Designing universally accessible games

LNCS, vol. Floyd, C. In: Budde, R. Johnson, P. In: Jones, D. People and Computers IV, pp. Nielsen, J. University of Crete, Department of Computer Science. Personalised recommendations. You can change your cookie settings through your browser. Open Advanced Search. DeepDyve requires Javascript to function. Please enable Javascript on your browser to continue.

Designing universally accessible games Designing universally accessible games Grammenos, Dimitris; Savidis, Anthony; Stephanidis, Constantine Today, computer games are one of the major sources of entertainment. Read Article. Download PDF. Share Full Text for Free.

Web of Science. Let us know here. System error. Please try again! How was the reading experience on this article? The text was blurry Page doesn't load Other:. Details Include any more information that will help us locate the issue and fix it faster for you. Adding symbols makes it a better experience for everyone. There are many creative ways to improve the accessibility of your game. Put on your creative hat and learn from other accessible games out there.

If you already have an existing game, learn to identify current game features that could be improved while keeping the core game mechanics and experience as designed. As mentioned above, accessibility in games is all about providing gamers with options to customize their gaming experience.

It could be through reinforcement or communicating information in more than one way. Considering accessibility allows you to approach design from a new angle and possibly ideas you would have not thought of otherwise.

This approach to design resulted not only in interesting concepts but have created products that have wide spread adoption or mass market commercial success. Examples include predictive text, voice recognition, curb cuts, the loudspeaker, the typewriter, and Optical Character Recognition OCR. Ideas for these products came from those who started thinking about solutions for accessibility.

Accessibility is a measure of quality. It has to be a feature requirement and not a good-to-have work item. For example, "Adapt minimap for colourblindness" is not considered a low priority work item that you get to if you have extra time. If this work item is not done, it simply means that entire minimap feature is incomplete and cannot be shipped.

Game development is always running on a tight timeline, so prioritizing accessibility will help make it an easier process.

One way is to design from the start with accessibility in mind. The earlier you consider accessibility, the easier and cheaper it becomes. During development, you can introduce a review process to make sure that at every step of the way you are thinking about accessibility. Make a checklist like the one below to help your team constantly evaluate whether what you are creating is accessible or not. When organizing playtesting sessions, invite play testers with disabilities that your game is designed for and get them to play your game.

Remember to include accessibility questions in the Beta test questionaires. Local disability groups are a great source of participants. Observe how they play and get feedback from them. Figure out what changes need to be made to make the game better. Use social media and your game's forum to listen for input about which accessibility features matter most and how they should be implemented.

Consumers will want to know if your game can be played by gamers with disabilities. Remember to make your website and all sales channels to the game accessible as well. Most importantly, reach out to the accessibility gaming community and tell them about your game. This section outlines some features that can make your game more accessible.

These features are derived from guidelines taken from the Game accessibility guidelines website. That resource represent the findings of a collaborative group of studios, specialists, and academics.

The retina of the eye has two types of light-sensitive cells: the cones for seeing where there is light, and the rods for seeing in low light conditions. There are three types of cones red, green, and blue to enable us to view colors correctly.

Color blindness occurs when one or more of these three types light cones is not functioning as expected. The degree of color blindness can range from almost normal color perception with reduced sensitivity towards red, green, or blue light, to a complete inability to perceive any color at all.

Do not rely solely on color to communicate or distinguish game objects. Use shapes and patterns as well. If you have to rely on colors alone, combine presets with a free selection of colors, so that it can be fully customizable by the players who need them and not creating extra work for players who do not need them. Use a color blind simulator to test your designs so that you can view your designs through color blind eyes. This can help you avoid common contrast issues.

Color Oracle is a free color blind simulator that can simulate the three most common types of color vision deficiency — deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia. When designing the closed captions and subtitles for your game, the objective is provide readable captions as an option so that your game can also be enjoyed without audio. It should be possible to have game components like game dialogues, game audio, and sound effects displayed as text on screen. If your title allows gamers to communicate using voice and send text messages to one another, Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text functionalities should be available as an option.

People who do not have microphones attached to their gaming device can still have a voice conversation with someone who is speaking. They are able to type text into the chat window and have those messages converted into voice.

It also allows someone who can't hear very well to read the transcribed text messages from the person they're having a voice chat with. For more information, see Game Chat 2 Overview. Sound provides feedback to the player, in addition to visual feedback.