Motivation

Video games have become part of our culture and 21st century life style. Not only for entertainment, a field where video games are already the largest industry in terms of annual revenue (according to data extracted from www.theesa.com and http://www.the-numbers.com the income generated by video game sales in the U.S. rose in 2010 up to $15,9 billion versus $10,47 billion of the movie market), but also in other areas like education, where video games are increasingly being used to improve the learning processes. Video games have spanned through platforms like smartphones, which are actually considered as one of the most important gaming environments, with numbers in the range of game consoles, according to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA).

But the growth of the video game industry has not taken into account the needs of people with disabilities, who usually face unavoidable barriers in games. The number of accessible games in the market is still low, especially in mobile platforms, which are not natural environments for people with disabilities yet.

The low accessibility level of video games may be attributed to a number of factors. One of the most important is the difficulty of developing games that could be enjoyed by people with or without disabilities, both in terms of design and implementation costs. It seems to be necessary to improve game designing techniques and methodologies that help increasing their accessibility, along with solutions that cut down the costs of accessibility, especially in those platforms that are less familiar for users with disabilities (e.g. smartphones).

Goals

The project serves a double purpose:

1. Investigate design strategies for developing smartphone games (Android devices in this case) that can be enjoyed with or without sight.
2. Develop a toolkit that facilitates development of accessible games in smartphones (Android) by reusing components and features.

Main outcomes

The main outcome of the project is the BFG Toolkit, a set of reusable components that facilitate the development of accessible games for blind users in Android. The BFG Toolkit is being developed following an agile, iterative and incremental methodology, building on the analysis of accessibility requirements  of different games.

At the moment 3 games have been developed using the BFG Toolkit: Accesible Minesweeper, Accessible Golf and Zarodnik. All three games are freely available for download from Google Play. Each of these apps is further described on different sections of this website.

Features

The games share some interesting features that enhance accessibility:

• Return of information using a text-to-speech system that does not require having other accessibility apps installed (e.g. Talkback), but is also compatible with external assistive tools.
• Two interactions modes on menus and other screens
• Blind Mode: adds an additional tap to each action. One tap (a single touch) over a menu control makes the synthesizer read its label, while a long tap activates/deactivates the control. 
• Standard Interaction: regular Android interaction, used by people without a visual disability. One tap activates/deactivates controls. 
•  Black Screen Mode: "shuts the lights off". It was designed to allow sighted users experience how a blind person plays the game and interacts with the mobile device. In former versions of these apps, this mode was called Blind Mode, but it was renamed as it was confusing.
• Enable/Disable game music 
• Onomatopoeia mode: activates subtitles for all the sounds and voices played in the game. This option was developed to allow sighted users understand how the game works for blind users without using the audio system. 

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