I’ve proved that making a previously inaccessible game available to someone with significant sight loss is both possible and highly beneficial to them.
So… what next? Several possible trajectories:
Keep it in the Family
My brother is keen to join in – potentially letting Dad play both of us at once. Suspect our kids would be happy to play Grandad at Scrabble too.
The server was designed with multiple games in mind – so that’s easy to expand.
The challenge is how to extend the user interface, without making it harder to use
- to let Dad see who he’s playing
- to let Dad switch between games
- to make it clear which game each new message refers to
Other Games
We’ve now been playing each other at Scrabble for a few weeks – and, rather than getting bored with it, the competitive element is increasing and Dad’s getting more serious about it!
So maybe little need yet to investigate other games. Crosswords and Word Searches are an obvious neighbouring category that would reuse a lot of the components built so far.
Build a Toolkit/Platform
Apply the lessons being learned to generate a toolkit that makes it easier to build other games – or User Interfaces more generally – for the partially sighted.
Flesh out Scrabble for Partially Sighted
There’s an opensource project – “Quackle” – that plays scrabble to championship standard!
To avoid re-inventing the wheel, this could be used to:
- automate scoring and validation against a Scrabble dictionary
- let users play the computer instead of a friend.
The latter point is a double-edged sword. Playing another human -whether fully or partially sighted – encourages social interaction.
The former point would allow two partially sighted players to play each other without either having to be able to perform the more onerous scoring and checking. It also allows ‘what if’ play. Putting letters down to make words that you’re not sure about – and have the board tell you if they’re valid or not without needing you to look them up in a dictionary.
Before Reinventing the Wheel…
Now that I know what’s possible and have a feel for how much effort each of the above might take, time to consult with some experts and to have another look at the ‘state of the art’.
