Brailliance Manual

Table of Contents

Introduction

Welcome to Brailliance by Themis Games! Brailliance is a puzzle game where you guess the word by adding up braille dots. This game has been carefully crafted to be playable by everyone, and it includes multiple accessibility features for people with blindness and other disabilities. For players with unhindered sight, tap the keyboard as you normally would and enjoy the challenge. For everyone else, the game is fully compatible with popular screen readers and can be played with a number of different input methods including keyboards and accessibility shortcuts.

Rules Overview

Guess the correct word to win.

Each guess must contain the total number of braille dots shown.

Letters turn GREEN if they're somewhere in the answer.

Guesses can be any length, so long as the dot sum matches.

You get unlimited guesses. Try to win in as few guesses as possible!

You can play an interactive tutorial by selecting "How to Play" from the main menu.

What are valid words?

Brailliance uses the free ENABLE dictionary. This game follows "scrabble" rules, meaning proper nouns and abbreviations are not valid guesses. Overall, correct answers have been hand-picked to be real, commonly-used words from the English language with very few redundant plurals or conjugations.

Notes on General Accessibility

Brailliance attempts the impossible task of being accessible to everyone. Accessibility is still a growing field of study, and each person's hardware setup and software environment is unique. Please read through the interaction models that pertain most to your situation, as the game may deviate from standard web browsing where necessary. Then, if you would like us to support your specific environment, please send us a polite message via our contact form with as many details about your setup as possible.

Please pay special attention to our recommendations for each interaction model. We do our best to adhere to accessibility standards, but many hardware manufacturers differ from the standards or omit features entirely. Wherever we find these incompatibilities, we will list them below and offer workarounds should they exist.

Interaction Models

Brailliance supports multiple ways to interact with the game. Players with unhindered vision can tap or mouse click to victory. For all other players, you can use keyboards, screen readers, and braille displays both for input and output.

Mouse and Touch Controls

Brailliance can be played just like other guessing games of its kind. Type on the braille keyboard to enter your guess, then press the Enter key to submit it.

You can tap the Swap Keyboard button in the bottom left to arrange the keyboard by QWERTY, alphabet, or braille dot sum.

Keyboard Controls and Shortcuts

Keyboards are fully supported, even without accessibility features enabled.

Type to enter your guess, then press the Enter or Return key to submit it.

Numbers 1, 2, or 3 arrange the on-screen keyboard by QWERTY, alphabet, or braille dot sum.

Enter confirms dialog boxes.

Escape dismisses dialog boxes, or backs out of a level.

iOS VoiceOver Controls

With VoiceOver enabled, you can swipe left and right or scan with your finger to survey the puzzle and enter your guesses.

Activate anything at your focus point with a double-tap.

The game starts you on the Status display. This dynamically informs you about your puzzle progress.

Swipe Left to find holistic readouts of your current guess, previously discovered correct and incorrect letters, and a list of your previous guesses.

Swipe right to find the keyboard. The first option allows you to open your device's native keyboard, but everything to the right of that is a virtual keyboard that offers more insight into your puzzle progress. The virtual keyboard describes each letter, its braille dot sum, and whether that letter is known to be correct or incorrect.

Android TalkBack Controls

With TalkBack enabled, you can swipe left and right or scan with your finger to survey the puzzle and enter your guesses.

Activate anything at your focus point with a double-tap.

The game starts you on the Status display. This dynamically informs you about your puzzle progress.

Swipe Left to find holistic readouts of your current guess, previously discovered correct and incorrect letters, and a list of your previous guesses.

Swipe right to find the keyboard. The first option allows you to open your device's native keyboard, but everything to the right of that is a virtual keyboard that offers more insight into your puzzle progress. The virtual keyboard describes each letter, its braille dot sum, and whether that letter is known to be correct or incorrect.

MacOS VoiceOver Controls

With VoiceOver enabled, you can use your arrow keys to have your current position read back to you.

Activate anything at your focus point with the Enter or Space keys.

The game starts you on the Status display. This dynamically informs you about your puzzle progress.

Arrow Left to find holistic readouts of your current guess, previously discovered correct and incorrect letters, and a list of your previous guesses.

Arrow right to find a virtual keyboard that offers more insight into your puzzle progress. The virtual keyboard describes each letter, its braille dot sum, and whether that letter is known to be correct or incorrect. While you can use this virtual keyboard, it is intended that desktop users keep to the status readouts to the left and use standard keyboard inputs to play the game.

MacOS Voice Control Controls

NOT IMPLEMENTED. Voice Control support is pending development. We need dedicated testers to help guide our development of this feature. Please contact us if you are willing to help.

NVDA Controls

With NVDA, you can use your arrow keys to have your current position read back to you.

Activate anything at your focus point with the Enter or Space keys.

The game starts you on the Status display. This dynamically informs you about your puzzle progress.

Arrow Left to find holistic readouts of your current guess, previously discovered correct and incorrect letters, and a list of your previous guesses.

Arrow right to find a virtual keyboard that offers more insight into your puzzle progress. The virtual keyboard describes each letter, its braille dot sum, and whether that letter is known to be correct or incorrect. While you can use this virtual keyboard, it is intended that desktop users keep to the status readouts to the left and use standard keyboard inputs to play the game.

JAWS Controls

With JAWS, you can use your arrow keys to have your current position read back to you.

Activate anything at your focus point with the Enter or Space keys.

The game starts you on the Status display. This dynamically informs you about your puzzle progress.

Arrow Left to find holistic readouts of your current guess, previously discovered correct and incorrect letters, and a list of your previous guesses.

Arrow right to find a virtual keyboard that offers more insight into your puzzle progress. The virtual keyboard describes each letter, its braille dot sum, and whether that letter is known to be correct or incorrect. While you can use this virtual keyboard, it is intended that desktop users keep to the status readouts to the left and use standard keyboard inputs to play the game.

You may reclaim a placed tile before it is played by activating it again.

Compatibility note: By default, JAWS will read all punctuation. We use puntuation to guide other screen readers for increased clarity. While we look into a better way to handle this, we recommend reducing your verbosity setting in JAWS.

Landmarks of Interest

Status Readout

In the center of the screen, a status readout keeps you appraised of your current puzzle progress. This also gives you specific information about your previous guess, and is especially verbose for screen reader users.

Current Guess

As you type, letters appear in the center of the screen along with a running tally of how many braille dots you've used. This area doubles as a text description for screen reader users.

Previous Guesses

Your previous guesses appear above your current guess. This area doubles as a text description for screen reader users. Screen Reader users may also swipe through additional sections here which keep track of known correct and incorrect letters as you find them.

Braille Keyboard

The on-screen braille keyboard lets you see letters and their braille equivalents at a glance. Type on the keyboard, then press the Enter key to submit your guess. Known good letters appear green, and known bad letters dim. Be aware, you can still use known bad letters if you desire. All of this information is sent to your screen reader or braille display as you scan this area with your finger.

Native Keyboard

On supported platforms, you can place your cursor in the native keyboard text field. This allows you to use whatever input device you desire. For instance, you could play entirely in braille with the iOS Screen Braille Input, which allows you to type braille directly via a virtual Perkins keyboard. This native keyboard field may also be better for certain refreshable braille displays.

Themis Games Pro

Brailliance is a free game with no advertisements. For free, you get access to a daily puzzle and the tutorial.

Subscribers to Themis Games Pro get access to two infinite modes. The standard game includes hundreds of levels of increasing difficulty for you to play one after another. The Challenge Mode ratchets the game up to its full potential with longer words, creative hints, and other features we just find fun and rewarding.

Themis Games Pro grants access to the entire Themis Games library of games, including Wordvoyance.

Browser Support

Different web browsers often work differently from one another. Because of this, you may encounter issues when playing on browsers we haven't tested for compatibility.

The following are browsers that we officially support:

If you encounter issues with any of these supported browsers, please let us know us via our contact page. We encourage feedback about other browsers as well, and we will author bugfixes within reason, though we may or may not choose to officially support anything else.

Browser-specific known issues:

None at this time.

Credits and Contact Information

Brailliance is created by a small team of enthusiastic and dedicated developers. You may reach out to us via our contact form.

Austin Larson - Game Designer and Engineer

Tyelor Klein - Software Engineer

Ben Ritter - Software Engineer

Jason Stock - Software Engineer


Special Thanks to our enthusiasts, evangelists, and testers:

Gab DeCastro for providing detailed and thoughtful consultation, testing, feedback, and moral support.

Wenwei Fisher for detailed technical testing and advising on UI and UX augmentations for screen readers.


Copyright Themis Games, all rights reserved.