Mobile Serious Games: An Accessibility Assessment for People with Visual Impairments

Nowadays, serious games allow to educate in an amused way in different areas. They have become a great tool in the learning process. However, the vast majority do not focus on vulnerable groups such as visually impaired people. On the other hand, the use of mobile devices has been growing and have become an important actor in the learning process, because there are many serious games developed for environments in this devices. Despite this, accessibility for visually impaired has not been considered as a necessary element in the development of this kind of video games. Some authors and companies of development of video games have proposed general guidelines that recommend for the construction of this type of applications. However, these initiatives have not been formalized so they need to be consolidated and analyzed to define a model for the accessibility assessment of video games oriented to people with visual impairments. This paper presents a compilation and analysis of accessibility guidelines for the development of video games for people with visual impairment. It also proposes a categorization of guidelines that can be used to analyze the level of accessibility of a video game and especially of serious games. As a case study, this categorization is used to evaluate some selected mobile serious games and identify their level of accessibility for people with visual impairment. We propose an analysis tool for those who wish to develop mobile serious games for the visually impaired.