Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Hearing-Impaired Players
To help support hearing-impaired players, consider the follow ing:
■
Display visible cues for audible events.
If a car scrapes along a railing, show
sparks; when a gun fires, show a muzzle flash. Naturally, you can't do this in some
circumstances. In horror games, scary sounds often come from unseen sources, and
that aspect is critical to creating the desired emotional effect. But for games that
aren't in the horror genre—which means most of them—you should be able to
design for hearing-impaired players by including visual cues for the most critical
audible events.
■
Offer two separate volume controls, one for music and one for sound effects.
Be sure the player can mute either one entirely. Hearing-impaired people often
complain that they cannot filter out background sounds from foreground ones, so
conversation becomes impossible in noisy environments. In a video game, music
can prevent them from hearing important sound effects. If you can, separate spo-
ken dialog into a third category and let the players control its volume level, too.
Make these controls easily accessible from a pause menu—don't require the player
to save the game and return to a shell menu to adjust them.
■
Use the rumble (vibration) feature of the controller if the controller includes
one.
If you do this, players will be able to feel events even if they cannot hear
them. Also allow the player to turn vibration off—not all of them like it.
■
Supply optional subtitles for dialog and sound effects.
(This feature is also
called
closed captioning.
) It is very inexpensive to implement and enormously help-
ful to hearing-impaired players. The biggest drawback of subtitles is that you must
leave space for them on the screen.
Half-Life 2
includes closed captioning and uses
different colors to indicate different speakers.
For more information on accommodating hearing-impaired players, visit
Deafgamers.com at
www.deafgamers.com.
Mobility Impairments
The best thing you can do for mobility-impaired players is to reduce the time pres-
sure required to accomplish tasks. Many people with physical impairments can
manage well enough given time, but they don't always get the time. If it's feasible,
include a switch that lets the player adjust the speed of the game. There's no such
thing as
too slow
.
Keep your control set simple.
Strange Attractors
, one of the finalists at the
Independent Game Festival in 2006, uses a single button for player control.
Weird
Worlds: Return to Infinite Space
uses a purely mouse-based interface. Researchers are
also working on ways to adapt games and game controllers to what is called single-
switch operation; see “Accessibility Resources” later in this section for more details.
Obviously not all games can make do with so few controls, but even if you're not
