Fine, no one reply. Heh.

Just to clarify what I mean by chess notation, I'll give a quick description and example.
White's queen's rook starts on the a1 square. Rows are numbered, columns are lettered. That said, black's king's rook is on h8. When denoting where a pawn moves, you just say the square it's moving to. When denoting where another piece moves, it's R for rook, N for knight, B for bishop, Q for queen, K for king. To kill a piece, you say "knight x (square designation)", or, for instance, Nxd5. - in the case of a pawn, you simply use the square designations (for instance, exd5). The square designation for the pawn which is capturing is letter only. To denote check, the + sign is used. To denote king-side castling, the o-o or 0-0 symbol is used...just insert an extra -0 at the end for queen-side castling. To denote checkmate, the # is used.
So  I'll give a fairly simple example of how it works:

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bb5 d6
4. Bxc6+ bxc6
5. d4 exd4
6. Nxd4 Nf6
7. Nc3 Be7
8. 0-0 0-0

Now, that's a really lame example, but it uses a good number of pieces and makes the point.

Any interest yet? *poke*

Where can you get them?

Ooooh! I'm having a day of forgetting stuff, left my bank card in the bank this morning and had to run to get it, for the third time forgot that I now am an ubrella owner so consequently got soaked, and almost forgot my cheque book later on this after noon.

to continue my heads' resemblance to a bucket, I now forget to post links, ----- oooopse! Here you go http://www.arkangles.com/kchess/index.html
There are two programs, advanced and illete. advanced has fewer features, but is cheaper, and both have demos, ---- so hopefully plenty of choice there.

It really is a long time sinse I've played chess Jayde, I used to go to the braille chess association tournaments with my brother and would come mid range, ---- once I even went to the international under 21s in belgium, sinse they didn't have enough young Vi british players to make up the team. I came 21st out of about 50 in the tournament rankings, which I was quite happy with.

that was about eight years ago though, and I haven't played sinse.

I deffinately would want some experience with Chess before I tired playing against someone, ---- pluss, sinse my visualization (along with my spacial awareness), is absolutely pants, I'd need to physically keep a board, which would mean buying a braille one! I have a beautiful Lotr chess set, but it's not really accessible for actually playing the game of chess with, and I'd forget which piece was which.

I'll get back to you on this one though, ---- perhaps when I've had chance to check out the kchess program.

Well, it seems that the "average" level is about as good as any expert I've ever played. I dunno, there's novice (which I wail on), average and expert wail on me. Average, though, I stand a fighting chance.

I wonder if "elite has more options. And I'm wondering how long these demos last.

Turns out there's a little depth indicator, of sorts, in with Elite's Strength options. It goes from 0 to 45 in increments of 3. It was always set on 45 for both  "average" and "expert" so there was essentially no difference. I bumped it way down, smoked the AI, bumped it back up again, won again, then went a little higher and really had to scrap for it. I'm sitting at 36 right now.
And I'll have you know: I -loathe the Najdorf Sicilian.

LOL. That has to  be bad and he isn't welcom at my house. Well, I don't know him, so I don't know, but I'll give that chess game a try ASAP and not in the loo. Hope you are not that bad or good depending on who's point of view.

Hmmm Jayde, as I said my lousy spacial sense would make life difficult if you have to review the pieces with a screen reader. I'll deffinately see about getting a board first though.

CW, if you have MSN and can make sense of the rules, I can  help as well if you have a board.

Well, here in England you can get accessible chess boards from the Rnib, so I imagine similar organizations in other countries would sell them, --- the same sort of organizations that sell braille playing cards and such.

As to remembering all the rules, their not too bad to learn basically I found, though castling, enpassen (which I'm probably missspelling horribly), and some of the finer points of checkmate I found tripped me up for a while until I was used to them.

Luckily, anyone, --- even a computer program can explain the rules, it's masteries them that's the tricky part.

As soon as I actually have some money I'll see about ordering a braille chess board and trying out one of the chess programs myself.

CW, make sure that in the case of your pawns that can move, you aren't blocking them with other pieces or that moving a pawn won't put your king in check. If your king gets attacked directly as a result of moving a piece, you can't move that piece.

As for braille boards? I dunno...I've never used one, and learned on the average run-of-the-mill cardboard-and-plastic jobs elementary students tend to play on. I now own one made of wood whose white squares are recessed and whose black pieces have small pins in their tops, and whose basis is a pegboard (small pegs in the bases of the pieces fitted into holes in the center of each square basically mean it's hard to knock something over and literally impossible to just bump something out of true). But so long as I know the size of the board and the free area just around its outside (most boards have 'em), it doesn't matter. Essentially, as long as you're against an opponent who'll make do for the occasional half-on half-off pieces and/or as long as you know your rules and your calls, it's really really easy, and you don't need to shell out big bucks for an accessible board. I find my wooden one's a treat, but I could do fine without one.

Also consider: you can make your own accessible board if you can get a way of figuring how to lightly outline the squares on a pre-existing board and to differentiate the black and white pieces.

Dark, the move you speak of is called "en passant", it's French for "in passing", and that's literally what you're doing. Here's how it works.
If you move a pawn up two squares from its original position, and it ends up directly beside one of my pawns, I can capture it en passant as if it had only moved once.
Reall simple example, and if you know the notation this'll be nothing at all:
1. E4 d5
2. E5 f5
3. Exf6 (there's your en-passant capture, nailing the f-pawn as if it had been sitting on f6, diagonal to the e5 pawn). I have used this move three times, and never found it useful. I castle all the time though. Castling's great fun.

LOL. Spotting the diaganals seem to be the easy thing for me. Guess I'll just practice until I master it. Oh yeh, White pon From A2 to a4

Well, I have played chess on a standard board before, ---- once even on an outside board where the pieces were around three feet high, --- that was fun, ;D. And the fact that I can see the difference betwene the black and white pieces does of course help.

it's just a preference thing I suppose Jayde, also me not exactly being the most deft fingered person ever, I am inclined to knock pieces off squares while moving them (another advantage of the three foot tall pieces, ;D).

next time I go home though, I'll see what I can find in terms of a board, then I'll try the chess programs with hal.