Can I Play That?.
This website was started in 2018 by Susan Banks and Courtney Craven
and aims to provide a platform for stories and conversations
about accessibility (or the lack of it) in games.
Game-Accessibility.com
(project website by the Accessibility Foundation in the Netherlands).
AudioGames.net: Resources:
AudioGames.net is a website dedicated to audio games and blind-accessible games.
Audio games are
computer games who's main output is sound rather than graphics.
See also the websites's
Frequently Asked Questions.
Game Accessibility
is a website that wants to address the problem of a lack of knowledge
about game accessibility
by […]
informing disabled gamers about the availability of accessible games and
by providing resources for developers, publishers and researchers
in order to stimulate accessibility in games.
Anastasia Salter:
“
Making Accessible Games with Twine Audio”, ProfHacker, 19 May 2015.
(Twine is
an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories;
Twine Audio is
extension that adds audio to the Twine interactive fiction engine.)
Millard, Adam:
Should Games Always Be Accessible?
(Adam Millard - The Architect of Games on YouTube, 14 minutes, 21.05.2018).
Millard defines accessibility as follows:
Accessibility is how easy a game is to engage with either on a physical
or mental level: how easy it is to understand, how easy it is to translate what you want to do into the game,
and how easy it is to tell what's going on. (…)
A game that is harder to engage with makes you work for your enjoyment,
but that effort or suffering often brings with it a much more precise and impactful vision.
This of course doesn't include disability-related accessibility stuff,
like colourblind modes and alternate control schemes, which are pretty much always a good idea.
Robberts, Nastassja:
US Law Affects Accessible Gaming For Disabled People,
Glitched Africa, 07.01.2019. Quote:
Back in 2010, then-president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, signed the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) into law.
As of 31 December 2019, the gaming industry is compelled to comply with the CVAA, after having been able to avoid compliance due to extensions being granted.
Stoner, Grant:
Meet the Disabled Streamers Who Are Transforming the Industry,
Wired, 20.05.2021.
Subtitle:
Gamers with disabilities aren't waiting for big companies to catch up: They're forming their own communities and making gameplay more accessible than ever.
All blind accessible games,
BlindGamers.com (no date).
This page list over 100 games with community ratings. It is not clear how frequently this page is updated.
Duplessis, Thibault; Polášek, Vojtěch:
Accessibility for blind players,
lichess.org blog, 11.05.2014.
This blog posts describes a number of changes that were implemented on Lichess to blind people:
Show a textual representation of boards in FEN and PGN. It updates in real time when the board state changes
Allow to input moves by typing "e2e4" or "b7b8Q" in a input field instead of dragging pieces
Implement aria label attributes on buttons, and disable icon fonts
Disable lichess custom CAPTCHAs. They will be replaced by accessible ones when blind mode is enabled.
It also explains how to play chess using a screen reader. It is not clear which combination of browser and screen reader this description is based on.
Journal Articles
Ossmann, Roland; Miesenberger, Klaus:
Guidelines for the Development of Accessible Computer Games.
Proceedings of Computers Helping People with Special Needs, 10th International Conference, ICCHP 2006, Linz, Austria, July 11-13, 2006.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 2006.
Rello, Luz; Subirats, Sergi; Bigham, Jeffrey P.:
An online chess game designed for people with dyslexia,
W4A '16: Proceedings of the 13th Web for All Conference, Montreal, Canada, 11 — 13 April, 2016, Article No. 28.
Abstract (published by ACM:
Teaching chess to students with learning disabilities has been shown to benefit their school performance in unrelated domains.
At the same time, chess involves skills that are highly correlated with dyslexia, such as visuospatial and calculation abilities.
In this paper, we created a online chess game designed for people with dyslexia and seek to understand whether people with dyslexia learn and play chess online in ways that differ from other students and whether such differences may be leveraged to improve classroom performance.
To test how people with dyslexia learn to play chess we carried out a within-subject experiment with 62 participants, 31 of them with diagnosed dyslexia.
Participants used an instrumented web-based chess learning platform that we developed to (i) complete lessons on how to play chess and about chess theory, (ii) work through exercises designed to test and reaffirm their skills, and (iii) play chess against a computer opponent.
We could not find significant differences on four dependent measures out of the twelve measures we collected.
Therefore, dyslexia might have an impact on how people learn and play chess using a computer, suggesting that chess may be useful as a fun way to help people with dyslexia improve their abilities.