NavStick: Making Video Games Blind-Accessible via the Ability to Look Around
This addresses accessibility for visually impaired gamers, offering a novel interaction method but is incremental in improving existing blind-accessible games.
The researchers tackled the problem of video game inaccessibility for visually impaired people by introducing NavStick, an audio-based tool that repurposes a thumbstick to allow looking around in 3D environments, finding that it enabled users to form more accurate mental maps compared to traditional methods.
Video games remain largely inaccessible to visually impaired people (VIPs). Today's blind-accessible games are highly simplified renditions of what sighted players enjoy, and they do not give VIPs the same freedom to look around and explore game worlds on their own terms. In this work, we introduce NavStick, an audio-based tool for looking around within virtual environments, with the aim of making 3D adventure video games more blind-accessible. NavStick repurposes a game controller's thumbstick to allow VIPs to survey what is around them via line-of-sight. In a user study, we compare NavStick with traditional menu-based surveying for different navigation tasks and find that VIPs were able to form more accurate mental maps of their environment with NavStick than with menu-based surveying. In an additional exploratory study, we investigate NavStick in the context of a representative 3D adventure game. Our findings reveal several implications for blind-accessible games, and we close by discussing these.