Technology in Escape Rooms

Project Summary

Playing video-games is a way to relax and share experiences with friends. However, for many users, the accessibility of games (or lack thereof) can exclude them from this experience. Considering users with visual impairments, research to date has focussed on the design of audio-based games, but little work has evaluated the success of these games. This research aims to investigate audio-only games and to evaluate the accessibility and usability of these for both typically impaired users and users with typical vision. Previously, this has only been considered with respect to users with impaired vision.

The outcome of this work will be useful for games developers who will be able to make use of the results in order to increase the accessibility of their own games. They may also learn about the importance of designing for marginalised groups when developing computer games.

Associated Publications

• Rachel Menzies. 2019. Unlocking Accessible Escape Rooms. In The 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 510–512. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3308561.3354602

Research Team Members

• Dr Rachel Menzies - The University of Dundee