Gamification and accessibility

Abstract

There are many software requirements for the development of accessible applications, in particular for elderly people or people with disabilities. In particular, user interfaces have to be sufficiently abstract to cover required adaptations. In this paper, we introduce a gamification approach for teaching, connecting and engaging developers on accessible design of applications. A particular challenge hereby is combining gamification patters with the requirements of accessibility. As many gamification patters build on visual representation or usage metaphors, they are not suited for adaptation. Instead, we derive a representation-agnostic set of gamification patters from actual game design of commercial games. We identify and illustrate five categories of representation-agnostic gamification patterns, based on a games survey: action space, reward, challenge, progress, and discovery.