[blindza] Article: How to Make a Video Game for the Blind - popular mechanics

From: "Jacob Kruger" <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "National Accessibility Portal mailing list with topics focused on accessibility for users with visual disabilities." <blind@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2013 01:24:32 +0200

---article content---
How to Make a Video Game for the Blind
Audio-based games are more than entertainment. They can be a tool to teach
blind and visually impaired people how to navigate new environments.
By Ashley Taylor Comments
0Share
Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary
March 28, 2013 3:19 PM Text Size: A . A . A "You are equipped with a medical
kit, a few grenades, a gun, a knife, your fists, and a computer to analyze your
surroundings, and you must make your way through the many levels of the top
secret military research base, and shut down the ill-fated experiment." This is
how the Shades of Doom website describes the gamer's task. Oh, and there's one
more thing: You are blind.

Shades of Doom is one of many computer games for the blind and visually
impaired. These are not "video" games, as that word implies a visual element.
Instead, a genre of audio games based not on graphics but on sound has popped
up. Perhaps as many as 2000 blind people play computer games, estimates Thomas
Ward, a blind gamer and game developer, and many of them converse on thriving
game forums, such as Audyssey.org and AudioGames.net, whose members provided
much input for this story. When asked what is the most interesting factoid
about computer games for the blind, one gamer on the Audyssey email list
responded: "To be honest, that we can play games at all." How is it done?

The key is to replace visual cues with auditory ones. David Greenwood, who
created Shades of Doom, says that his game is similar to its prototype for
sighted players, Doom, the classic shooter by id Software: "In Shades of Doom,
it's more or less the same thing, except it's all done with sound." Sounds come
in many forms and have different purposes, providing spatial orientation, text
descriptions, and "ear candy."

Orientation

In audio games, players orient themselves with help from stereo sound. Wearing
headphones that pipe different sounds into the left and right ears, a player
can hear where sounds are coming from and develop a sense of the environment.
In Shades of Doom, Greenwood says, "You'd be walking down a hallway and a
passage would open off to the left, and so to give this info to the blind
gamer, I would make the echo so that it sounds like the echoes of your boots
are coming off from the left side. If there's something attacking you, you just
turn your character until the sound is directly ahead of you." A beeping sound
rises in pitch until you are right in front of the target. Then, you shoot.

Sound Effects

"If something can be represented graphically," Ward says, "usually there is
some sound queue that can be added to identify it." Wind sounds, he says, can
identify the opening to a cave or passageway. Different kinds of footstep
sounds can indicate different terrain. A player might hear a quack in the
child's animal game "Here Comes The Duck!" or the moan of a zombie in the
shoot-'em-up game Swamp. Each zombie has its own moan or growl, which you can
listen to in this audio review.

Text Descriptions

A growl could easily represent a barking dog or a zombie. But so can words.

"A zombie dog snarls and tries to bark at you!" That snippet comes from the
role-playing game, Alter Aeon. Though not specifically designed for blind
people, Alter Aeon is accessible to them because it relies on text to tell the
player what is happening. Screen reader programs, which automatically read the
text on the computer screen, can just read the text aloud to a blind player.
People have developed new versions of the game that condense the text or
replace some of it with iconic sounds, says Dennis Towne, the lead coder for
Alter Aeon.

What kinds of descriptions should you use in a game for the blind? You might
think that visual descriptions are out. In fact, that's far from the truth,
says John Bannick, Chief Technology Officer of 7-128 Software, a company that
makes family games that are accessible to both blind and sighted players.
"People who are blind, in our experience, want to hear visual descriptions.
They may not know what blue is but they want to know that something is blue.
They don't want to be treated any differently."

"Ear Candy"

Not all the sounds in a game have to be functional. As Bannick says, "Another
important thing that's often overlooked in games for the blind is what one of
our blind colleagues calls 'ear candy.' [She] says, 'Hey-you guys got eye
candy. I want ear candy.' Give me sounds that are interesting." Bannick
describes the sound effects in one of 7-128 Software's games, called Inspector
Cyndy in Newport. "We have a lot of background sounds-you have sounds of
seagulls, sounds of cats, clocks ticking, doors opening and closing, people
walking around."

Function Follows Fun?

Audio games can be more than entertainment. Researchers at Massachusetts Eye
and Ear Infirmary and elsewhere have created an audio game with a practical
purpose: to help people learn to navigate unfamiliar environments. Lotfi
Merabet and colleagues created their game based on a map of a building at the
Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, Mass. In the game, players navigate the
building searching for jewels and avoiding monsters.

"As you find these jewels," Merabet says, "you're actually exploring the map,
and at the same time, this map is forming in your mind." In an experiment, the
researchers had one group of blind subjects play the game and taught another
group the layout of the building using the same building simulation but without
the game component. As reported in the journal PLOS ONE, when the researchers
then took the study participants to the real building, they found that both
groups could navigate the building but those who had played the game were
better at finding shortcuts-thanks perhaps to their superior mental map. Those
who had played a game based on a different building, Merabet says, were lost. A
video explaining the game appeared this week in the Journal of Visualized
Experiments.

For this kind of thing to work, however, first you need an entertaining
product. "A good game for blind people must first and foremost actually be a
good game," says Michael Feir, the creator of Audyssey, an e-zine about audio
games, which has now morphed into a game review site and online forum. "No
amount of fancy audio work or accessibility will save an ill-conceived game
from being thought of as such."

source URL:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/video-games/how-to-mak-a-video-game-for-the-blind-15277536?click=pm_latest

[blindza] Article: How to Make a Video Game for the Blind - popular mechanics

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