Cardiff researchers working with Google to design accessible games for people with dual disabilities

Dr Fernando Loizides and Chra Abdoulqadir are working with a team of global developers to launch a free and accessible game on Google Play

The team is currently working on a demo aimed at users with vision and motor disabilities, with plans to release a second full game on Google Play later in 2024.

Dr Loizides said that the motivation for developing a game of this nature was the lack of variety and limitations of accessible experiences currently available.

Dr Loizides said: “Our guiding principle is that an experience should be equally enjoyable for abled individuals as it is for those with single or dual disabilities. Leveraging technological advancements, we aim to deliver comfortable yet natural interactions that yield enjoyable experiences”

The demo game currently in development, ‘CellEscape’, is based on the real-life Nellie Bly - a journalist who worked in New York in the late nineteenth century.

The game itself is based on one of Bly’s real life investigations, during which she went undercover in an asylum to expose the treatment of the women institutionalised there.

Nellie Bly will also be the protagonist of the full game the team hopes to release later this year, which will focus on her 72-day trip around the world, inspired by Jules Verne’s ‘Around the World in Eighty Days.’

Dr Loizides and Miss Abdoulqadir are working with a team that includes Google’s accessibility teams in London and California and sound engineers in York.

Dr Loizides said: ”Our goal is to create mobile game experiences that are accessible for both disabled and non-disabled users alike without compromising on entertainment. To achieve this, we carefully consider both input and output mediums.

“Employing binaural audio, we immerse users in a spatial auditory environment, enhancing their sense of direction and immersion. For input interaction, speech seems natural. However, we advocate for natural language interaction in our experiences. By allowing users to communicate naturally with characters, we foster realistic interactions and alleviate the burden of memorising specific commands beyond basic functions like pause and resume.

“Here, the magic of natural language processing and advancements in AI work in our favour. After analysing user speech for sentiment, our software adapts the script dynamically, offering a unique experience tailored to each interaction.

“Moving forward, we aspire to make our experiences accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing by incorporating rich visuals and touch controls for users with speech difficulties.”