If you use the web version you may get this effect by using a custom script for a browser:
The script changes the style of black/white pieces on the client side so that their images rotate 180°. Tested on Chrome and Firefox with the parrot above.
Since you prefer rapid games, running the script manually at the beginning wont take much effort. The script can be added as a bookmarklet to a browser for quick access
Hi all — I'm a visually impaired shogi player. Chess.com has been my introduction to chess for the past few months, and I've thoroughly enjoyed both the game and the platform.
I'd like to propose an optional accessibility feature: rotating opponent pieces 180° in the shogi style, as shown in the attached mockup.
Here's why: the board coordinates are quite small and hard for me to read, which makes it surprisingly difficult to tell at a glance which side of the board is Black, or even which way the pawns are moving.
In shogi, piece orientation encodes all of this directly — each piece points toward the enemy, so you can instantly see whose piece it is, which way it moves, and which side of the board is yours, no coordinates needed. Applying the same idea to chess would make this information readable at a glance, even without coordinates.
Of course, this perspective comes from shogi — to shogi players (with or without visual impairment), this kind of orientation feels completely natural. Whether chess players would also find it intuitive is something I'd genuinely like to hear thoughts on. Would this be something chess.com could consider as an optional setting?
A follow-up note for anyone viewing this thread on the chess.com mobile apps (iOS or Android): the mockup image doesn't display, and paragraph breaks are stripped. The image is visible if you open the thread in your mobile browser instead.