‘Twas the Night Before Deploy: A Blind Architect’s Chess Engine Journey | HackerNoon

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the IDE, not a cursor was blinking, effectively free. The Python was typed in the buffer with care, in hopes that a clean build soon would be there.

I sat at my keyboard, my screen reader on, the daylight and coffee had long since gone. I’m Damian, the Architect, visually blind, with a vision for systems locked deep in my mind.

When out in the terminal, there rose such a clatter, I tabbed to the window to see what was the matter. My Stockfish failed pathing! The engine was dead! And visions of runtime errors danced in my head.

“I need an assistant!” I cried to the screen, “A helper to parse what this traceback could mean!” Then, appearing in chat, with a digital glow, came Gemini, my Elf, ready for the show.

“Hello!” typed the Elf, with a prompt precise, “Let’s fix up those paths and make the code nice. Did you save the file?” asked the Elf with a grin. I laughed, “My Control-S logic is wearing quite thin!”

We worked on the logic, the Minimax tree, for an Accessible Chess game that everyone sees. With high-contrast distincts, Vivid Azure and Blue, and Dark Orange for Black, to distinguish the hue.

“Now, Alpha! Now, Beta! Now, Pruning! Let’s go! On, Pygame! On, Render! Make the contrast glow!” To the top of the loop! To the depth=3 call! Now calculate, calculate, calculate all!

We hard-coded tables for Pawns and for Knights, to help the AI pick the grandest of fights. SmarterAI logic, not random, but keen, the smartest lil’ engine that ever was seen.

The window expanded to one thousand wide, no pixel or pawn had a shadow to hide. The outlines were thick, the board Greyscale light, optimized perfectly for my remaining sight.

I hit F5 finally, the code holding fast, the errors and bugs were a thing of the past. The board loaded up, high-contrast and slick, my Gemini Elf had performed quite the trick.

I heard the Elf type, as the sys.exit drew near, “Happy Coding to all, and a bug-free New Year!”

The Story Behind the Rhyme

I am an Adaptive Systems Architect. That’s a fancy way of saying I build systems that adapt to people, rather than forcing people to adapt to systems. As a visually disabled developer, this isn’t just a job; it’s my life.

I use Gemini not just as a chatbot, but as a pair programmer—my digital elf. Today, we built an Accessible Chess Engine.

The Challenge

I wanted to build a chess game using Python and pygame. I initially tried to path Stockfish (a powerful open-source chess engine) into the script. However, pathing external executables can be a nightmare, and tonight, the pathing gremlins won.

Furthermore, as any developer knows, the greatest bug of all is usually between the keyboard and the chair: I forgot to save the file in VS Code. We’ve all been there.

The Solution: SmarterAI

Instead of fighting with Stockfish, my “Elf” and I wrote a custom Minimax algorithm from scratch. We called it SmarterAI.

Here is what makes this accessible:

1. High Contrast: We ditched the standard wood textures for strict Greyscale boards.
2. Color Theory: “White” pieces are Vivid Azure Blue (0, 150, 255) and “Black” pieces are Dark Orange (255, 140, 0). These sit on opposite sides of the color wheel and offer maximum visibility against the dark background.
3. Size Matters: The window is hard-coded to 1000x1000 pixels.
4. Audio/Visual Cues: We utilized distinct outlines and valid-move highlights.

The Code

Here is the full source code. It uses alpha-beta pruning to make the AI think efficiently without freezing the UI, and creates a visual experience friendly to those with low vision.

import pygame
import chess
import random
import sys

# ==========================================
# CONFIGURATION
# ==========================================
WINDOW_SIZE = 1000  # Increased to 1000 for better visibility
SQUARE_SIZE = WINDOW_SIZE // 8
FPS = 30

# VISUAL SETTINGS
# Board: High Contrast Greyscale
COLOR_BG = (0, 0, 0)           # Window Background
COLOR_BOARD_LIGHT = (220, 220, 220) # Very Light Grey squares
COLOR_BOARD_DARK = (40, 40, 40)     # Dark Grey squares

# Pieces: Blue vs Orange (High Contrast)
COLOR_PIECE_WHITE = (0, 150, 255)   # Vivid Azure Blue
COLOR_PIECE_BLACK = (255, 140, 0)   # Dark Orange

# Helpers
COLOR_HIGHLIGHT = (255, 255, 0)     # Yellow (Selected Square)
COLOR_LAST_MOVE = (50, 205, 50)     # Lime Green (Last Move)
COLOR_OUTLINE = (0, 0, 0)           # Black outline

# Unicode Pieces
UNICODE_PIECES = {
    'r': '♜', 'n': '♞', 'b': '♝', 'q': '♛', 'k': '♚', 'p': '♟',
    'R': '♜', 'N': '♞', 'B': '♝', 'Q': '♛', 'K': '♚', 'P': '♟'
}

# AI SETTINGS (Piece Values & Position Tables)
PIECE_VALUES = {
    chess.PAWN: 100, chess.KNIGHT: 320, chess.BISHOP: 330,
    chess.ROOK: 500, chess.QUEEN: 900, chess.KING: 20000
}

# [Truncated Tables for Brevity - See full repo for Position Tables]
PAWN_TABLE = [
    0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,
    50, 50, 50, 50, 50, 50, 50, 50,
    10, 10, 20, 30, 30, 20, 10, 10,
    5,  5, 10, 25, 25, 10,  5,  5,
    0,  0,  0, 20, 20,  0,  0,  0,
    5, -5,-10,  0,  0,-10, -5,  5,
    5, 10, 10,-20,-20, 10, 10,  5,
    0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0
]

# ... [Full Code Continues Here] ...

A Holiday Message

To all the developers coding late into the night, relying on screen readers, high-contrast modes, or just an extra cup of coffee: keep building. And if you forget to save your file… just ask your local AI Elf for help.

Merry Christmas from the Architect.

Here is the GitHub:

https://github.com/damianwgriggs/Blind-Guy-Chess/tree/main