Audio Game Maker

I just came across a game creation tool that I thought readers might be interested in. It's called Audio Game Maker and is designed for visually impaired users.

Sounds interesting. Let me know if you try it out!

Kestrel

Guido Corona and Bill Carter have posted some more information about their Kestrel project at IBM,

Virtual Worlds User Interface for the Blind

Looks like really exciting stuff!

There's a brief summary on Virtual Worlds News.

Related Work

I'm not involved in accessibility anymore, but did just come across some really interesting sounding work,

The first two from International Conference Series on
Disability, Virtual Reality and Associated Technologies. I don't think the papers are available yet though.

Accessible virtual environments for people who are blind – creating an intelligent virtual cane using the Nintendo Wii controller, L Evett, D J Brown, S Battersby, A Ridley and P Smith, Nottingham Trent University, UK

People who are blind tend to adopt sequential, route-based strategies for moving around the world. Common strategies take the self as the main frame of reference, but those who perform better in navigational tasks use more spatial, map-based strategies. Training in such strategies can improve performance. Virtual Environments have great potential, both for allowing people who are blind to explore new spaces, reducing their reliance on guides, and aiding development of more efficient spatial maps and strategies. Importantly, Lahav and Mioduser have demonstrated that, when exploring virtual spaces, people who are blind use more and different strategies than when exploring real physical spaces, and develop relatively accurate spatial representations of them. The present paper describes the design, development and evaluation of a system in which a virtual environment may be explored by people who are blind using Nintendo Wii devices, with auditory and haptic feedback. Using this technology has many advantages, not least of which are that it is mainstream, readily available and cheap. The utility of the system for exploration and navigation is demonstrated. Results strongly suggest that it allows and supports the development of spatial maps and strategies. Intelligent support is discussed.

Virtual reality rehabilitation – what do users with disabilities want?, S M Flynn, B S Lange, S C Yeh and A A Rizzo, University of Southern California, USA

This paper will discuss preliminary findings of user preferences regarding video game and VR game-based motor rehabilitation systems within a physical therapy clinic for patients with SCI, TBI and amputation. The video game and VR systems chosen for this research were the Sony PlayStation® 2 EyeToy™, Nintendo® Wii™, and Novint® Falcon™ and an optical tracking system developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. The overall goals of the current project were to 1) identify and define user preferences regarding the VR games and interactive systems; 2) develop new games, or manipulate the current USC-ICT games to address these user-defined characteristics that were most enjoyable and motivating to use; and 3) develop and pilot test a training protocol aimed to improve function in each of the three groups (TBI, SCI and amputation). The first goal of this research will be discussed in this paper.

And a presentation called "Serious Games for People with Physical and Cognitive Impairments"

Virtual Cane/Guide Dog
WiiMote can be used as a pointing device, and can give auditory, visual and haptic (it rumbles) feedback
Virtual cane – uses auditory and haptic feedback
Support with an intelligent agent which gives spoken warnings and advice
Combine to create a virtual guide dog

Another publication, though I'm not sure this paper's actually available yet either,
EVETT, L., RIDLEY, A., BATTERSBY, S. and BROWN, D., 2008. A Wiimote controlled interface to virtual environments for people who are blind - mental models and attentional demands . In: Interactive Technologies, Nottingham, November 2008 .

Paper Available

Our paper is now available in the ACM Electronic Library. If you're unable to access it there you can send me an email or a message here and I'll get a copy to you. Please send an email to G.White at my university, sussex.ac.uk

Here are example citation data,

White, G. R., Fitzpatrick, G., and McAllister, G. 2008. Toward accessible 3D virtual environments for the blind and visually impaired. In Proceedings of the 3rd international Conference on Digital interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (Athens, Greece, September 10 - 12, 2008). DIMEA '08, vol. 349. ACM, New York, NY, 134-141. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1413634.1413663


@inproceedings{1413663,
author = {Gareth R. White and Geraldine Fitzpatrick and Graham McAllister},
title = {Toward accessible 3D virtual environments for the blind and visually impaired},
booktitle = {DIMEA '08: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts},
year = {2008},
isbn = {978-1-60558-248-1},
pages = {134--141},
location = {Athens, Greece},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1413634.1413663},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
abstract = {3D virtual environments are increasingly used for education, business and recreation but are often inaccessible to users who are visually impaired, effectively creating a digital divide. Interviews with 8 visually impaired expert users were conducted to guide design proposals, and a review of current research into haptics and 3D sound for auditory displays is presented with suggestions for navigation and feedback techniques to address these accessibility issues. The diversity and volatility of the environment makes Second Life an unusually complex research object, suggesting the applicability of our work for the field of HCI and accessibility in 3D virtual environments.}
}

Paper Publication

Last week I returned from Athens where I presented our paper at DIMEA 2008.
I thought the presentation went well, with about 15-20 people in the audience. There were a few good questions at the end where we discussed amongst other things the use of synthetic verses naturalistic sounds for 3D spatialisation, from a semiotic point of view, and the potential of formal, structured data like VRML for environments like Second Life.

The presentation itself dealt with 3D virtual environments more generally than the paper, which uses SL as a case study. I demonstrated screen readers and AudioQuake as an example of 3D sonification in an audio game. All presentations in the conference were arranged by theme, and my paper was included in the track called "Social and Collaborative Spaces", so the emphasis of my talk was to raise awareness of the issues for blind and visually impaired users in these environments, and also to call into question just how "social and collaborative" they are when they exclude a sector of society. Following the previous day's excellent keynote by Professor Michael Meimaris, in which he talked about "Digital Natives" and "Digital Immigrants" I coined the phrase "Digital Outcasts" in the context of rapidly evolving but inaccessible technology.

Please get in touch if you'd like a copy of the paper or presentation slides.

Power Up: The Game

As referred to in a previous post, some of the IBM folk have developed an accessible game called PowerUp which is described in the following paper,

@inproceedings{1358752,
author = {Shari M. Trewin and Mark R. Laff and Anna Cavender and Vicki L. Hanson},
title = {Accessibility in virtual worlds},
booktitle = {CHI '08: CHI '08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems},
year = {2008},
isbn = {978-1-60558-012-X},
pages = {2727--2732},
location = {Florence, Italy},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1358628.1358752},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
abstract = {Virtual worlds present both an opportunity and a challenge to people with disabilities. Standard ways to make such worlds accessible to a broad set of users have yet to emerge, although some core requirements are already clear. This paper describes work in progress towards an accessible 3D multi-player game that includes a set of novel tools for orienting, searching and navigating the world.}
}

My first impressions suggest that it's quite similar to Second Life in some respects (fixed name lists, Orientation Center).

I'd be interested to hear feedback from some blind or VI players.

Other Papers

Although our project's finished I've just coincidentally come across some interesting papers that seem relevant to our work,

Desurvire, H. & Wiberg, C. (2007). Master of the Game: The Crucial Role of Accessibility in Future Game Design. In Wiberg, C & Wiberg, M. (eds.) Proceedings of CMID´07 - The First International Conference on Cross-Media Interaction Design, March 22-25, 2007.


@inproceedings{1358752,
author = {Shari M. Trewin and Mark R. Laff and Anna Cavender and Vicki L. Hanson},
title = {Accessibility in virtual worlds},
booktitle = {CHI '08: CHI '08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems},
year = {2008},
isbn = {978-1-60558-012-X},
pages = {2727--2732},
location = {Florence, Italy},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1358628.1358752},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
abstract = {Virtual worlds present both an opportunity and a challenge to people with disabilities. Standard ways to make such worlds accessible to a broad set of users have yet to emerge, although some core requirements are already clear. This paper describes work in progress towards an accessible 3D multi-player game that includes a set of novel tools for orienting, searching and navigating the world.}
}

@inproceedings{354375,
author = {Jochen Schneider and Thomas Strothotte},
title = {Constructive exploration of spatial information by blind users},
booktitle = {Assets '00: Proceedings of the fourth international ACM conference on Assistive technologies},
year = {2000},
isbn = {1-58113-314-8},
pages = {188--192},
location = {Arlington, Virginia, United States},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/354324.354375},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}

@inproceedings{274525,
author = {Sandy Ressler and Qiming Wang},
title = {Making VRML accessible for people with disabilities},
booktitle = {Assets '98: Proceedings of the third international ACM conference on Assistive technologies},
year = {1998},
isbn = {1-58113-020-1},
pages = {144--148},
location = {Marina del Rey, California, United States},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/274497.274525},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}

@inproceedings{638263,
author = {Chieko Asakawa and Hironobu Takagi and Shuichi Ino and Tohru Ifukube},
title = {Auditory and tactile interfaces for representing the visual effects on the web},
booktitle = {Assets '02: Proceedings of the fifth international ACM conference on Assistive technologies},
year = {2002},
isbn = {1-58113-464-9},
pages = {65--72},
location = {Edinburgh, Scotland},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/638249.638263},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}

@inproceedings{1028657,
author = {Andreas Hub and Joachim Diepstraten and Thomas Ertl},
title = {Design and development of an indoor navigation and object identification system for the blind},
booktitle = {Assets '04: Proceedings of the 6th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility},
year = {2004},
isbn = {1-58113-911-X},
pages = {147--152},
location = {Atlanta, GA, USA},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1028630.1028657},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}

@inproceedings{634213,
author = {Calle Sj\"{o}str\"{o}m},
title = {Using haptics in computer interfaces for blind people},
booktitle = {CHI '01: CHI '01 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems},
year = {2001},
isbn = {1-58113-340-5},
pages = {245--246},
location = {Seattle, Washington},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/634067.634213},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}

@inproceedings{1321285,
author = {Mar\'{\i}a J. Ab\'{a}solo and Jos\'{e} Mariano Della},
title = {Magallanes: 3D navigation for everybody},
booktitle = {GRAPHITE '07: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australia and Southeast Asia},
year = {2007},
isbn = {978-1-59593-912-8},
pages = {135--142},
location = {Perth, Australia},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1321261.1321285},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}