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.
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.”
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”.
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.
