and aria labels)

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I posses not a single skill to help you with your request but I sure hope something workable is figured out. That would be really nice. Good luck you all!

3 Likes
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I prefer the Japanese coordinates simply because I cannot remember the position of all letters in the alphabet :slight_smile: With two numbers, it’s easy to remember that 10-10 is the center point for example, but what is the 10th letter of the alphabet? I honestly don’t know that without counting from the start, or looking at an annotated go board :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Further, it changes depending on whether you include i or not, so some boards have s as the 19th letter and others have t if i is skipped.

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We already have humans of many languages saying, IIRC, all the numbers from 1-19 at least (I hope, it may only be 1-10 but I think it is 1-30), from the introduction of voiced joseki countdown, so these can be repurposed to read out coordinates during play if desired.

1 Like
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That too. The meaning of a letter is not tied to its alphabetic position, but the meaning of a number is tied to its numeric position, so the latter is much more appropriate for coordinates

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My current script hooks into the socket to voice the moves. However if I’m doing reviews this doesn’t work.

Does anyone know what objects or callbacks I’d hook into to listen for moves being added to the board?

For reference my hacky script is the following:


var encodeCoord = (x, y)=>{
  var isLeft = x <= 10;
  var isUpper = y <= 10;
  if(x > 10){
    x = 19 - x;
  }else{
    x += 1
  }
  if(y > 10){
    y = 19 - y
  }else{
    y += 1
  }
  var letter;
  if(isUpper && isLeft)
    letter = "A"
  else if(isUpper && !isLeft)
    letter = "B"
  if(!isUpper && !isLeft)
    letter = "C"
  if(!isUpper && isLeft)
    letter = "D"
  return `${letter} ${x} ${y}`
}
socket.socket.onmessage = (message) =>{
  if(!message.data)
    return;
  var arr = JSON.parse(message.data);
  if(!Array.isArray(arr))
    return;
  var dataInfo = arr[0].split('/')
  if(dataInfo.length < 3 || dataInfo[2] !== 'move')
    return;)
  var move = arr[1].move;
  var str = encodeCoord(move[0], move[1]);

  var speech = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance();
  speech.text = str;

  speech.lang = 'en-US'; 
  speech.volume = 1;  
  speech.rate = 0.7;     
  speech.pitch = 1;   

  window.speechSynthesis.speak(speech);
}
1 Like
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I guess noone actually answered this? Though I guess we did implicitly assume that it was a useful feature

While I do not have trouble seeing things near to me, I would still use this for a more authentic Blindfold Go experience if it were paired with a facile way to enter moves via keyboard (as I’ve described in other posts in this thread)

1 Like