Video Gaming for the Vision Impaired

Abstract

Mainstream video games are predominantly inaccessible to people with visual impairments (VIPs). We present ongoing research that aims to make such games go beyond accessibility, by making them engaging and enjoyable for visually impaired players. We have built a new interaction toolkit called the Responsive Spatial Audio Cloud (ReSAC), developed around spatial audio technology, to enable visually impaired players to play video games. VIPs successfully finished a simple video game integrated with ReSAC and reported enjoying the experience.