Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 16, numbers 3 and 4, 2023 // View article
Authors:
Saba Mateen
Paula Wiesemüller
Sarah Voß-Nakkour
Keywords: Accessibility Education; Virtual Reality; Game Accessibility; Escape Room; Didactic Design
Abstract:
Access to Escape is a Virtual Reality (VR) Escape Room, aimed at sensitizing computer science students to the importance of digital accessibility. Since these students will develop digital content in the future, this target group is an important starting point to create awareness towards the topic. This article outlines the development of a VR game based on the viewpoints of Accessibility Education, Game Accessibility, and accessible VR to offer access to a wide range of people. The primary objective is to address the research question of what steps are necessary to create an accessible VR game and what the design process should entail to achieve this goal. The first step involves developing a didactic conception to create an educationally valuable learning offer. A guide by didactic expert Kerres is presented, which supports the development process of a didactic design including the application to the VR-Escape Room. The development process of Access to Escape also showed that the Game Accessibility Guidelines (GAG) workflow offered a low-threshold starting point, for example, by making the vast amount of accessibility guidelines more tangible. Here, it should be emphasized that the prioritization, as suggested by the workflow, must not lead to the exclusion of any applicable guidelines, since every guideline is needed to guarantee an accessible game experience. However, during the implementation process of our VR-Escape Room, it became apparent that many resources and a well-defined time schedule are needed to achieve a fully accessible game. To counteract this issue, more information material and open-source solutions are needed to meet all accessibility requirements. An evaluation of the first development phase of Access to Escape showed that the VR-Escape Room is a suitable format for educating about accessibility and, based on these results, further steps regarding the development are discussed such as the use of Artificial Intelligence, a multiplayer mode or the transfer to other topics.
Pages: 113 to 126
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2023. Used with permission.
Publication date: December 30, 2023
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-2679