Accessibility

Designed to be played without looking.

Cobble Gobble is a cozy city-walking game built to be played with the phone in a pocket — which makes it one of the very few games a blind or low-vision player can play the same way everyone else does: ears on the game, walking a real city.

Every claim on this page is backed by the shipping code (internal audit, July 2026).

The idea

You pick a city. Every street of its old town is lined with dots. You walk the street, you collect the dots, the street lights up gold on your map. Landmarks are fruit bonuses. That's the whole game.

The design pillar is heads-up: the phone stays pocketed and sound carries the play. Nothing on screen ever needs your attention. I built that for sighted walkers who want to look up and enjoy the city — but it means the core loop was audio-first from day one, not retrofitted. For a player who navigates by sound, the game isn't a lesser experience. It's the intended one.

What a blind or low-vision player actually gets

Spoken narration of every meaningful moment. An opt-in “Spoken updates” toggle reads street completions, fruit bonuses, and level clears aloud. Dots are deliberately not spoken — that would chatter constantly — so the audio stays a clean chime for dots and a spoken sentence for the things worth announcing.

It respects your VoiceOver settings. When VoiceOver is running, narration defers to your speaking rate and voice rather than overriding them.

A dedicated non-visual “Nearby streets” screen. Instead of forcing the map to be VoiceOver-navigable, I built the accessible surface as a list: every remaining street, nearest first, each read as one clean sentence — “Höllgasse, 120 meters northeast, 3 of 14 dots.” Distances are spelled out as words (“120 meters”, not “120 m”, which a screen reader reads as a letter). Directions are cardinal compass words chosen specifically because they stay true with the phone in your pocket — no device heading required.

Hints and values, not just labels. Every control on the map — start and pause, resume, “Stats & share,” the Nearby-streets button — carries a spoken VoiceOver hint, and the progress bar speaks its value (“77 of 128 streets”), so the whole screen is navigable by ear.

Audio that survives real life. Gameplay sound keeps playing with the screen locked and the phone pocketed, mixes with your podcast or music instead of stopping it, and self-heals after a phone call so a speech-only player isn't left in silence for the rest of the walk.

English and German, narration and labels both, matched to your device language and spoken in a matching voice.

Haptics for players who use them — a light tap on each event — offered honestly as a foreground extra, never sold as pocketed feedback (iOS delivers no haptics to a locked, pocketed app, and I don't pretend otherwise).

Beyond blindness

Dynamic Type: text uses semantic type styles throughout, so it scales with the system text-size setting.
Pressure-free is cognitive accessibility. No timers, no streaks, no expiry, no leaderboards, nothing to lose — the score only ever goes up. For players with anxiety, cognitive-load sensitivity, or ADHD, the absence of pressure is the feature.
A GPS dead-zone fallback (“mark as walked”) gives full credit — every dot plus the street bonus — so a player whose signal drops in a stone alley is never stuck or penalized.
Reduce Motion: turn it on and the celebration and the map's collect-pulse hold still — nothing bounces, pops, or replays.
Differentiate Without Color: streets you mark by hand get a dashed stroke, not just a paler gold, so the “marked as walked” distinction never rests on color alone.

Privacy, because it's part of the story

Data Not Collected. No accounts, no analytics, no ads, no tracking SDKs, no advertising identifiers. Your location never leaves your phone. (One non-personal value — which city you picked as your free one — is mirrored to your own private iCloud so it survives a new phone; I can't read it.) For many disabled users, who are disproportionately profiled and tracked, “I genuinely can't see you” is not a footnote.

The honest part, kept current

I keep this page honest by naming what isn't perfect yet — not by pretending there's nothing. The three gaps this section listed at first draft have now shipped: Reduce Motion, Differentiate Without Color, and richer VoiceOver hints and values (all above). When the next gap turns up — and it will — it goes here, in the open, rather than under the rug.

Platform: iPhone, iOS 17+
Languages: English & German (narration and labels)
Pricing: One free city; others a one-time purchase
Offline: A city you own plays fully offline
Press & reviewers: press@newworkbydesign.com
Maker: Manuel — New Work by Design (Bavaria, solo developer)