Access Invaders: Developing a Universally Accessible Action Game
Published: Jun 27, 2007
At the ICCHP conference held in July this year, Dimitris Grammenos, Anthony Savidis and Yannis Georgalis of the Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, Crete and Constantine Stephanidis of the Department of Computer Science, University of Crete. presented a paper on computer games that concurrently accommodate the needs of people with diverse abilities.
A variety of electronic applications and tools are not accessible to people with disabilities, as they are unable to handle the associated input or control devices. Access to information and services is the fundamental right of all people. Not making the technology appliances accessible to people with disabilities can, in a way, be translated into undermining their right to enjoy the related benefits.
Computer games are a source of entertainment that is rapidly gaining popularity. Sadly, most of these games can only be operated by input devices that are inaccessible to people with disabilities. Currently, there are no official guidelines or standards that control games accessibility. From the technical point of view, some approaches have been adopted to deal with these issues. Widely used games are designed to be compatible with assistive technology products like virtual keyboards, In addition, some games are designed especially for people with disabilities, such as audio-based games for the disabled.
However, these approaches have not been able to address properly the question of overall accessibility to disabled users. The games designed with accessibility as an after-thought have limited accessibility and are also low in quality. The games currently devoted to disabled users have their own serious limitations, since developing such games in large numbers involves huge costs. Also, instead of putting the disabled users on par with users without disabilities, specially designed games create an obvious distinction between these two groups.
The standards and principles of the concept of Universal Design can be adopted in developing games that can be concurrently accessible to diverse groups of users. However developing such games, especially the ones that require dynamic content and controls based on reflex-based reactions, such as action games, are far from easy. Not only that, if the games have to made accessible to different categories of disabled users also, it can pose many technical challenges.
The paper presented by Dimitris Grammenos and his co-researchers discusses a universally accessible version of the conventional game Space Invaders. Called the Access Invaders, it supports alternative input/output modalities and interaction techniques that can co-exist and cooperate in its user interface, combined with customizable player profiles and game content. It has been designed to appeal to several user categories: people with hand-motor impairments, blind people, people with deteriorated vision, people with mild memory/cognitive impairments ,novice players, and people belonging in more than one of the previous groups.
The most important feature of this game is adaptation of profiles. Once a profile is selected, the game’s interaction and content adapt to its characteristics. Any or all of the following input or control devices can be used to play the game: keyboard, mouse, joystick, game pad and binary switches. Additionally, for people who can use only one switch, the option of automatic scanning is available.
Access Invaders also implements the concept of Parallel Game Universe. The technique enables multiple users to play the same game, aware of each other’s presence, and each one can follow different rules and perceive distinct content.
Further research is being done to develop the game so that it can support tactile output through a Braille display and a force feedback joystick and stylus. Future work also includes developing prototypes of distributed game universes.
