Week 8: AX in 2D and 3D

This week Ed and Richard led the talk. They looked mainly into accessability in computer games. Generally it proves to be unsuccessful to make games universally accessible to everyone. Some people in the class argued that complex games that are quick paced and involve the interaction in an immersive 3D environment (such as BioShock) would probably be ruined if they were dulled down in certain ways for disabled or impaired users. I would argue that since blind people for example can navigate real worlds using haptic map technology, the same could be applied in principle to game environments. Haptic maps work through representations of input to produce a map output. If both the real world and game environments can be translated into haptic representation there may well be room for blind people using assitive technology to enjoy complex interactive games. Apparantly we were told that cognitively impaired users can use software to slow down the pace of games, another example of an assisstive technology use. Solutions for other disabilities are open to HCI research.

The other alternative to using assitive technology to playing mainstream games is to design the games from scratch with the disabled user in mind. They showed us a demo in which a particpant from the class tried to play an audio led game, designed for blind users. Again I refer back to haptics. Using auditory information for spatial awareness is probably much less natural than haptics. After all blind people usually navigate using a stick (haptics), a guide dog (haptics in the sense of following the pull) or haptic assitive technology. On the other hand you could argue that the abstract medium of knowing direction and space in the game is part of the challenge.

We also had a guest speaker this week who was an expert in accessibility. she gave us lots of helpful pointers for our accessiblity projects.  As well as looking into guidelines like WCAG, she pointed us to some useful AX tools that are free to use. She also emphasised that AX is not just about tedious guidelines, but about influencing huge numbers of peoples lives. Its easy to forget this aspect when your usability is not overly unrestricted by web design. I liked the quote she gave from Christian Heilman at Yahoo, "Disability is nothing more than a hard core usability testing of your product." Ultimately in this course we are just taking usability to the extreme end.