- Not being able to receive visual, auditory, or tactile stimuli.
- Not being able to determine the adequate response to perform a given action
- required to advance in the game.
- Not being able to provide input to the game once the player has decided what action to take because they cannot use the interface device between them-selves and the game, such as the mouse, the keyboard, or the controller.
DH players and blind players experience difficulties in overcoming the first barrier, as they do not receive the relevant sensory stimuli, while users with cognitive impairments may not always be able to determine the right response to the stimuli. On the other hand, gamers with reduced mobility can process and determine the answer to a given stimulus, but they may not be able to provide the required input to the game, especially within a given timeframe. After carrying out a study of several games that include a number of accessibility options, Yuan et al. (ibid.) reached the conclusion that different strategies must be applied to improve accessibility to different groups of users depending on their needs, and that some game genres are more suitable for certain groups of users than others. For example, while racing and rhythm games could be made accessible to blind players with relative ease, this is not the case for RPGs and strategy games.
Currently, players with hearing impairments face fewer and more clearly-de-fined barriers to games than players with visual or cognitive impairments. The main barrier for the former group is the loss of information that is presented only by means of the audio track, for example, voiced dialogue in the cinematic scenes or sound effects, such as approaching steps or the sound of a flying bullet as typically encountered in a first-person shooter (FPS) game. By comparison, cognitively impaired players are a very diverse group of users with varying needs. These players may experience difficulties related to the game speed and difficulty level, as well as reading and comprehension problems or memory deficiency. Players with reduced mobility face the challenge of having difficulties in providing the required input to the game in a timely manner, with the result that they cannot advance in the game. The speed of the game may be too fast for them to react and they may also experience some hand-eye coordination issues. Finally, players with visual impairments are also a heterogeneous group. Players with low vision may have trouble reading the text on the screen in small font or they may not be able to identify small icons. Colour-blind players are likely to experience difficulty when extracting information from elements that are based on colour. Blind or visually-impaired players cannot process information that is only provided visually. Given the wide spectrum of users and (dis)ability levels, the main challenge to the video game industry in terms of accessibility is to design mainstream games that are maximally optimised to address different limitations imposed on the users. Due to the primarily visual nature of the video game medium, accessibility for blind players remains the most difficult challenge and there seems to be wide-
spread scepticism in the industry about the possibility of universally accessible games, in line with the findings of Yuan et al. (2010). However, some authors (e.g. Archambault et al. 2005; Savidis and Grammenos 2006; Glinert 2008) claim that in spite of the difficulty involved, it is possible to design universally accessible games. The topic of universally accessible video games will be further explored later when we describe the current research avenues in this field.
The evolution of game technology can, ironically, erect more accessibility barriers if players with disabilities are not taken into consideration. We highlighted how the evolutionary advances of audio technology eventually led to more common inclusions of recorded human voices into in-game dialogues, making the gameplay experience more realistic and cinematic. However, if the dialogues and sound effects in a game are not subtitled, this becomes an accessibility barrier for DH players - a barrier that did not exist when all text in games was provided in written form. The latest controller-free interface game technology Kinect, developed by Microsoft for Xbox 360, allows players to control the game with their body movements. No matter how revolutionary such a technology may be, it creates a new accessibility barrier for players with reduced mobility, excluding them from benefiting from the new innovation. While this may seem to be an insurmountable challenge, if accessibility issues are considered from the conceptual stage of development of game hardware and software, many of the barriers could be at least minimized with alternative solutions.
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