Shared Control for Game Accessibility: Understanding Current Human Cooperation Practices to Inform the Design of Partial Automation Solutions
For game accessibility researchers and designers, this work provides insights into current practices and guidelines for automating shared control, though it is incremental.
This paper explores how shared control is used for game accessibility, finding it essential but limited by human support. Participants welcomed automation but identified design requirements, leading to guidelines for automated support systems.
Shared control is a form of video gaming accessibility support that allows players with disabilities to delegate inaccessible controls to another person. Through interviews involving 14 individuals with lived experience of accessible gaming in shared control, we explore the ways in which shared control technologies are adopted in practice, the accessibility challenges they address, and how the support currently provided in shared control can be automated to remove the need for a human assistant. Findings indicate that shared control is essential for enabling access to otherwise inaccessible games, but its reliance on human support is a key limitation. Participants welcomed the idea of automating the support with software agents, while also identifying limitations and design requirements. Accordingly, this work contributes insights into current practices and proposes guidelines for developing automated support systems.