Accessible gaming

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Accessibility highlights from the Consumer Electronics Show

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The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was held last week in Las Vegas, revealing a number of interesting new products that are likely to turn up in our stores in the months to come. Here are some of the main themes this year and their accessibility implications.

Interactive home appliances

With Panasonic introducing its accessible talking TV last year, LG is aiming to go one better, this year introducing a range of interactive home appliances.

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Accessibility celebrated at game developer awards

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The development of games designed to include people with disabilities will be recognised at this year’s Australian Game Developers Awards with the introduction of the Accessibility Award.

Presented at the Game Connect Asia Pacific (GCAP) conference, the awards recognise excellence and innovation in games developed in Australia. For the first time, they have added accessibility as an award category. According to the conference website, accessibility is defined as “mainstream games that make an effort to avoid unnecessarily excluding people with motor, cognitive, hearing speech or vision impairments.”

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Accessible computer game released for young children

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Sonokids have recently released an accessible educational computer game called Ballyland for young children who are blind or vision impaired.

The game features adjustable colour contrast, spoken feedback, zoom, as well as easily recognisable sounds and images. It requires no assistive technology and is described on the Ballyland website to help young children “develop essential foundation keyboarding and keyboard ‘mapping’ skills that will benefit their future use of computer technology”.

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Introducing Glassbrick, Australia’s home-grown screen magnifier

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Have you ever used a piece of technology and thought “I could make a better one of these”? Sierra Asher, a 27-year-old game designer from Brisbane, did just that. The end product is Glassbrick, a screen magnifier for Windows that can meet the demands of hardcore gamers.

Asher works for game design house Halfbrick Studios and is the sole artist behind the hugely popular Jetpack Joyride. He has impaired vision and is reliant on screen magnification software to use computers. A Mac user at home, Asher couldn’t find a screen magnifier for PCs that was up to the task.

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