Building a Roadmap for Accessible Gaming

Date & Time

Tuesday, March 14, 2023 - 2:20 PM PST  

Location

Grand CD  

Description

RNIB’s 2022 Accessible Gaming Research highlighted six potential areas of improvement and have been working with the industry to advance these. The areas are: ● Participatory design: end-user engagement and user testing with real people ● Knowledge sharing and learning resources for practitioners ● Motivations and mandates for making video games accessible ● Infrastructure challenges for designing accessible gaming experiences ● Interface challenges for designing accessible gaming experiences ● Future research areas in accessible gaming One accessibility feature, 3D audio, can precisely pinpoint to a user where sounds are coming from but this either requires an extensive speaker array or audio encoding using an HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function). HRTFs should ideally be personalised and require head tracking to present a persistent virtual world around the user (for sighted gamers the software knows their head is facing the screen). These features are available but are rarely advertised or fully utilised and as such may have much more potential as an accessibility feature then they are currently realising. Research is needed to ascertain the extent to which these features could help. This presentation aims to outline the six areas of improvement and what has been done so far to advance these. We will also discuss head tracking and personalised HRTFs and whether research and intervention is needed to ensure these live up to their accessibility potential.

This Presentation Link is provided by the Presenter(s) and not hosted by the Center on Disabilities at CSUN. The Center on Disabilities has confirmed, as of April 14 2023, content linked is relevant to the presentation, but has not been reviewed for accessibility nor will the Center on Disabilities attempt to remediate any accessibility issues in the linked content. Please contact the Presenter(s) with any accessibility concerns.

 

Audience

• Disability Specific
• Entertainment & Recreation
• Research & Development

Audience Level

Beginning  

Session Summary (Abstract)

RNIB’s 2022 Accessible Gaming Research highlighted six areas of improvement to make gaming more accessible. We will present what these are, the work done so far to advance them and why 3D audio may not yet be living up to its accessibility potential.  

Primary Topic

Gaming & Interactive Entertainment  

Secondary Topics

• Blind/Low Vision
• Development
• Digital Accessibility
• Research

 

Session Type

General Track  

Presenters

• John Paton
  RNIB
• Alison Long
  RNIB

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