Accessible gaming

The drill goes like this: it is likely that you receive the majority of your adaptive equipment (the cool stuff) through a government scheme, and that you wait ages for it to arrive. After delivery, someone comes from miles away and sets it all up for you. You're given a couple of days training and all is fine and dandy for a while until something - often just one little thing - goes wrong, and no one knows how to fix it for you. They keep passing the buck.

"It's probably that special software you have that's conflicting with our system," says your Sys Admin.

Or:

"Our accessible software has never been used with a system like yours before," says the software manufacturer. Months ensue where you spend hours on the phone with customer support from about five different companies, as you try to work out the problem for yourself. Worse still, someone may take your machine away never to be seen again. Aargh.

So, when you see an article on accessible gaming, you just think "Yeh, right, in my dreams! First, I don't have time to do fun stuff like that; and second, it would probably mess up my system again!" The truth is, you don't, and it might - but what the heck! Even us super-powered disabled people need to have fun sometimes!

"But," you say, "there won't be any games out there I want to play that are accessible!" and before I started working on this article, I would have completely agreed with you. I've found, however, that the web is absolutely crawling with disabled gamers and people who have found ways round the annoying bias that games seem to have for favouring the physically un-challenged.

The first annoyance, for most of us, is the physical interface to the game. It's well known that computer game technology is always ahead of other computer technology - whether in terms of graphics, sound or the device you use to control it. For people with disabilities, this is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing, because gamers have pushed the market for low-cost devices such as gesture gloves, touch feedback devices, speech recognition and 3D wireless mice - all of which have a lot of potential for us. It's a curse because the games they are driving often feature lots of tiny, fast-moving things where accuracy and speed of action are the keys to success and, though you might not have any motor problems, adaptive software on your machine may get in the way of these time-critical applications. Moreover, sophisticated games use sound and visual effects that are often ahead of current access solutions such as screenreading software and voice-input systems.

If pressed, manufacturers of computer access systems would say that, while their goal is to keep up with leading edge application development, as seen in the gaming industry, in reality they need to focus their energy and resources on supporting the applications people need in the workplace.

Don't worry, there is hope. One company, Mindmaker, has produced a voice-recognition engine for games called Game Commander. Though not specifically created as an access solution, it has been designed from the ground up to be integrated into game engines that have time-critical requirements, such as flight simulators, and has proven to be a very effective solution for many disabled gamers.

There are also many off-the-shelf solutions for accessibility that have been pressed into service for gaming, some of which are listed in TechTV's Equal Access Peripheral Directory. But as Justin Hall, the former director of innovation at Gamers.com points out, game designers can't use the fact that these devices are in theory compatible with their games to get themselves off the hook - they actually need to sit down and try playing a game with a head mouse and a foot switch, as he did, to get a taste of reality.

Hall suggests it isn't that difficult to overcome these problems and if, as analysts are saying, the gaming industry is outstripping the film industry as a source of revenue, then surely there are some pounds to be extracted from us disabled folks as well?

There is also hope directly from the gaming industry itself. This year, for the first time, the Independent Games Festival award for Innovation In Audio acknowledged that making accessible games can also bring material rewards, when it was given to Terraformers for their forthcoming game designed from the ground up to be accessible to people with visual disabilities.

In Terraformers, sounds play a crucial role - in fact, you can't win the game if you don't attend to its sounds. As its manufacturers say:

"The game looks and feels like a regular 3D game, familiar to seeing gamers, but also has an advanced audio interface. This combined graphics and audio-based interface is the key to integration of users with different abilities. The audio interface is transparent according to the game design, i.e. all audio feedback has a logic function within the game itself. This way there is no special accessibility layer that would counteract integration."

In the meantime, however, disabled gamers haven't just been sitting around waiting for the rest of the world to see the light. The disabled gaming community itself sports its fare share of hackers who have been working away in the background for years to come up with their own solutions. There are several websites where you can find the fruits of their labours and download great, adapted classics - many of which are free!

If you like arcade games, for example, check out levelgames.net.

You can also find a whole raft of information on blind-person friendly games, together with some great downloads, at the blind gamers' webzine - Audyssey.

The future? Well, who knows? But there are some funky things in the offing. How about a bunch of games that you control with your brainwaves and that respond to your heart-rate and how sweaty your palms are? You can find that on MindGames, and also reported on the BBC News Technology site. But to heck with the future - I want accessible Sims NOW! Come on! Fatten up those Sims people so they are easier to aim a mouse at and make Sims speech-friendly - or is the thought of a bunch of blind urban planners too much for you?!