How to Design Games for Deaf Children: Evidence-Based Guidelines - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 80

How to Design Games for Deaf Children:
Evidence-Based Guidelines

Alessandra Melonio and Rosella Gennari *

Abstract. The goal of this paper is to present the first evidence-based guidelines
for the design of electronic games for deaf children. According to the most recent
deaf literature, playing with such games shows positive effects on deaf children's
visual abilities and working memory abilities. Our review of deaf literature,
briefly sketched in the paper, considers such abilities as well as other relevant
findings concerning the needs of deaf children most relevant for the design of
electronic games for them. The paper also outlines the latest findings of the
TERENCE project, which builds electronic smart games for deaf children. All
such findings are then use to compile the guidelines, which are presented in the
third and final part of this paper.

Keywords: evidence-based design, user centred design, deaf studies, games, chil-
dren with special needs, usability and accessibility.

1 Introduction

In recent years, more and more attention is being paid to the design of electronic
tools (e-tools) for children, and there is a fair amount of work in which designers
have started developing design principles for e-tools for children (e.g. in [21,34]).
To the best of our knowledge, however, there is no single collection of principles
for the design of e-tools for deaf children. We found a list of suggestions for eva-
luating e-tools for deaf people [28] and guidelines for captioning for web sites for
them [29]. On the other hand, the benefits of e-tools for the deaf population are
purported by deaf research studies. In particular, recent deaf studies show how
playing video games can have positive effects in terms of visual abilities and
working memory of deaf individuals [14;16]. Therefore we set ourselves on such a
tack: the main goal of this paper is to present the first evidence-based guidelines
for the design of electronic games that are accessible and usable for deaf children.