Blindfold Solitaire

original article by MARTY SCHULTZ

One of the first games that I built about 5 years ago was Blindfold Solitaire, and it continues to be one of the most popular of the Blindfold series.

It contains about 24 varieties of Solitaire, starting with  Klondike (the game everyone associates with Solitaire and includes both the 1 card and 3 card variants), Spider (with 3 variants), Freecell (with 10 variants), Golf (with 6 variants), and Baroness, Fourteen Out and Gay Gordon.

Blindfold Solitaire is the game where we pioneered the concept of gesture control as a preferred way to play a game when you cannot see the screen.

When a visually impaired person uses an iPhone, they normally use phone’s voice-over features.  When voice-over is enabled, as you swipe  left and right, the iPhone tells you what button you are at.  For example, on the home screen, if the first row of icons are MAIL, CALENDAR, CLOCK and SAFARI, as you swipe left, you’ll hear the phone say “mail”.  Swipe again, and you’ll hear “calendar”, and so on.  To start one of those apps, you double tap the screen.

In many cases, using voice-over means lots of swiping left and right, up and down, and then finally double tapping.  That can make game play – especially a game like Solitaire – much slower.

Instead, Solitaire uses gesture control.  It makes game playing much faster; you move cards using the following gestures:

• swipe up and down to move within a pile
• swipe left and right to move between piles
• double tap to select a card to be moved, and start playing a beeping sound to tell you that the card (or cards) is about to be moved.
• double tap again to deposit a card (or group of cards) somewhere
• tap with 2 fingers to flip sequentially between the deck, the waste pile, the foundation and the tableau.
• swipe down with 2 fingers to hear all of the cards in a pile.
• swipe left with 2 fingers to hear the top card in all the piles of either the foundation or the tableau.
• shake the phone to hear your status in the game, such as the number of cards left, or the top waste pile card.

To download Solitaire from the Apple app store, link here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blindfold-solitaire/id949649793?mt=8