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Accessible games for blind children, empowered by binaural sound

Published: 01 July 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Accessible games have been researched and developed for many years, however, blind people still have very limited access and knowledge of them. This can pose a serious limitation, especially for blind children, since in recent years electronic games have become one of the most common and wide spread means of entertainment and socialization. For our implementation we use binaural technology which allows the player to hear and navigate the game space by adding localization information to the game sounds. With our implementation and user studies we provide insight on what constitutes an accessible game for blind people as well as a functional game engine for such games. The game engine developed allows the quick development of games for the visually impaired. Our work provides a good starting point for future developments on the field and, as the user studies show, was very well perceived by the visually impaired children that tried it.

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    PETRA '15: Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments
    July 2015
    526 pages
    ISBN:9781450334525
    DOI:10.1145/2769493
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    • NSF: National Science Foundation
    • University of Texas at Austin: University of Texas at Austin
    • Univ. of Piraeus: University of Piraeus
    • NCRS: Demokritos National Center for Scientific Research
    • Ionian: Ionian University, GREECE

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 01 July 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. audio only games
    2. auditory interface
    3. binaural processing
    4. games for the visually impaired

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    • University of Texas at Austin
    • Univ. of Piraeus
    • NCRS
    • Ionian

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