Designing for Accessibility: Improving Gameplay for Blind Players; The Right to Play: Accessibility in Video Games

“The one argument for accessibility that doesn’t get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people’s lives. How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?”
― Steve Krug
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.
― James Oppenheim, “Bread and Roses”

With more than one in four adults in the US alone having some type of disability, making society more accessible is becoming increasingly paramount. While there has been some cultural and legal impetus into creating better accessibility, this has been largely limited to what society deems necessary. The basic needs, or bread, are allowed, but better opportunities for cultural, social, and recreational engagement and sometimes even dignity, the so-called roses, are neglected. Because of this disparity, I decided to focus both my STS research and technical proposal on accessibility in gaming, an industry often looked down upon. From a technical perspective, I looked at how audio could be utilized to help simulate visual scenes for people with visual disabilities and examined the potential for a new video game design paradigm. For my STS topic, I used the comparison of video games to art in order to draw insights into why accessibility is not prioritized within the field of gaming.
In my capstone report, I proposed exploring the application of audio in video game design and its ability to adequately simulate visual scenes. In it, I planned to observe how different audio techniques, such as sound alerts and changing pitch, help or hinder players in navigating environments. Additionally, I identified several human-computer interaction (HCI) and STS principles that could be drawn upon to improve game design. From developing this proposal, I found that conventional game design of large development companies needs to include blind accessibility considerations from the start and bring in more diverse perspectives. The result is a challenge to the “inevitability” of technology, the idea that the nature of video games inherently excludes certain people with disabilities and that developers cannot affect that reality.
For my STS research, I identified how using art as an analogy for video games revealed how people either limited or expanded the possible applications and value of video games. People who identified video games as art tended to ascribe more value to them, viewing them as having cultural and social significance. Conversely, people who did not identify games as art found them to be of less value, associating them with commercialism and toys. When considering the state of accessibility in the gaming industry, the perceived value of video games indicates whether further effort should be made. Thus, the lack of a unified voice on these matters weakens the incentive for any change regarding accessibility.
Through both these projects, the value of a sociotechnical perspective became evident as it broadened my scope from the narrow view of accessibility in video games to a much broader look at the factors that help and hinder it. Notably, when developing my proposal for my capstone report, I drew on STS topics to inform some of my design decisions. Namely, while I focused on audio application, I realized that blind accessibility could not be addressed with only new technical adaptations but required a comprehensive overhaul of the design philosophy behind video games. That is, a sociotechnical solution needed to be created, drawing from new technology and integrating it with a design paradigm that introduced accessibility in the problem definition phase. Ultimately, reflecting on Krug’s words, engineers have the extraordinary opportunity to make a significant impact on people’s lives, simply by taking small, extra considerations that improve their work. The power of the sociotechnical perspective then comes from leveraging a more complete view of the system and using it to elevate the people affected by technology.

School of Engineering and Applied Science

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Technical Advisor: Briana Morrison

STS Advisor: Kathryn Neeley