A case study into the accessibility of text-parser based interaction.

Heron, Michael James

Abstract

The academic issues surrounding the accessibility of video games are reasonably well understood although compensations and inclusive design have not yet been comprehensively adopted by professional game developers. Several sets of guidelines have been produced to support developers wishing to ensure a greater degree of accessibility in their titles, and while the recommendations are broadly harmonious they only address the issues in isolation without being mindful of context or the subtle relationships between interaction choices and verisimilitude within game interfaces. That is not to denigrate the value of these resources, which is considerable -- instead it is to highlight a deficiency in the literature which can be addressed with reflective case studies. This paper represents one such case study, aimed at addressing accessibility concerns within interactive text interfaces. While the specifics of this paper are aimed at multiplayer text game accessibility improvements, it is anticipated that many of the lessons learned would be appropriate for any environment, such as command line interfaces, where the accessibility of written and read text is currently suboptimal.

Citation

HERON, M.J. 2015. A case study into the accessibility of text-parser based interaction. In Proceedings of the 7th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) symposium on engineering interactive computing systems (EICS'15), 23-26 June 2015, Duisburg, Germany. New York: ACM [online], pages 74-83. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1145/2774225.2774833

• Conference Name: 7th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) symposium on engineering interactive computing systems (EICS'15)
• Conference Location: Duisburg, Germany
• Start Date: Jun 23, 2015
• End Date: Jun 26, 2015
• Acceptance Date: Mar 30, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Jun 23, 2015
• Publication Date: Jun 23, 2015
• Deposit Date: Nov 24, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 24, 2016
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 74-83
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2774225.2774833
• Keywords: Human computer interaction (HCI); Text parsing; Accessibility
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/1979