Accessibility
An honest account, including the parts that do not work yet. The chess board has real gaps and they are named below rather than glossed over.
What works today
Every page on play-chess.io is built from semantic HTML with a single H1, ordered headings and real links, so a screen reader can navigate the structure and a browser reader mode can strip the pages cleanly. Text meets or exceeds the WCAG 2.1 AA contrast ratio against the dark background, and nothing carries meaning by colour alone.
- Keyboard focus is visible on every link and control, with a brass outline that does not rely on the browser default
- The mode, colour and level controls on the board are real buttons and report their state with
aria-pressed - Animation respects
prefers-reduced-motion: with that setting on, the page-load piece animation and hover transitions are switched off - Text reflows to a phone screen without horizontal scrolling or pinch-zooming, and page zoom to 200% does not break the layout
- Images carry alt text, and the board carries a describing label
Known gaps in the chess board
The board cannot currently be played with a keyboard. Moves are made through pointer and touch events only, which means a person who cannot use a mouse or a touchscreen cannot make a move, and the squares are not reachable in the tab order. This is the most serious gap on the site and the honest statement is that it fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.1.1 for keyboard operation.
There is also no live announcement of moves. Nothing on the board uses an aria-live region, so a screen reader user is not told what the computer or the other player just played, and would have to re-read the move list to find out.
Both gaps are in the interface rather than the engine, and both are fixable: square-by-square keyboard navigation with algebraic entry, and a polite live region announcing each move in notation. Publishing them here before they are fixed is deliberate — a statement that lists only strengths tells a disabled visitor nothing about whether the site will work for them.
The standard being worked toward
play-chess.io aims at WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The written pages substantially meet it today; the interactive board does not, because of the keyboard gap above. No formal third-party audit has been carried out, and no assistive-technology testing beyond manual checks — saying otherwise would overstate what has been done.
The testing that has been done, and what remains untested, is described on how the engine is tested.
How to report an accessibility problem
Write to the address on the contact page with the page, your assistive technology and what happened. Reports about the board carry more weight than anything else here, because that is where the known failures are.
If the board is unusable for you and you need a written record of a game, the move list beside the board is plain text in standard algebraic notation and can be copied out of the page. That is a workaround rather than a fix, and it is not offered as a substitute for making the board operable.
Last reviewed 2026-07-23. Changes to this page are listed by date at the bottom of about play-chess.io.