Research on videogame development for blind users
Good afternoon,
I am a computer science student from Spain. For my bachelor thesis I am trying to make a game engine accessible for users with visual functional diversity. I am looking for people to
Answer 2 short questions about how do you interact with your computer
(Optionally) test the prototype of my solution by doing some simple steps on the program
(Optionally) telling me your opinion about my prototype
I am interested in people with some degree of visual functional diversity and previous experience programming or developing videogames (by experience I don't necessarily mean professionals; students and amateurs are fine as well as you have some knowledge and practice).
In case anyone would want to help, my email is alvarocaceresmu...@gmail.com.
I thought it is a good idea (specially for new people who may see this list) to provide you with some context of what my project is about and wh at are my plans for the future. Some of you will recall this from private emails I sent to you; I wanted anyone to know this before hand so that emails with questions are shorter.
My idea is not to reinvent the wheel and to get the highest possible level of inclusion of visually impaired developers on big game studios and companies. For these reasons (and also given the short time span I have to write my thesis), I am trying to take an already existing game engine / game development kit called Godot Engine and to adapt it so that it is accessible. The advantage of Godot Engine is that, while being young compared to Unity 3D or Unreal Engine, it is Free and Open Source Software, it has a huge community releasing constant updates, it is cross-platform and it can export games to many architectures. Godot is written in C, C++ and Python, and communication with screen readers (at least on Linux and Orca) requires using the AT-SPI interface; there are C++ bindings but from what I ha ve heard from AT-SPI developers it is better that I stick to the C implementation of the API.
Also, the idea for this thesis is to develop a small prototype (making it accessible for Debian using Gnome desktop environment and Orca screen reader), as most of my thesis is focused on the Human-Computer Interaction study of users and their needs in the context of video game development. That being said, I would like that this project is actually useful apart from the theoretical HCI conclusions I may get from the thesis, and using Godot instead of coding a small game engine on my own comes from this will. Of course my source code will be made free and open source software once I finish my bachelor thesis, and I would like to continue developing the accessibility layer for Godot Engine.
Thank you in advance; best regards,
Alvaro Caceres
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