Invited talk at the Games for Health Conference workshop on game accessibility. This deck of slides discusses some of our research projects at the university of nevada in Reno such as a version of guitar hero that visually impaired can play. Interfaces to popular game genres for severe motor impaired and a virtual world interface that can be accessed with a screen reader.

1. Games 4 Health Conference, Boston
Game Accessibility Workshop
June 10th 2009
Game
Accessibility
Research @
Eelke Folmer

2. Overview
1.Introduction
2.Motivation for Research
3.Research Projects:
1 TextSL
4.Lessons Learned
5.Q&A

3. Eelke Folmer
Assistant Professor (2006)
Player-Game-Interaction Lab
2 MS. / 3 Ph.D / 1 PostDoc
Research Interests: Dead Space
 Human Computer Interaction
 Software Engineering
 Games / Virtual Worlds
 http://www.eelke.com Wii-Fit
 “You are what you play”:
BioShock

4. Motivations

5. Games are pervasive
Education
Advertising
Politics
Military Simulations
Health
...

6. Diverse audience
More & more people are interested in playing games
Varying amounts of experience & abilities
Individuals with disabilities often face significant
barriers to or are excluded from playing games
What are these barriers?
Illustrate with a Game Interaction Model

7. How do we play games?
game output 3 different
modalities
input
player

8. Detailed Steps
1.Game provides feedback {enemies/ gunfire/ sound}
2.Player decides what in-game response to provide:
1.(a) Do nothing.
2.(b) Move or reorient his/her character.
3.(c) Fire his/her gun.
4.(d) Change the weapon.
5.(e) Change the camera viewpoint.
6.(f) Reload, pause, or save the game.
3.The player must physically issue the chosen action(s)
through a physical device.
4.The internal state of the game may change and new
feedback may be provided

9. Synthesis
1. feedback 1. feedback 1. feedback
2. up/down 2. left/right/gas 2. left/right/shoot
3. button 3. wheel 3. button / mouse

10. Game Interaction model

11. Disability

12. Disability

13. Disability

14. Disability

15. Disability

16. Game Accessibility Stats
★Disability may affect ability to
play to different extents
★Based on Census 2006 data &
game interaction model we found
that in the US:
★6.2 Million disabled are
unable to play games at all
★25.9 Million disabled suffer
from reduced game experience
★Elderly overly represented in
our estimates.
★Nevertheless this will be a
big problem in the future

17. Our research
★Understand exactly what barriers
individuals with disabilities face.
★Research alternative ways to play:
★Feedback from alternative
modalities
★Reduced amounts of input.
★while retaining game experience
★Focus on game genres that are NOT
accessible
★More complex interaction models
★Provide examples & guidelines to
the game industry.

19. Guitar Hero
> 21M copies sold
Dominate sales charts
Not playable by

20. Viable strategies
?
VI accessible games Guitar Hero
• Speech • Interference with music
• Earcons
• Sonification • Too many stimuli
• Audio Cues

21. Haptic output
5 Different “notes”
!
Varying note lengths
Lookahead
<3 notes simultaneously
!
? ?
Glove
Pager engines (# ? )
“Haptic Cues”?
Position?

22. Tradeoffs
!
remove
lookahead
!
★“whack a mole” gameplay
Remove ★retain “guitar playing” feeling
1 button ★Easy to learn
★Fun!

23. Play testing

24. User Study
Participants
8 sighted + 4 visually impaired
age 20 - 41 (SD=4.5)
Groups
1 sighted Blind Hero first time players
2 blind Blind Hero first time players
3 sighted Blind Hero experts on Guitar Hero
4 sighted Guitar Hero first time players
Play 2 songs repeatedly (to measure
increase) for 4 times

25. Results
guitar Hero - novice
expert
VI
novice
Haptic is a viable strategy for Music based games
Performance lower but could increase over time
Most important: participants enjoyed the game

26. one switch games

27. Problem
switch controller
mouth controller
eye tracker one handed joystick
 rely upon adapted controllers
Constrained (type/ amount)
Suitable for arcade/puzzle games
Not suitable for popular game genres (FPS, RTS,
etc)

28. Research objective
less
?
Find smallest amount of input.
Preserve gameplay.
Find the “core” of the game.
What strategies can be used?
more

29. Experiences
less
✔
✔
✔
 Support all types of input
 Find minimum (may not be binary 1 switch)
 Identified the following mechanisms:
 automation
 reduction
more  scanning
 How do these change the gameplay?

30. Gordon’s Trigger Finger
Be able to respond fast
Scanning/automating/removing
Idea: player on top of a bot?
Evaluate alternatives
Scanning too slow moving user automated
Multiplayer only aiming user automated
fire user user
Railshooter
switch weapons user random
Balanced/ Fair open doors user automated
FUN jump/crawl user removed

31. Video

32. One Switch Interfaces
Music
Puzzle Games
virtual world
Sports Games first person shooter

33. TextSL

34. Virtual Worlds
Second Life / There / Active / Home
Higher degree of interaction.
Visually attractive
Entirely driven by user generated
content
Virtual Economy
Social Interaction most important
Estimated: in 4 years 80% of
internet users will have a VW
account

35. Accessibility Problem
?
? ?
Unlike Web, VW lack textual representation
Not Accessible with screen reader / tactile display
VW increasingly used as virtual classrooms /
distance learning (Section 508)
Communities for Disabled in SL (Virtual ability)
Research how VW can be made accessible
 develop prototype interface

36. Analyze differences
virtual worlds video games
 VW lack Combat/Storyline/Score
 No need for quick responses as you cannot die
 Everything is user generated (large amount of
content you cannot change)
 Viewer offers large number of functions including
creating objects. Many operations on objects. Objects
define their own functionality through scripts.
 VW viewers is more like a browser.

37. Output Strategies
 VI games (TerraFormers, AudioQuake, Shades of Doom) with
similar interaction mechanisms as VW.
 All use audio
 Levels have minimum number of objects
 Most strategies focus on being able to locate “enemies”
 Earcons & Audio Cues (too many objects in VW & you
cannot augment objects )
 Sound Radar (not applicable)
 Speech (applicable, but requires augmentation)

38. Controls
 Controls the same as the original games (arrow keys)
 Player has to do the pathfinding which is useful for mental
mapping (dungeons)
 Generic “use” command to interact with objects
 Design of levels accommodates limited interaction &
manual pathfinding
 CS difficult to implement in Virtual worlds as
 Large amount of objects & avatars
 Large number of functions to support.
 Mental mapping impossible in VW
 Manual Pathfinding is very hard

39. Different approach
 Command based interface (TextSL):
 Inspired by multi user dungeon games (MUD)
 “chat interface” to support social interaction
 Iteratively extract texts that can be read with a screen
reader
 Command based interaction supports interaction with large
amounts of objects & Avatars (“give my flower to jane”, “sit
on chair”)

40. TextSL features
 Commands in 3 categories:
 Exploration (move / fly / teleport / follow / describe /where)
 Communication (say / whisper / mute,.....)
 Interaction (sit, touch.....)
 Notable features:
 Natural language (go / travel / walk all map to “move” )
increasing learnability. Interpreter allows for prepositions and
adjectives “give my chair to...”
 Collision free navigation. e.g. “Move forward 100”
 Summarizer aims to minimize the amount of feedback
provided to avoid overwhelming the user with feedback.

41. User Studies
 Compare TextSL with SL
 8 Sighted & 8 Screen
reader users
 Tasks in 3 categories +
tutorial
 Measure success rate &
performance times
 TextSL has same succesrate as SL viewer for
performing tasks (accessibility)
 Exploration & Interaction significantly slower (usability)
 Communication the same.
 Command based interface is a feasible approach

42. Lessons Learned
 Research contributions:
 Haptic feedback is a viable strategy for making music
based games accessible to VI.
 Popular game genres can be made switch accessible
by automating, reducing or making it switch accessible
but it involves significant tradeoffs with regard to the
gameplay. For a number of popular game genres we
now understand these tradeoffs.
 Virtual worlds are different from Video games and
require a different strategy to make them accessible to
VI. A command-based interface is a feasible approach.
 lack of meta data for objects in SL

43. Questions?
A description of all research projects & media (video/
downloads) can be found on http://www.eelke.com