Panel Contribution: Accessibility for Interactive Games and Simulations

Clayton LewisUniversity of Colorado, USA

Argument

• Online education has a key role in supporting the aims of Article 24 of the UNCRPD, including EPSD.

• Online education can offer enormous benefits for people with disabilities…

• … but only if we who develop online educational offerings work to make them fully inclusive.

• Some important educational media, including games and simulations, are rarely inclusive today.

• How can we address this challenge?

Approaches

• The Raman Principle: separation of content from presentation

• The Mazrui Challenge: supporting people with disabilities in creating their own ICT

• Fluid: software architecture for flexible inclusion

• Extended metadata for games and simulations

The Raman Principle

"The way to think about the visual system is as a way to ask questions about a spatial database. If you give someone another way to ask the questions and get the answers, they don't need vision."

--T V Raman, Google

Jawbreaker Demo (Raman and Chen) demonstrates the

principle

Jamal Mazrui: Technology Tools for People with Disabilities

Jamal Mazrui

Gregg Vanderheiden

Software Architecture: GPII and Fluid

• The Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure Initiative (GPII.net) aims to support autopersonalization: allowing people to specify how they want to interact with ICT.

• The basis for software that can be flexibily reconfigured to meet differing individual needs is an architecture being developed by fluidproject.org as part of the GPII.

• The emphasis is declarative representation of programs.

Extended Metadata

• Amazon X-Ray technology lets video viewers access information about scenes, characters, and actors, as they watch.

• YouDescribe, from Smith Kettlewell Institute, allows peope to attach audio descriptions to YouTube videos.

• Can we extend this approach to provide explanations of the action in simulations and games?

What These Approaches Can Mean

• We can separate the conceptual content of games and simulations from a particular presentation that works well only for some learners.

• We can provide software tools that will make it easier for people, including young people, and difference learners, to create their own games and simulations.

• We can support people sharing information to enrich the experience for other learners.