Representing Sentiment Using Colors and Particles to Provide Accessibility for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Players

Providing game accessibility to deaf or hard of hearing players is still an issue in the game industry. The most common access feature developed to provide accessibility for players with this type of disability is to implement closed captions and other textual information to detail sentiments. This paper presents another approach to this problem. Based on the study of colors, this work uses the particle system provided by Unity engine and combines these elements into different scenarios where colorful particles propagate in different directions and with different speeds and forms. This paper proposes that these scenarios can express different sentiments. The proposal evaluation was performed through user interviews. The results present a set of scenarios that can be used by game designers to visually express the intended sentiment of the music or game environment sounds and a Unity plugin that support this task.