NavStick: Making Video Games Blind-Accessible via the Ability to Look Around

TL;DR

NavStick introduces an audio-based, controller-augmented tool that significantly improves blind players' ability to explore and form mental maps in 3D video game environments, enhancing accessibility.

Contribution

This work presents NavStick, a novel line-of-sight exploration tool using a game controller's thumbstick to improve blind-accessible gameplay in 3D environments.

Findings

VIPs formed more accurate mental maps with NavStick

NavStick outperformed traditional menu-based surveying

Implications for designing more accessible blind-friendly games

Abstract

Video games remain largely inaccessible to visually impaired people (VIPs). Today's blind-accessible games are highly simplified renditions of what sighted players enjoy, and they do not give VIPs the same freedom to look around and explore game worlds on their own terms. In this work, we introduce NavStick, an audio-based tool for looking around within virtual environments, with the aim of making 3D adventure video games more blind-accessible. NavStick repurposes a game controller's thumbstick to allow VIPs to survey what is around them via line-of-sight. In a user study, we compare NavStick with traditional menu-based surveying for different navigation tasks and find that VIPs were able to form more accurate mental maps of their environment with NavStick than with menu-based surveying. In an additional exploratory study, we investigate NavStick in the context of a representative 3D adventure game. Our findings reveal several implications for blind-accessible games, and we close by discussing these.