A Contemporary Interactive Computer Game for Visually Impaired Teens

Abstract

Computer games have now become a part of many teens’ development.  Many teens today socialize through online games or talking about the games they are playing with friends because they can have fun together or share experience with each other.  The content of the games does actually help shape the growth development of many teens and it is important to make sure that all teens have access to good games to help their development.  However, there is a group of visually impaired teens who cannot access a large number of games due to their visual effect.  The majority of game makers do not consider visually impaired teens as target customers, and they make modern games with the focus on beautiful graphics.  This issue widens the gap between normal and visually impaired teens.  Even though visually impaired teens can use computer more conveniently than they do in the past thanks to accessibility tools provided today, there is little accessibility tools for computer games.  Realizing this problem, we completely redesign a contemporary game of a popular genre called “first person shooting” so that visually impaired teens can play with their hearing and touching abilities instead of visual ability.  In order to provide ability to socialize with friends including normal teens, the game is designed to be multiplayer and allow normal teens to play with limited visual effect to ensure that visually impaired teens can play fairly with normal teens.