20 - Making Games Accessible for Everyone

by Lennart Nacke

Eelke Folmer is a promi­nent game researcher, con­cerned with game acces­si­bil­ity at the University of Nevada, Reno. At the Games For Health Conference 2009, he gave a talk about his areas of research and an intro­duc­tion to game acces­si­bil­ity in gen­eral. His argu­ment is that games as a major force of cul­ture should not exclude dis­abled indi­vid­u­als from play­ing and enjoy­ing the ben­e­fits of them. He out­lines a game inter­ac­tion model, where we see dif­fer­ent forms of sen­sory out­put of games: visual, tac­tile, and audi­tory, and sim­i­larly dif­fer­ent stan­dard devices, such as game con­trollers, allow­ing the player to phys­i­cally enter infor­ma­tion into the game sys­tem. Feedback and inter­ac­tion work in syn­the­sis in games, how­ever often not account­ing for all pos­si­ble modes of inter­ac­tion or feed­back that might chal­lenge so-called able gamers.

As gamers grow older the prob­lem of inter­act­ing with games may grow (and they might become part of the acces­si­bil­ity sta­tis­tics), but a large num­ber of dis­abled peo­ple are cur­rently excluded from play­ing games. This should not be a prob­lem as games in gen­eral are about research­ing alter­na­tive forms of inter­ac­tion and thus dif­fer­ent inter­ac­tion forms should be avail­able in games, some of them may even be included as game­play modes (adding bonus value to the prod­uct). Before we talk about this some more, first have a look at this presentation.


Professor Folmer out­lines a few of the games spawned by his research. Blind Hero is a Frets-on-Fire vari­ant which allows play­ers to con­nect a gui­tar con­troller and a hap­tic feed­back glove, so they are able to play the game by touch and sound alone. The game design had cer­tain trade­offs, such as remov­ing a but­ton and remov­ing looka­head. He designed a user study to test the effec­tive­ness of the game with 4 visu­ally impaired and 8 reg­u­lar par­tic­i­pants and found the hap­tic feed­back to be a viable strat­egy for music inter­ac­tion games.


Next, he dis­cusses one-switch games, which rely on a sin­gle switch and may be espe­cially help­ful for para­plegic gamers. Common con­trollers are for exam­ple, an eye tracker for gaze inter­ac­tion, mouth con­trollers, or a one-handed joy­stick. For design­ing a one-switch game, it is impor­tant to focus on the small­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor between game and input modal­ity: What is the small­est amount of input that pre­serves game­play? This requires a lot of extra work for the arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence that takes over most the steer­ing, for exam­ple, in a first-person shooter (FPS), which is usu­ally done with the mouse and key­board. What he did in his exam­ple (see video below) is to basi­cally put the FPS cam­era on top of a game bot that takes over the steer­ing, while all the one-switch player has to worry about is the shoot­ing. Although, cer­tainly alter­na­tives could be explored, such as focus­ing on explo­ration game­play and steer­ing with one switch, while the arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) takes care of the shooting.


The final case study, he presents is his expe­ri­ences with TextSL (Download). This game inter­ac­tion soft­ware uses the vir­tual world of Second Life, but removes the graph­ics inter­face and replaces it with a command-line inter­face (sim­i­lar to a MUD) that allows to nav­i­gate in the world, but also puts an empha­sis on the social inter­ac­tion (in form of text chats) that is the pri­mary dri­ver of Second Life game­play. More excit­ing game acces­si­bil­ity projects can be found on his research web­site.

Bonus Presentations on Game Accessibility



More Links

Barrie Ellis One-Switch Games

Eelke Folmer’s publications

IGDA Game Accessibility Special Interest Group

AudioGames.net

Deaf Gamers

Interaction Design Patterns for Games Library

A list of research papers con­cerned with game acces­si­bil­ity from the IGDA GA SIG

A list of videos deal­ing with game acces­si­bil­ity from the IGDA GA SIG

Improving Game Accessibility (Gamasutra Article by Kevin Bierre)

Accessible Game Controllers (PDF Fact Sheet)

Guidelines for the devel­op­ment of enter­tain­ing soft­ware for peo­ple with mul­ti­ple learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties (Article by Media Lunde Tollefsen)

One Button Games (Gamasutra Article by Berbank Green)

GDC: Success Factors of One-Button Casual Mobile Games (Gamasutra Article by Brandon Sheffield)

Universally Accessible Games at the Human–Computer Interaction Laboratory of ICS–FORTH

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