Accessible Games on VIP Games Zone

A set of free online educational games for vision-impaired children was launched this week.

The three games: ‘Typer,’ to help players learn to type on a QWERTY keyboard; ‘ABC,’ to help players learn the English alphabet and ‘Numbers Stuff,’ for players to learn basic math; can be downloaded from the VIP Games Zone site.
 
“All programs will have the same interface; this way, children will not need to learn a new interface for each program,” said developers Alina and Igor Khmelevtsov of Israel-based VIP Games Zone. All games have an audible menu and ’speak’ actions so users do not have to use a screen reader. Features such as main menu items and tasks are displayed on-screen to allow sighted family and friends to help the vision-impaired child operate games initially.
 
Each game allows the child to send their score to a scoreboard on vipgameszone.com or kids.vipgameszone.com where they can check their position against other players.
 
The Khmelevtsovs sought views from parents and teachers to feed in to the development of the games via a questionnaire on their Web site.
Around 150 replies from parents showed there was a need for online educational games on various subjects.
 
“We plan to create mailing list for parents to discuss our programs and our future projects. We hope this will help us to improve our programs for blind children, making these programs more accessible.”
 
The pair has designed around 100 educational programs for Ukrainian schools and has developed a computer training method for children. They previously released accessible online game Super Football and strategy game Galaxy Ranger, among others.
 
Taken from e-access bulletin, a free monthly email newsletter.