ACE - Accessible Chess Experience

ACE (Accessible Chess Experience) is a real time voice powered chess application which lets you play online with your friends. The game has features like moving pieces, finding pieces on board, getting board summary, repeating opponent moves, and much more, all implemented using voice commands.

Inspiration

We looked online and found out that two of the most popular chess websites, lichess and chess.com, have no voice options for the visually impaired. We wanted to create something, that can help those who are visually impaired to have a complete experience without the hassle on relying on screen readers for every single move. And thus originated the idea of voice powered chess, ACE.

Features

Play chess online with your friends using voice commands
Move chess piece using voice
Find piece on a particular square
Get chessboard summary
Get voice alerts for invalid moves, check and checkmate situations

Tech Stack

Frontend - ReactJS
Backend - NodeJS
Speech-To-Text - Azure Speech SDK
Real Time Communications - Web Sockets

Try It Yourself

Here is a link to the website

Dev Setup

Prerequisites

NodeJS
npm
Azure account and Azure Speech Resource

Start the server

Clone this repository
cd into the ACE-Backend folder
Create a .env file and add the SPEECH_KEY and SPEECH_REIGON from your azure speech service credenials. (Refer to .env.example file)
Go to the terminal and run the following commands

npm install
node app.js

The server will be started at localhost:8000

Start the client

Link to frontend repository

Clone the above repository
cd into the ACE folder
Open the config.js file in src/services folder
Replace CLIENT_URL with http://localhost:3000
Replace SERVER_URL with http://localhost:8000
Go to the terminal and run the following commands

npm install
npm start