ABSTRACT

The academic issues surrounding the accessibility of video games are reasonably well understood although compensations and inclusive design have not yet been comprehensively adopted by professional game developers. Several sets of guidelines have been produced to support developers wishing to ensure a greater degree of accessibility in their titles, and while the recommendations are broadly harmonious they only address the issues in isolation without being mindful of context or the subtle relationships between interaction choices and verisimilitude within game interfaces. That is not to denigrate the value of these resources, which is considerable -- instead it is to highlight a deficiency in the literature which can be addressed with reflective case studies.

This paper represents one such case study, aimed at addressing accessibility concerns within interactive text interfaces. While the specifics of this paper are aimed at multiplayer text game accessibility improvements, it is anticipated that many of the lessons learned would be appropriate for any environment, such as command line interfaces, where the accessibility of written and read text is currently suboptimal.