Applying sonification to improve accessibility of point-and-click computer games for people with limited vision

Abstract

Computer game accessibility for people with limited vision is a challenging problem because many games, such as point-and-click games, heavily rely on mouse interaction for game world exploration. But mouse interaction requires the sense of sight for orientation and navigating through the user interface. Solutions have been proposed to this problem but usually they come at a significant increase in the cost (e.g. haptic devices). This paper explores the use of general sonification techniques applicable to a broad set of games to generate acoustic hints that help limited vision users to locate the interactive elements in the game world by simplifying the use of the mouse. This is a first step to improve point-and-click computer games accessibility with little extra development cost and the initial sonification experiments with limited vision people show promising results.