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

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

Eighteen Months of Meeple Like Us:An Exploration into the State of Board Game Accessibility

The study of game accessibility to date has largely focused on the topic of accessibility within a video game context. Largely underexplored in the academic and professional literature is accessibility in the domain of tabletop games, especially those that are classified as part of the 'hobbyist' market. An ongoing series of research annotations, published on the blog Meeple Like Us, has been aimed at addressing this lack of attention. In this paper, the authors report on the work of the Meeple Centred Design project which to date has examined 116 board games for the accessibility issues they manifest and the lessons that can be learned for designers in this space. While the project has not achieved significant coverage of even a fraction of the available library of hobbyist games, currently numbering approximately one hundred thousand, it has discussed the issues with many of the most critically success and popular of these titles. This paper reports on results to date, methodology of the analyses, limitations of the project, and the future plans for work in this interesting game accessibility context

Meeple Centred Design: A Heuristic Toolkit for Evaluating the Accessibility of Tabletop Games

Evaluation of accessibility within a tabletop context is much more complicated than it is within a video game environment. There is a considerable amount of variation in game systems, game mechanisms, and interaction regimes. Games may be entirely verbal, or completely non-verbal. They might be real-time or turn based, or based on simultaneous actions. They can be competitive or co-operative, or shift from one to the other during a single game session. They might involve visual pattern recognition or force players to memorise game state without visual cues. They may involve touch, or smell. They might involve social deduction or betrayal. They can encompass all sensory faculties, in differing degrees. Almost all games have accessibility considerations that should be taken into account, but there is currently no comprehensive tool by which this can be done that encompasses the rich variety of tabletop gaming interaction metaphors. In this paper, the authors discuss the heuristic lens that is used by the Meeple Centred Design tabletop accessibility project. This is a tool that has been applied to one hundred and sixteen games to date, and the full results of these have been published for analysis and consideration within the wider tabletop gaming community

Ethical and professional complications in the construction of multi-developer hobbyist games.

The modern availability of powerful video game development frameworks has resulted in something of an indie renaissance. Within this blossoming of small scale development are numerous hobbyist developers who build games for their own inherent satisfaction rather than with the expectation of any financial remuneration. While many of these individuals labour in isolation, some have undertaken projects of sufficient scale and complexity to require the recruitment of multiple developers over long periods of time. The lack of direct payment for volunteered efforts in such environments creates numerous interpersonal issues that must be considered?these relate to aspects of intellectual property ownership and the treatment of developers, as well as to the expectations of those players who may invest their time in a hobbyist title. The nature of recruitment for such projects is such that formal experience in software development or games design cannot be assumed, and the management complexities this paradigm introduces are of sufficient complexity that few tools are available to ensure the coherent development of a game. This paper is a reflective analysis of the issues that emerged through the development of one such game. The observations contained within however are applicable to all multi-developer projects where financial compensation for contributions are likely to be non-existent

Re-imagining the Command Line User Experience for Problem Solving

Though they appear to be arcane and outdated tools by modern standards, traditional command line interfaces (CLIs) still fnd heavy use by sysadmins, software developers and power users. This is largely due to the fact that for many of these users, graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are not often designed to scale to the functionality and control requirements of modern software systems.While CLIs can support powerful and effcient action, it is clear that they challenge usersfin many ways. In examining defciencies with CLIs, we can observe a principle problemfwhich affects the extent to which CLI users are able to effectively and effciently accomplishftheir goals, and, in particular perform action specifcation. This problem is characterised by a need for users to engage in exploratory activities in order to successfully execute validfcommands.The question explored within this dissertation is how this problem of exploration may be addressed, and in doing so, determine how CLIs can better support the solution of novel problems. This is explored through several studies involving expert CLI users, and deriving,testing and evaluating a design for a CLI with usability-enhancing features.Users were found to react well to command suggestion mechanisms, achieving faster tasksuccess and engaging in less documentation checking. However, their inclusion often lead to a less engaging experience for users, and there are still challenges for the integration offthese in real-world CLI software systems. As a consequence of these fndings and others, wefare able to arrive at an informed theoretical model of CLI user action specifcation, whichfmight be used to better understand how the experience of CLI users might be improved