To be honest, I have the same needs:
- keep a position of an unfinished game over the table
- validate my solutions of puzzzles from a paper book
I find the board editor slow to use and I wanted to add shorcuts to make it faster.
On the desktop, moving around with arrows and pressing r key to add a black rook.
This would really look like the start of a non visual interface.
I have not started yet and I see the accessibility has been suggested in the past https://github.com/lichess-org/chessground/issues/158
On the mobile, the visual board editor is touch screen friendly and so should be the accessible version.
I will dig into it but it is a bit challenging
Another reason I have not started yet is because I found that the fastest way to write a FEN is writing it yourself
It's surprisingly straight forward.
You flip the board to see the position as white
You start from the top left corner (square a8) and you scan from there
When a square has a piece, you write the usual piece name (k q r b n p) .. uppercase for white, lowercase for black
When a square has no piece, you write the number of adjacent squares with no piece ... a blank rank would be 8
When you go to the next rank you write / forward slash
At the end, you have 8 groups of letters and number separated by forward slash characters
Last thing is to add whose turn it is ... w for white b for black separated by a space
There some additional refinements like if white and black castling was performed but I never use it.
You don't need a lot of practice before it becomes natural
To be honest, I have the same needs:
- keep a position of an unfinished game over the table
- validate my solutions of puzzzles from a paper book
I find the board editor slow to use and I wanted to add shorcuts to make it faster.
On the desktop, moving around with arrows and pressing r key to add a black rook.
This would really look like the start of a non visual interface.
I have not started yet and I see the accessibility has been suggested in the past https://github.com/lichess-org/chessground/issues/158
On the mobile, the visual board editor is touch screen friendly and so should be the accessible version.
I will dig into it but it is a bit challenging
Another reason I have not started yet is because I found that the fastest way to write a FEN is writing it yourself
It's surprisingly straight forward.
You flip the board to see the position as white
You start from the top left corner (square a8) and you scan from there
When a square has a piece, you write the usual piece name (k q r b n p) .. uppercase for white, lowercase for black
When a square has no piece, you write the number of adjacent squares with no piece ... a blank rank would be 8
When you go to the next rank you write / forward slash
At the end, you have 8 groups of letters and number separated by forward slash characters
Last thing is to add whose turn it is ... w for white b for black separated by a space
There some additional refinements like if white and black castling was performed but I never use it.
You don't need a lot of practice before it becomes natural