Best Video Games Designed To Work For People With Poor Eyesight

Most video games available these days are designed and marketed for able-bodied individuals with clear vision, but that hasn’t stopped blind gamers from playing and enjoying them. There are currently a surprising number of games out there friendly to the vision impaired – some, like the phone game Night Jar, designed specifically for audio navigation, others with audio feedback cues which people with poor vision can deftly interpret.

Gamers with blindness, color blindness, or other issues of sight want to play the latest hit video game as much as their sighted colleagues, and to that end many vision-impaired gamers navigate through video games using audio cues, vibration feedback from their controllers, or special patches and mods that improve sound quality, increase the interface size, read game text out loud, and more.

Some video game genres are easier for people with vision-impairment to play than others, often because their gameplay has a close relationship between sound and the movements of a video game avatar. Other games have been designed from the ground-up to be playable by the vision-impaired, emphasizing audio as a way of perceiving the game world.

Audio-Centric Video Games Like The Night Jar and Blind Legend

Night Jar, an iOS game released in 2011, and Blind Legend, released in 2016, are two big examples of games built around audio navigation and blindness as a theme. Night Jar, a science-fiction horror adventure narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, is about an astronaut trying to escape a spaceship plummeting into a black-hole, in which players use sound cues to navigate the ship corridors and avoid a stalking alien. Blind Legend, in contrast, is a hack’n’slash fantasy about a blind knight and his daughter navigating and fighting their way through a danger-filled castle.

Text Adventure Video Games Like Zork or Planetfall

One of the earliest video game genres developed for the home computer, Text Adventures, also called “Interactive Fiction”, use text to describe the game world and keyboard commands to interact with it (“Go North”, “Pick Up Flask”, etc.). Classic Text Adventures like Zork, Planetfall, or A Mind Forever Voyaging can be played by the blind and vision-impaired using a text-to-audio interface or digital braille displays.

Racing Games Like Mario Kart and Need For Speed

Newer racing car games like Grid, Need For Speed Heat, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe have been popular among gamers with impaired vision, particularly if the gameplay focuses on safety rails over bottomless chasm (for this reason, the arena battle mode of Mario Kart is more popular among blind and vision-impaired gamers than its racing mode). The main audio cues seen in most racing games – the roar of the engine, the screech of brakes, the shriek of cars grinding together – are useful cues that vision-impaired gamers can use to feel out the racetrack.

Fighting Games Like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat

In the same spirit, the sounds effects of fighting games like the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat series are tied directly into the tactile motions of the dueling martial artists. Attacks like punches, kicks, and fireballs all have clear audio cues indicating whether they hit, miss or get blocked, letting a vision-impaired player judge the effectiveness of their inputs and feel out the distance between themselves and their opponent. The traditionally bombastic declarations of fighting game announcers provide an additional form of feedback to vision-impaired players – particularly when they pull off an extended combo or input a Fatality.

The better the sound quality and sound feedback of a mainstream video game, the more vision-impaired gamers can interact with with and genuinely enjoy them. This highlights how important sound design is to the development of video games – more importantly, it shows that game developers don’t need to spend big bucks to make their games accessible to people with vision-impairment or other disabilities. They need only make small changes, but these small changes can make a big difference to people in the gaming community who are too often overlooked.

Source: NPR

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