Improving Accessibility for Shooter Games An explorative study of the possibility to systematically improve the accessibility for shooter games

Abstract

Playing video games is an activity enjoyed by many for the diverse experiences that they offer. For players with disabilities, playing games comes with additional barriers that prevent them from enjoying the game. For someone who is deaf, a barrier can mean the inability to hear spoken dialogue and other background sounds essential to the game. Game accessibility is about removing those barriers. While progress has been made within game accessibility research, games still include unnecessary barriers. Games are usually not inaccessible by design but rather because of an information gap between game developers and the accessibility needs and solutions discovered in existing research. To address the information gap, this research explores how accessibility can be improved for shooter games by developing a heuristic tool applicable to examine the accessibility of shooter games systematically. The tool was evaluated by applying it on four games and by conducting a user test with people who are hard of hearing. Furthermore, the research explored the possibility of incorporating the tool in a game development process. The result adds to the knowledge of examining accessibility features systematically and the experienced issues in shooter games of players who are hard of hearing. Additional research is required to examine the validity, content, and usefulness of the tool.