DISABILITY GAME REVIEW
CMPM131
GROUP 9
DYLAN DE LA CERDA, HENRY ROSS, LOGAN FLANSAAS, NELSON PHAM, OMAR BAHLOOL
Problem
Lack of priority for accessibility options in videogames
Games that don’t accommodate various disabilities but are commercially popular, alienates thousands of people with disabilities from that experience. When accessibility options are overlooked, an entire population of people are kept from being able to enjoy this vast medium of entertainment.
Design
For our design process we started by making a storyboard to help us envision our user and their wants and needs that we would try to satisfy with our design.
We then made a flow analysis chart to break down the details of potential user interactions to help us understand how our users would interact with a hypothetical design and what our design needed to incorporate in order to satisfy user needs.
From there we created many Crazy 8 sketches to begin narrowing in on prototype design ideas.
We then iterated upon our best sketches and worked them into a cohesive whole with our low fidelity prototype. Once we had our low fidelity prototype made, we schemed up a color scheme and visual design for our next iteration of our prototype using the 60 - 30 - 10 rule and commonly accepted color meanings. We also compared our design to other products to see how we fared and gather some insights as to how we could improve on our next iteration.
We then took what we had learned so far and created our first iteration of our high fidelity prototype with full color and a functional interface. After some final usability testing, we did one last iteration on our high fidelity prototype to address the feedback we received.
Research
One of the major questions we had was how disabled people interacted with games because, while we were aware of accessibility options, we weren’t sure how often games handle options for them outside of subtitles.
This led to us asking about the types of users we’d want to focus on since we’d want to know what types of disability people would have that could affect how they play games.
We then asked about what could frustrate users with disabilities as well as excite them due to the idea that, if we could figure out what frustrates them and excites them, then we could better find something we could look into and work on making.
Finally, we asked about what their considerations are when purchasing and reusing their games because if there could be reasons why someone with a disability would want to look into a game to make sure they could play it comfortably then we could work on something to tackle that.
Insights
Through our research, we found that people with disabilities such as vision impairment are repeatedly frustrated by the lack of options to increase the size of UI elements, subtitles, etc. As well as people with hearing options were disappointed with the lack of options for audio to either make it louder or better options for subtitles.
People like this are often feeling left out and unable to fully connect with the characters and story as they can’t fully immerse themselves in the game.
People with disabilities would often look up whether a game would be accessible to their specific disability which would alter whether they want to buy it or not. However, for less popular games or for certain disabilities, it was often difficult to look up how accessible a game is and get consistent, relevant results.
Solution
We decided on a simple solution that would satisfy everyone, a website completely dedicated to people with disabilities find games that work for them.
This website has, essentially, a library of games akin to Steam or Origin, except this website would show how accessible a specific game is for people with disabilities. You could also sort by your specific disability and see what games you can enjoy despite it.
The website would have reviews from people specifically criticizing or praising the accessibility of certain games, as well as an accessibility score to show how overall accessible it is to the general audience whom this website is for.
Usability
Insights
At first, the testers didn’t know the site was specifically for Disability Games Review as it wasn’t stated clearly. It wasn’t until they saw the title at the very top that they realized it was for people with disabilities who play games and want to read reviews. There was also too much text in the review section and it was small to read according to the tester. There also needs to be more options for other disabilities like people with reading or vision impairment. The term “accessibility” was sort of vague to them in terms of what was meant by that and how there should be more specific disabilities just so there’s more options available. Not every gamer has the same disability. Overall, it was a good site but should be improved in a way that helps disabled gamers navigate the website more easily since the website is catered towards those disabled gamer
Taking all the testing insights into consideration, we made the title of the games alot bigger and bolder for vision impaired gamers to see them better and also reduced the amount of text needed in the games review section of the site. The whole idea for us improving this site was to make everything bigger to read and see because most of the criticism was too much text in too small of a space and the text was too small in it of itself. We made tweaks that catered more towards gamers with disabilities as opposed to treating it as some regular website.
What's next?
Improving the prototype, adding additional functionality, and checking responses when we do another round of testing. As for future plans with this, we can hopefully bring this site to life and work with any data we collect from a live site to improve and add more functionality depending on user feedback.