Cobble GobbleAccessibility
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.
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 game 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, on from the first walk. “Spoken updates” reads street completions, fruit bonuses, and level clears aloud, and it is on by default for everyone — there is no toggle to hunt for before the game will talk to you, and the first-run page says so plainly along with where to switch it off. The one setting your phone still decides is the extended landmark story: it turns itself on when the device already uses spoken content (VoiceOver, Speak Screen, or Speak Selection), because that longer story ducks your music, and taking someone's audio is a thing you ask for. Both are changeable either way. 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.
The game tells you what it's doing. It speaks its own state as it changes — standing still when you stop, back to gobbling when you move again, riding detected, a walk saved, or GPS gone fuzzy — so a player whose phone is in a pocket never has to wonder whether it's still tracking.
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.
The GPS dead-zone fallback works without sight. When your signal drops in a stone alley, you can mark a street walked for full credit — and you do it straight from the Nearby-streets list (swipe a row, or use the VoiceOver actions rotor), not by aiming a press at a map you can't see. The same list is where you report a wrong street, too.
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.
Beyond blindness
- Dynamic Type: text uses semantic type styles throughout, so it scales with the system text-size setting.
- Contrast: buttons and text-on-colour meet the WCAG AA contrast ratio, checked in both light and dark mode.
- 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.
- Walking is the verb, and not everyone walks. An old town is stairs, cobbles, and steep lanes — Passau has a lane that is literally a staircase. An impassable street is never a dead end: mark as walked gives it full credit, every dot plus the street bonus, scored exactly as if you had walked it, and nothing in the game punishes reaching for it. What the app can’t do yet is warn you which streets are steps before you get there. OpenStreetMap knows; surfacing it is the next job. If you hit a street that can’t be walked, there’s a report button on it — and we fix those in OpenStreetMap itself, so the correction reaches every map that uses it, not just this game.
- 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.
- 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 (Bavaria, solo developer)