| Abstract: |
Video games have become one of the most relevant audiovisual products in the last decades. As their status shifts from an isolated form of entertainment to a well-established industry, it is time to set the ground for guidelines and standards that ensure a design that make them enjoyable for everyone. Creating accessible video games is a social, ethical and even economic must[1]. In particular, there are three steps in which any gamer's performance might be compromised: receiving stimuli, determining a response and providing input[2]. Among these, people with cognitive disabilities struggle when responding to a video game's expectations. This kind of impairment is the least explored and thus the one that would benefit the most from a research approach[3]. On that note, this paper will illustrate how cognitively disabled gamers are currently being addressed in a double-sided way. On the one hand, we will review the issue from the perspective of the industry by analyzing current video game accessibility guidelines[4,5,6]. On the other hand, we will perform a bibliographic review to address the efforts carried out by the academia. In many cases, we will encounter that these two differ greatly, as is the case with learning difficulties. Even though many of the aforementioned guidelines include clarity of language, most developers are not aware of the accessibility services that best deal with them, such as the easy-to-understand (E2U) languages. This emerging service, aimed at improving comprehensibility, is currently not included in any mainstream video game. In fact, most studies on the topic are very recent and focused on web sites. However, their results are promising[7,8]. Its application seems to improve the performance not only of people with developmental disabilities, but also of people with acquired ones, such as the elderly. It could even be beneficial for people with no impairments[9]. In this regard, it seems only appropriate to broaden its study to include other audiovisual products, so that we can not only prove its effectiveness across different media, but also promote its use. We will argue that a good starting point would be developing reception studies with cognitively disabled gamers to compare their performance with a version of a video game in standard language and a version with E2U language. This will lead us to discuss the benefits of this and others lines of research in order to ascertain, firstly, that video game developers take people with cognitive disabilities into account and, secondly, that implementing an accessibility service such as the E2U language can in fact mark the difference. |
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(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
