Blind Racer: Audio Racing — a slot car racing game built for us from the ground up — is now free on the App Store

Hi everyone,

I'm pleased to announce that Blind Racer: Audio Racing is now on the App Store, free, for iPhone and iPad. It's a slot car racing game designed from the ground up for blind and visually impaired players — not a visual game with VoiceOver labels added afterwards. You can play all of it without seeing the screen.

There's one control: the throttle. Hold anywhere on the screen to accelerate and release to coast down. The car sits in a slot, so there's no steering to worry about — the whole skill is knowing when to squeeze and when to lift. Carry too much speed into a corner and you fly off the track, and those lost seconds decide races. The throttle zone uses direct interaction, so holding to drive works normally with VoiceOver running. If you'd rather not use the touchscreen, a game controller's analogue right trigger works and gives you finer control than a finger does, and a held spacebar on a Bluetooth keyboard works too.

The audio does the driving for you. It's HRTF spatial audio with the listener sitting in your car and turning with it, so corners are pinged from where they actually are on the track — left is genuinely on your left. The pitch tells you how hard the corner is: a single low tone for a gentle bend, faster mid pips for a real corner, urgent high pips for a sharp one. A spoken coach backs this up with lines like "Ease left," "Slow, right turn," and "Brake! Hard left," and it calls every corner rather than staying quiet on the easy ones. Your speed comes through the engine pitch rather than a beep, and your rival's engine is spatialised too, so you can hear where they are relative to you. Laps, sector splits, position changes, and your fastest lap each have their own cue. Audio is on a mixWithOthers session, so none of it fights with VoiceOver.

Haptics are Core Haptics rather than simple taps, and the one I'm proudest of runs continuously: a throttle texture modulated by how much grip you're actually using, which roughens as you approach the limit. It's a genuine extra sense for where the edge is. Corners, de-slots, and laps each have their own distinct feel on top.

Settings let you tune all of it. Voice Cues, the Driving Coach, and Haptics each toggle independently, and there are three separate volume sliders — Master, Spatial for the positional 3D layer, and Abstract for the centred cues — so you can pull one down without losing the other. Every slider is a proper adjustable VoiceOver element that reports its value as a percentage.

There's a real game around all this, not a demo. Ten hand-built tracks, from a 400-metre banked bullring to a mile-long speedway to an esses-and-chicane sprint loop. Free Play gives you a single race against a rival on any track, difficulty, and lap count. Career follows Mira Vance, a blind racer, and her crew chief Sol through six tournaments and eleven races, from the Rookie Loop to the Champion's Series, with the story told in text between races. Career points go to the Garage, where you buy Engine, Tyre, and Aero upgrades that genuinely change the physics — a fully upgraded car is half again as fast as a stock one — and unlock five engine voices, four of them chiptune. Series lets you build your own one-to-three-race championship settled on points. Online is 1v1 over Game Center, running a deterministic lockstep simulation on both devices, so there's no server and no host advantage.

Worth saying plainly: this is a game for everyone. Sighted players get a full 3D visual track display and HUD and can play it as an ordinary racing game, so it works just as well with sighted friends, family, or classmates as it does on your own. Blind players were the design target from the start rather than an afterthought, but nobody is playing a lesser version.

It's free, with no ads, no in-app purchases, and no accounts.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6756441552

I'd really value what this community makes of it. Feedback from AppleVis members will shape the updates, and VoiceOver issues go straight to the top of my list — so please do tell me what works and what doesn't.

Happy racing!

Jamie