IGDA Game Accessibility Special Interest Group

Slalom, the Videogame






Wheelchair Slalom is a sport for people with cerebral palsy, in which the players go through a course made up of various obstacles and tests in the shortest time possible.

'Slalom, the Videogame' provides an insight into the sport without the need for space, time and personnel required for its practice.
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Design Tips For: Subtitled Games



Full subtitles (aka Closed Captions if you live in the USA or Canada) in a game, can make the world of difference to deaf and partially-hearing players. Now that games and films have so many parallels, imagine how hard it would be to follow a film without the sound-track. It's not much a stretch to imagine how hard some games become without sound.

My friend, Reid Kimball, has posted a really helpful Mockup of Heavy Rain with full closed captioning. It shows some of the importance of having the mood of music described, the sound effects as well as the essential dialogue.

Reid is offering a service to advise game developers upon how to best include deaf and partially-hearing players. He definitely knows his stuff, after having worked with the team that modified Doom 3 to include full subtitles, and spending many years supporting the IGDA's Game Accessibility Special Interest Group.

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Subtitles: Increasing Game Accessibility



Image of a road-sign for route 888 - linking tenously to the BBC's original subtitling service accessed via paging 888 on their teletext service on analogue TVs. Gamasutra have published an excellent article that presses home the benefits of including full subtitles (aka Closed Captions in the USA) in video games. Read on here.

Link via: Reid Kimball. More on the meaning of 888 here.

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Ubisoft



Doughnuts! It seems as though Ubisoft's grand gesture to game accessibility stretches as far as adding basic text subtitles to future games. This is a good but very basic step. A little more appreciation of "The Sound Alternative" would have been better. A little more willingness to communicate with those pressing for accessibility in games would have been better still.

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Ubisoft Commits To Include Subtitles In Future Products



Ubisoft Commits To Include Subtitles In Future Products - Image of an Opera with Surtitles. Ubisoft have started to listen to the deaf-community struggling with their games for want of some subtitles. Scanning through the comments over at Kotaku gives an idea of the problems gamers have had - and also some of the ignorance that causes these unnecessary barriers.

All fingers are crossed that Ubisoft will be offering full "Closed Captioned" subtitles - with description of important sounds, music and the direction of sounds. They could do a lot worse than to take a peek at Games[CC], Deaf Gamers and Game-Accessibility.com for guidance.

Via: Sandra Uhling on the GASIG mailing list.

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