If you’ve played the popular online puzzle game Wordle, you’ve probably come across a number of spinoffs in various other topic areas. The one thing all of these have in common is their use of visual images to convey information, with a single image sometimes being the only clue from which to guess the answer. This is certainly the case with Worldle, a website that presents a daily outline of a mystery country. The objective is to guess the name of that country based solely on its shape. As someone who’s worked extensively with paper braille and tactile maps, I was long fascinated by the increased access to geographic information afforded by a device like the Monarch. In this post I’ll explain how Worldle can be made accessible with this new piece of technology, based on playing the game over the past few weeks.
A few useful notes:
• I only tested this procedure on a Windows 10 PC running JAWS.
• Worldle presents each country map image as an SVG file, a format that the Monarch’s Tactile View app doesn’t support yet. Below the main Worldle procedure is some information about an SVG to JPG converter that I find useful, but will hopefully become unnecessary soon.
• As Worldle is designed to test geographic knowledge for the general population, a reasonable familiarity with tactile maps is strongly recommended for those playing using the Monarch. If anything, one might learn something about a country that’s too small to accurately show on a mainstream braille map.
To access Worldle, go to https://worldlegame.io. On the home page, press G to move to the graphic with the alt text “Country to guess”. With focus there, press the Application key, Shift+F10 or right click to bring up the context menu, and select “Save image as”. This mystery country map image will be given the generic filename “Vector.svg”, and can be saved either in the Downloads folder on your computer, or directly on your flash drive (once SVG support is available). At the time of writing, you’ll need to convert this file to a supported format such as JPG or PNG before transferring it to your Monarch for viewing.
Once you have the graphic open in the Tactile Viewer app, take some time to examine the shape(s) and their relative positions on the display. Many countries around the world have one contiguous or main piece of land, but there are many others (like Indonesia or Fiji) that are entirely made up of islands of various sizes and shapes. Zoom in, rotate and pan around in the image looking for features such as peninsulas/panhandles or inlets of some kind. Because there’s nothing to represent surrounding water or other features and all you have is the country’s shape, it might take some time to come up with your first guess.
Back on the computer, enter the name of any country and press Enter. If you happen to misspell or only write out part of the name, you’ll find a list of search results just below the edit box. If your first guess isn’t the final answer, you’ll find a hint represented as an approximate distance and direction between your guess and the answer. Direction is indicated with a Unicode arrow character which JAWS can speak the name of, e.g., ↓ (“downwards arrow”) for south. Enter as many guesses as it takes, following the hints as you go. Unlike regular Wordle, there are an unlimited number of attempts here. You can change distance units from kilometers to miles using the Settings page. The basic instructions for playing are located near the top of the page above the user interface.
To convert the SVG file from Worldle, I recommend the following free online tool: SVG to JPG | CloudConvert. Just select the “Vector.svg” map image file to upload, and then press the Convert button. After a few seconds or so, you’ll have the option to download the JPG file. Move this downloaded file to your flash drive and it’s ready to be opened on the Monarch.
In conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised at the possibility of playing an online game I once thought was inaccessible. Given my passion for geography and the world at large, I found it fun to discover things I hadn’t known about particular countries’ territory, such as the arrangement of islands in the Caribbean nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. What I noticed was that the JPG images produced by the conversion didn’t just feel like outlines, as there was shading within each piece of territory. If it turns out that the original SVG’s are line drawings, I hope that maybe I have a better viewing experience when I won’t have to convert them. And like all graphical applications of the Monarch, there’s the problem of low resolution images. Zoom out too much and small peninsulas aren’t properly rendered; zoom in too much and the individual pixels might use multiple braille pins. Generally, I had much more success when the mystery country was large enough to appear in a standard braille atlas, and the least luck with ones that didn’t make it into these publications. In any case, I feel that Worldle can be a useful learning tool for anyone in a world geography course or unit within a social studies program, whether they use print maps or view things tactually. It’s one of many activities for which the Monarch can create a level playing field for students who are blind and their peers.