I had an initial hunt for online Scrabble for the partially sighted back in September 2021 – before starting to work on my own version. Now that I know a bit more about what works, it’s time to have a more careful look.
The biggest problem in searching is to filter out online/apps from physical board games – of which there are many aimed at the partially sighted – essentially with larger tiles and print!
Scrabble for the Blind Proposal
Writing a game for fully blind participants feels much more challenging than my objective!
A potential final year student project attempting this is proposed here in 2019 – and it looks like it got very positive feedback but… not clear if it ever made it off the starting blocks.
But, as is often the case, following the breadcrumbs leads to more interesting things. The most relevant links provided on that page lead to a recent post that looks promising!
https://www.applevis.com/forum/ios-ipados-gaming/new-scrabble-game-beta-wordvoyance-looking-feedback
So… I found Wordvo
Wordvoyance from Themis Games
This is in beta test already! Darn… beat me to it – or did they?
https://www.themisgames.com/wordvoyance/
This is a pretty slick implementation of a slight variant on Scrabble. The board is a little smaller – 13 x 13 instead of the usual 15 x 15. It’s been written by a team of very experienced games writers in response to a request from a blind player.
I reached out to Ben – the lead designer and exchanged a bunch of emails and ideas. It’s aimed at totally blind players rather than partially sighted – but does that matter?
Finally able to visit my Dad again at the end of November 2021, I decided to see how he got on with it, whilst sitting next to him and watching how he coped with everything from the intial sign-up process to actual game-play.
It was fascinating to see how he struggled with the sign-up process – which, of course, has nothing to do with the carefully targetted game itself. That’s a whole blog post in itself!
I realised that if we’re going to help the partially sighted to play games, we have to think about the entire experience – not just the game-play itself. That’s going to require a bunch more work on sign-up, instructions, support, how to communicate with other players etc that also need to consider the player’s visual impairments.
Once Dad had fought his way through sign-up – with a little help from me to point out the bits he was missing on screen, we fired up Wordvoyance. It quickly became apparent – and confirmed by Ben – that it has been designed for completely blind users, who rely wholly on a “screen-reader” to speak to them. It also works well for fully sighted users like myself but for those like Dad who make heavy use of magnifiers – both physical and software – it’s not a viable approach.
Ben very kindly shared a pre-print of an article he’s written for games programmers – walking them through the issues faced by blind users and providing – free of charge – the framework that he has developed to support them. I’ll post a link to it when it’s published – probably on Game Developer https://www.gamedeveloper.com
Ben’s used a different tech stack – HTML, CSS and Javascript versus my Flutter for web approach. Unfortunately it doesn’t lend itself to zooming right in on parts of the board so I can’t reuse that part but his other hints and tips are invaluable. As an introduction to screen-readers and how to apply them, though, it’s excellent – and moves me a long way forward in my design thinking.
We both concluded that our very different approaches each have a valuable target market – so onwards and upwards!
Game Developer
From Ben’s article, I discovered gamedeveloper.com, previously known as “Gamasutra”. Good call on the decision to rebrand guys! I’m gradually uncovering the key sites in this space – which is completely new to me, having been focussed on applications for businesses for the last forty years. I’ve been aware of the growing requirement to improve accessibility across all apps but here’s an article on how it applies to games.
Action games look really challenging to make fully accessible. Glad I’m concentrating on non-real-time word games for now. That feels like plenty to keep me busy for the foreseeable.
