Accessible Games for the Blind
- Computer games aren't limited to the sighted.computer image by Orlando Florin Rosu from Fotolia.com
As technology increases, the limitations put on people with disabilities decreases. Computer gaming has advanced to the point that games which were once only playable for sighted people are being recoded and altered so that the visually impaired are able to play as well. Regardless of whether it's an old arcade game, war game or simply a challenging puzzle, games are now being made accessible for blind players. - The main goal of Time of Conflict is to capture enemy cities and use their new-found resources to attack. The battles take place on land, at sea and in the air, and are controlled with roughly a dozen keystrokes. The maps which dictate the terrain of the game (land or sea) can be displayed both visually or described with text and sound. The size of the map selected (there are several to choose from) dictates the amount of time and fighter units involved. The menu only shows which actions the gamer is able to use at a given time which makes learning it easier. Time of Conflict supports most Braille displays and uses sounds to give information about the status of each fighter unit. It can be used with Jaws, Window Eyes, System Access and Microsoft SAPI.
- Pac-Man is one of the classic arcade games and has been given a bit of a shift to make it playable for the visually impaired. Rather than having an overhead view of the maze that Pac-Man is traveling through, it's been altered to a first-person point of view so that the player is within the game. From this new perspective, the gamer is able to hear the sounds of approaching walls and doorways as they're being approached so he knows when to make a turn. The ghosts are just as fast and smart as in the original game, but in this incarnation, the gamer has a ghost detector that lets him hear when one is hiding just around the corner. Pac-Man Talks is a Windows application that uses Microsoft's DirectX to play. Each of the commands are single key, and the game itself is self-voicing.
- It's only fitting that a game invented by a blind mathematician should be available to blind gamers for play on computer. Sudo-San has an auditory interface that corresponds with the visual one and uses simple key codes to access different information within the game. Moving around the board is easily done with the cursor and if you lose your place, pressing the "O" key will give you your orientation. To download it, your computer needs a Macromedia Shockwave plugin in order for it to work.
