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Towards a Generalized Acoustic Minimap for Visually Impaired Gamers

Published: 10 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Video games created for visually impaired players (VIPs) remain inequivalent to those created for sighted players. Sighted players use minimaps within games to learn how their surrounding environment is laid out, but there is no effective analogue to the minimap for visually impaired players. A major accessibility challenge is to create a generalized, acoustic (non-visual) version of the minimap for VIPs. To address this challenge, we develop and investigate four acoustic minimap techniques which represent a breadth of ideas for how an acoustic minimap might work: a companion smartphone app, echolocation, a directional scanner, and a simple menu. Each technique is designed to communicate information about the area around the player within a game world, providing functionality analogous to a visual minimap but in acoustic form. We close by describing a user study that we are performing with these techniques to investigate the factors that are important in the design of acoustic minimap tools.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)SoundShift: Exploring Sound Manipulations for Accessible Mixed-Reality AwarenessProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661556(116-132)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2022)OmniScribe: Authoring Immersive Audio Descriptions for 360° VideosProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3526113.3545613(1-14)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2022

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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST '21 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
October 2021
182 pages
ISBN:9781450386555
DOI:10.1145/3474349
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 10 October 2021

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Author Tags

  1. Audio navigation tools
  2. acoustic minimaps
  3. blind-accessible games
  4. visual impairments

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UIST '21

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Overall Acceptance Rate 355 of 1,733 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)SoundShift: Exploring Sound Manipulations for Accessible Mixed-Reality AwarenessProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661556(116-132)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2022)OmniScribe: Authoring Immersive Audio Descriptions for 360° VideosProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3526113.3545613(1-14)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2022

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