Presentation, Making Unrelatable Things Relatable

As an engineer, we often find ourselves immersed in the technical intricacies of our work. During presentations, we may struggle to conver our ideas to a non-technical audience.

It's difficult because they don't share our background, and we often forget about that.

This is a story about how I managed to pitch a chess app for visually impaired people to a panel of judges at the Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) 2025 in Taiwan,

none of them were chess players and none of them were visually impaired.

App development

To be honest, during the initial ideation I also thought "who would even play chess on the phone when they can't see?"

But then, we started to go to a local chess club for visually impaired players, and I was surprised by their story. They were passionate about chess, and they absolutely can play chess on their phone using talkback, there are several apps that supports that.

Talkback is a screen reader that reads out the content on the screen for visually impaired users. It allows them to navigate and interact with apps using gestures.

I was really touched when they said the reason they rarely wins against sighted players was not because they can't see the board, but because learning materials are hardly accessible.

There were minimal braile books for them.

Digitalization should have made it easier right? But even the largest chess platform, which has game analysis, puzzles, and courses, is not accessible for them. It doesn't support talkback.

Game analysis is a feature that allows players to review their games and learn from their mistakes. It provides insights into the best moves, alternative strategies, and overall performance.

This was the moment I truly understood the problem, after interacting with them. Without doing so, I wouldn't have known about these problems.

Creating the Pitch Flow and Deck

There were a lot of revisions in this part. Really, how are we supposed to make the judges relate to the problem when they don't play chess and they can see perfectly?

We had to squeeze our brain to think it through.

1. Start with a detailed user story

Starting the pitch, we first introduced the story of Gressia, a visually impaired chess player who struggled to find accessible learning materials. We described her challenges in detail. We also explained the mechanism of chess and its learning tools in general, so that the judges could understand the context of the problem.

2. Show how the user interacts with the digital app

This is crucial, as simply explaining what the user faces is not enough judges would still question how Gressia usually play chess on her phone. We showed a video of Gressia using the app, demonstrating how she navigates through the phone with talkback.

3. The rest of the pitch

Once the judges understood the problem and how Gressia interacted with her phone, the rest of the pitch became much easier. We could finally talk about VoiceChess itself, our solution, testimonials, impact, and the features we built.

Conclusion

In order to make other people relate to a problem, we need to understand it first obviously. But more importantly, we have to navigate the gap between our understanding and the audience's understanding and imagine ourselves being the audience. Use stories, videos, and words that are short but simple to describe a certain term or concept.