NavStick: Making Video Games Blind-Accessible via the Ability to Look Around

Abstract

Video games remain largely inaccessible to visually impaired people (VIPs). Today's blind-accessible games are highly simplifed renditions of what sighted players enjoy, and they do not give VIPs the same freedom to look around and explore game worlds on their own terms. In this work, we introduce NavStick, an audio-based tool for looking around within virtual environments, with the aim of making 3D adventure video games more blind-accessible. Nav-Stick repurposes a game controller's thumbstick to allow VIPs to survey what is around them via line-of-sight. In a user study, we compare NavStick with traditional menu-based surveying for different navigation tasks and fnd that VIPs were able to form more accurate mental maps of their environment with NavStick than with menu-based surveying. In an additional exploratory study, we investigate NavStick in the context of a representative 3D adventure game. Our fndings reveal several implications for blind-accessible games, and we close by discussing these. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Auditory feedback; Accessibility technologies; Accessibility systems and tools.

Demonstration of VRBubble: Enhancing Peripheral Avatar Awareness for People with Visual Impairments in Social Virtual Reality

“…User Queried Verbal Descriptions Some works allowed users to select objects in the environment via a list or a grid and hear additional descriptions about the selected object [37,49,74,82]. For instance, Terraformers [82] was a virtual world game designed to be accessible to PVI.…”

“…A user can thus navigate the menu and hear audio descriptions of selected objects. Nair et al [49] also compared similar menu systems with their novel game controller-based navigation technique, allowing PVI to look around a virtual world by scrubbing the thumbstick on a game controller to different directions; the system then announced what was in that direction via spatial verbal descriptions.…”

“…Researchers have started tackling the VR accessibility problems for PVI by enabling them to navigate and perceive VR scenes. Some research leveraged or created additional devices (e.g., PHANToM, game controller thumbsticks) to enable VR navigation by providing haptic feedback and/or audio feedback [7,24,30,46,49,68,85]. Others focused on software solutions, designing accessible interactions based on existing VR setups, such as keyboard-based interactions with spatial audio feedback for a virtual world [52,59,72,74], and more intuitive interactions based on off-the-shelf VR controllers and headsets [86].…”

“…We aim to fill this gap by enhancing PVI's awareness of surrounding avatars in social VR. Unlike prior work that required PVI to actively explore and query information from the environment [49,85], we focus on peripheral awareness-the innate ability to unconsciously "maintain and constantly update a sense of our social and physical context" [56]. People can usually maintain peripheral awareness effortlessly without being distracted from their main focus [6].…”

Towards a Generalized Acoustic Minimap for Visually Impaired Gamers

“…Several examples of SATs have come from the research community as well. A notable example is NavStick [41,42], which repurposes a game controller's right thumbstick to allow VIPs to "look around" their in-game surroundings via line-of-sight. A directional scanning system like NavStick could allow VIPs to determine the presence and spatial arrangement of objects around them (Types…”