Design of a game community based support system for cognitive game accessibility

Abstract

Cognitive game accessibility concerns removing unnecessary barriers for people with cognitive disabilities to participate in game play. Cognitive accessibility may involve the content of the game that requires work by game designers with limited time but also perhaps limited awareness of the issues and opportunities. The focus here is on people in the game community without cognitive disabilities to contribute with content for cognitive accessibility. The problem is that there is no support system for game community-based contributions of simplified texts and other modalities in games. This paper presents three iterations of a support system, within a design science framework with prototypes, interviews and observations, to answer: Which requirements need to be met for a game community-based system for making quest descriptions more accessible for people with cognitive disabilities affecting language? How can a system for contributions of simplified text be designed from the perspectives of experienced gamers? The conclusions were: (1) a set of requirements and a digital prototype available online; (2) experienced gamers understood how the interface of the prototype worked; and (3) further support functionality would benefit the users of the system. Future work is to evaluate community contributions by involving people with mild cognitive disabilities in game play studies.