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AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 29: Accessible Video Gaming with Aaron Preece

Episode Notes

Welcome back to another episode of AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. In this episode, co-host and AccessWorld Magazine editor-in-chief Aaron Preece gives a preview of his presentation he’ll give this week at the annual CSUN conference in Anaheim, California. The presentation builds on a post Aaron published last October, in which he reviewed the Wicked Quest video game. The presentation demonstrates how innovations from non-visual games can guide mainstream developers in making video games accessible to blind and low vision players.

The session, titled “Game Accessibility 101: Translating Visual Gameplay into Sound,” will take place on Wednesday, March 11th, at 10 AM in Grand A/B. For those attending, be sure to stop by and give Aaron a shout-out.

AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 29 Transcript:

Intro:

You're listening to Access World, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. Access World is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind. Learn more at www.afb.org/aw.

Aaron Preece:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Access World Podcast, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. I am your host, Aaron Priest, the editor-in-chief of Access World, and today I am flying solo. In today's podcast, we're going to be doing a sort of sneak peek or a preview of my session at the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference in Anaheim from the 10th through the 13th of 2026. I'll be presenting at CSUN this year on Wednesday, March 11th at 10:20 AM in Grand AB. If anyone's at the CSUN conference this year, please come by and say hi.

And my session is called Game Accessibility 101. And what I'm looking to do is when it comes to the accessibility of say an app, a website, a piece of software, making a UI accessible is a pretty much solved problem at this point. You have things like the web content accessibility guidelines that can be applied to things outside of web accessibility. You can use that for apps and for software as well. And it's really an implementation problem to make things accessible now in that space. The techniques, the recommendations, they're pretty set in stone at this point for multiple disabilities. One of the things in Access World, and we've talked a little bit about here on the podcast, is I really am pushing on game accessibility. In the last, say, 10 years for sure, maybe a little before that, we're starting to see mainstream game developers, AAA developers make their video games accessible to people that are blind.

And there's been accessibility in games for a while, and there's a lot of options for other types of disabilities, but there's something kind of uniquely difficult about making a video game accessibility for blind people, because you're taking something that is very explicitly a visual medium, and then you need to find a way to make all those visual elements understandable to someone that is blind and is not going to be able to see the screen at all. So everything that the person needs to do to play the game, they need to be able to access that in audio and not just visually. So in this particular example, the blindness community has been making games that are sort of mirrors or similar genres to existing video games for decades. I would say for sure back to 2001, but even potentially back into the '90s. And because games weren't accessible, people just made their own and they're called audio games.

So there's no visuals, there's just audio, and everything is done through the realm of audio. And before we get started, the visual medium versus the sound medium or the audio medium are different. They're not one-to-one. Vision and light essentially is a precise medium. You can tell exactly where things are visually, if you can see. If I reach towards my monitor, if I could see, which I kind of can't, I could theoretically see the exact difference and distance between my hand and my monitor. If I am somewhere and I hear something, if I'm walking down the street and I hear the rhythmic clicking or dinging of the light pole, the walk sign pole, that I can kind of tell where that is, but I can't precisely tell where it is. There's a little bit of relativeness there. That audio is basically being blasted out in sort of a ring around that pole, if you think about it that way.

And so it's coming to me and I'm getting that information and I kind of have an idea of where that is and the distance to it. And it works pretty well, but it is a relative medium. It's a little different than the way light works. So that's something to keep in mind when it comes to translating from a visual medium into an audio one. So the game, I'm going to be demonstrating several games specifically made by blind people over the years that demonstrate different issues you might run into in making things accessible for a blind person. So especially in games that are action based or like what I think of as like time based, so you have to react to things quickly. How do you say if you're playing at like an action adventure game, how do you know where walls are? Like if you're navigating, how do you know where hazards are like pits or lava or water or what have you?

How do you know where enemies are? How do you know if you're in a range of an enemy to attack an enemy? How do you know if the enemy's in range to attack you? We'll be covering a lot of those things in the session.

Today we'll be covering some of that because I'm going to be demonstrating a game called Wicked Quest made by, I believe a blind person, which is a side scrolling video game or audio game. If you're familiar with the original, like the classic Super Mario video games where you're looking essentially at the, you're looking at the character from the side and they're running like left or right to navigate through the world. That's the way this game works, but it's an audio. So if you're thinking about Mario, there's multiple things that you have to deal with that you have to see to be able to interact with. So in the very first Super Mario Brothers game, the very first thing Mario runs into is an enemy. And visually you can see that in me. You can see as it comes towards Mario, so you can jump over it or in Mario's case, you can jump on it to defeat it.

And then you also have blocks hovering in the air that you can jump up and hit to get coins. Then there's pipes you have to jump over. There's pits in the ground that if you fall into, instead of jumping over, your character will die. So all those aspects are silent. There's no audio cues for any of that. That's all visual. So how do we make that accessible? So in Wicked Quest, you have very similar elements to this, but it's all made accessible through the medium of audio. And I've made some levels for ... I made a level here because this game allows you to do that, to design your own levels, to demonstrate the different features of the game and how we can understand these different aspects. And this is all done through sound. So one thing I would say too is, I would recommend listening to this podcast using headphones because that is ... Normally when you play an audio game, the audio panning, so like the stereo field, if something's in your left speaker, right speaker or the center and like the spectrum in between is really important.

And so you can kind of hear that through traditional speakers if they're stereo, but it's definitely easier to do if you're wearing headphones. So to get the full effect of this podcast, I highly recommend that you use headphones when you're listening. So I've got the game up here. Don't worry that you can't see anything. There's some text that reads out or like visually displays what option I'm on, but that's it. There's no other visuals in this game. So everything that you're hearing is all the content that the game contains. So I'm going to press enter on play. Select an

V/O:

Adventure. So

Aaron Preece:

We have to select an adventure. These are basically the different level packs. So I'm going to go down to-

V/O:

Access world levels.

Aaron Preece:

Access world levels, press enter. Select game

V/O:

Mode. Story. And

Aaron Preece:

Story is like the set of levels in order. So that's what we want to hit. So I'll press enter and we are in the game. So I am, like I said, think of you ... Mario is a good reference for this, if you're familiar with that. So we're currently looking at ... Our audio camera is focused on our character. We are Billy Bones, the skeleton, and this is a Wicked Quest is like a Halloween themed game and there's goblins and ghosts and you collect bone dust instead of like coins and there's coffins you whack to get items and graves in the ground you have to jump over. Very Halloween theme, very fun game. I actually reviewed it in the October on our AFP blog, if you're interested. So we are looking at Billy Bones here in our audio camera. He's essentially in the center of the screen.

So I'll take a step forward and you'll hear his footstep in the middle of your stereo field.

So that click sound, that is his footstep. And you can tell that that's in the center of your audio field. That tells you where your character is in relation to other things. I want to continue walking right, because again, we're facing him from the side, so we can only walk left or right. So I'm walking right, which is kind of forward in this case. Oh, and we hear a clicking over, a rapid clicking over to our right and our far right speaker, and it is positioned in a specific way. It's positioned very far to the right. It's also a little lower pit or lower volume. As I continue to walk towards it, you can hear, it's now in the center of our audio field. As I got closer to it, it slid sort of across the audio spectrum, across the stereo field, and now it's positioned in the center.

It's also much louder. We're going to walk away from it for a second. So I walked back to the left. These are, like I said, you can kind of think of bone dust as coins, and they're in sort of a group here. And so I can jump up and collect that if I jump in an arc to the right. Interestingly, in this particular game, the way this is done is that the sound source for that group of bone dust, there's not an individual sound for each bit of bone dust. That sound is essentially, if you think of this as like a five pack, a row of five individual items, the sound source is in the center of those items. It's on the third item of the group of five. So I'm going to walk right and I'm going to jump and move forward at the same time.

And we have here a coffin, as well as a grave. So you have two separate sounds here and one above the other are overlapping each other. The coffin is up in the air. So the wind sound, the blowing wind sound, that's a grave. If we stop, if we walk into it like this ...

V/O:

Game over.

Aaron Preece:

Game over. If you walk into the grave, you fall in, your skeleton breaks apart and you're gone. There also was a sound to warn us. I ran right into the grave to demonstrate, but there was a sound you heard that rapid like beeping sound, like warning sound. That tells me I'm right on the edge of the grave in addition to the sound source moving towards the center of my stereo field. So I was supposed to jump over that. I can also fill it in, which is what we'll do because that sound source also informed me because of the nature of it. That sound says, oh, there's an item in this grave. So if you fill it in, you get the item. So we're going to start over. I'm going to go back to play, go down to levels. And we're back in. So we're going to go right, just running right.

V/O:

Run lock enabled. Okay.

Aaron Preece:

So I enabled the run lock because I was walking, so now you can tell I'm moving faster. Versus ... So you can run or walk in this game.

V/O:

Run lock enabled.

Aaron Preece:

So I am going to run to the right and now as I get closer, I'm going to run and jump. Two jumps got all the bone dust and now that sound disappears coming back up on our grave here. I'm right next to it. So what I'll do, I can fill this in. I can either jump over it like that. Now you can hear that I jumped over and it's off to the left. I can also crouch and now I can walk to the right. Left. Oh, well. Why? Oh, I was running. That why I had the chair. Game over.

V/O:

Play.

Aaron Preece:

So you have to be walking and have this shovel in hand.

V/O:

Select access world. Select story.

Aaron Preece:

You can tell. So I'm running.

V/O:

Run lock disabled.

Aaron Preece:

So I disabled the run lock. That was my issue. I forgot that I'd put 10 on. Got all the bone dust again and now. So right here. Now I can crouch. And you heard the click and the shin bone. We got a shin bone out of that grape. So I have a rusty shovel.

V/O:

Rusty shovel.

Aaron Preece:

That I can use to attack enemies and I can also use it to fill in grapes. There's also this creaking coffin here. You can think of this as almost like a Mario block where it gives us an item if we whack it. So we're going to jump up and whack it to the left a little bit. So shatter the coffin and a hand of glory was in it, which gives us invincibility. And it's already running out. That's what that bell means.

V/O:

Invincibility wore off.

Aaron Preece:

Invincibility wore off. I am going to put NVDA into sleep mode real quick.

V/O:

Sleep mode on.

Aaron Preece:

This will keep us ... So normally, you noticed it said a hand of glory was spoken by the game, but invincibility wore off was spoken by NVDA. So I put NVDA into sleep mode so that as I press like the arrow keys, whenever it says things, it's going to do a combination of essentially text and sound and like game sounds to help me understand this game. So I'm going to run to the right.

V/O:

Run lock enabled. Run lock disabled. Pumpkin catapult activate. Out of pumpkin catapult range.

Aaron Preece:

So it tells us that we don't hear the catapult yet. That's going to make a sound source and we'll get closer and you can hear it. But to let me know that the pumpkin catapults fleeing pumpkins at you and they actually hurt quite a bit. They do half your health. And you have to either jump over them if they're rolling along the ground or you have to duck under them if they're kind of tumbling through the air and they make different sounds based on that. So we're going to step into range and you can also, even though the catapult's not in my field of my audio camera, essentially, it's not in my field of view, so to speak, but it will play a sound to let me know that it's fired and you'll recognize like the arms swing as it launches the pumpkin.

V/O:

Pumpkin catapult activates.

Aaron Preece:

So we don't hear it, but there you go. We deduct that. Here it goes again. Duck again. Duck again. Hopefully it'll send us one that's on the ground. Nope. I'm just ducking until you can hear that sound. That's one. So you can hear it kind of-

V/O:

Out of pumpkin catapult range.

Aaron Preece:

So it randomizes. And so those ones that are kind of whooshing that I was ducking, those are the one that was like three different ones. Those were in the air. And then the other one was rolling along the ground. So I'll run towards this and you'll see how this can be kind of complex. So as I run towards it, you hear my footsteps. Pumpkin

V/O:

Catabolt activates.

Aaron Preece:

Oh, I was right on it when it fired, so I took half health.

V/O:

Five health of 10.

Aaron Preece:

To jump over that, and it was shooting after me. Now

V/O:

The pumpkin catapult range.

Aaron Preece:

We ducked that one. And so this guy is a goblin and he's patrolling. So you notice he laughs constantly. That basically is to let us know where he is. So if this was a video game, you could just see him walking back and forth. He wouldn't need to make noise. But because this is an audio game, we need a constant sound source to tell us as he walks back and forth so we know where he is in relation to our character. So you can hear him getting closer again. Now he's going to turn around, he's going to walk the other way. He's patrolling. So I'm going to walk forward and as he gets closer, I'm going to whack him with my shovel. So when he got right on us, he was able to hit us because we don't have much range and he takes two hits to take out, but we were able to defeat him and you heard the wax sound that told us that we hit him.

And then also his death cry, so to speak, when we knocked him out here. So we're going to continue to the right and I'm going to run instead of walking. The ground

V/O:

Crumbles is the dead reach for you.

Aaron Preece:

So there's that sound. So basically undead hands burst from the ground and started chasing me. And if they caught me, they would take me out. So it tells me that. And then you also could hear that kind of like almost mechanical track sound. That was them coming after me and they will take me out if they get me. And then you also heard when they stopped chasing me and kind of dropped back into the ground. And we've also got some more bone dust up here. So we'll run and jump to the bone dust like so. Keep running to the right. And there's the exit door. And again, I walked towards it, now I'm walking away and you can tell as it makes, it makes obviously kind of a very like stone tablet ominous sound. So we'll walk into the door and ...

V/O:

Level two, feature showcase, 145 end with grave, complete. Time taken, five minutes and 17 seconds.

Aaron Preece:

So we have data here about the playthrough we just did, and it tells us like our different statistics on like how many points we got, the time.

V/O:

Bone dust, 12.

Aaron Preece:

So we collected 12 bone dust, that sort of thing. And that's sort of how it works. There's different things that can happen. We heard the hands. Sometimes there'll be like skulls falling from the sky and they scream as they fall and will hit you if you're underneath them. So you have to make sure that they're not in the center of the camera field so you know that they're not going to hit your character. And that's just kind of a, in some ways the basics of how an audio game works. As you could tell, everything in the play field was represented by some kind of sound and the very distinct sounds at that.

The coffin made a distinct sound. The bone dust makes a distinct sound. The open grave makes a distinct sound. The enemies all sound different, so you know what they are. The catabolt firing is very distinct and it is good to help you out and let you know that something's coming at you, even if you're not close enough to see the catapult itself, since it can fire so long, either direction of itself, it does play the sound so you know to expect a pumpkin coming at you and then it uses very distinct sounds for the different types of pumpkins. So you know to dodge, you jump over one or duck under the other. And that's just one way of doing this. There's other ways. And if you come see the presentation at CSUN, the games I'll demonstrate there might use very different ways. Some of the things might be similar, but some of the things might be different on how they handle making these games accessible.

It's a little bit of an art form to some degree. And there's definitely ways that are better than others.

And so even if something's technically accessible, it might not be usable or intuitive where I would say this game I personally, my personal opinion, but I think it is very intuitive to play. I find it very easy to understand even like when I first got it, it was easy to understand and play. And it took some time getting used to ... It's a difficult game. The levels, if you say have a bunch of enemies plus hands chasing you, plus you're trying to run and dodge pumpkins at the same time and there's graves to jump over. And that's a lot of sound sources on the screen at once. That's a lot of quick thinking to duck here, jump there, swing there. So these games can be difficult. You can make them hard.

And to some degree, there's some games where I would be like, I personally don't know the best way to make them accessible. So we're talking about say a traditional Mario game, but if you're familiar with say a Super Mario 64, like the Mario, the 3D Mario games, where they are 3D platformers and there are platforms in all directions and all heights and all that sort of thing. How do you efficiently communicate all that information? And like you might see a platform way up in the sky off in the distance, but then you have to find a platform behind you that then lets you find something else to let you finally get over there. How do you communicate all that?

I would have to experiment to come up with a way to do that. That's something that I'm not sure I know a good way to do. So this is a new frontier in accessibility. There are questions that have yet to be answered, but one thing that I would say, if you are a game developer, there are solutions out there for a lot of this and people have come up with solutions. Even the 3D thing I talk about, there are games that try to do 3D and have done to varying success and it kind of works. It works well enough that people can play it. You can use say a camera option to let people explore before they go somewhere to sort of explore the area, have a key to announce what's ahead of someone. There's all kinds of different options and it can be overwhelming.

So that's why I wanted to stick to a game like this today, but I think I've always played video games. That was my favorite form of entertainment as I was growing up. And I began to be able to play video games less and less as I got older and as my vision got worse and I was very thankful that audio games are a thing and that I can continue playing games and in the same style that I love. And these days people are making mods for existing video games or implementing accessibility features directly into games. And so that's very exciting. And that's why I want to show people that there are, you don't have to come up with, sometimes you might have to come up with solutions from scratch, but oftentimes the solutions are there for you that you can adopt. And a lot of these games borrow as if, if a system works well, you'll see multiple audio games use it because systems like this are designed to just let you understand the game.

And so when one works really well, a lot of people will use it because it's the best way to play the game. And I would say it's a good reason to also, which this kind of goes for anything, you always want to have, if you're testing something or if you're implementing accessibility, having blind testers is helpful because blind people know what works well and what doesn't. And I would say the same goes for games. You want to have blind people testing your accessibility solutions before you implement them so you know that they really do work for someone that's blind. And the solution you come up with might not, or there might be something you don't think of that might seem unintuitive, but is actually intuitive to a blind person. And there's going to be differing preferences. And like I said, this is kind of an art form, but I've rambled on enough.

If you're at CSUN, come see me. 11:00 AM, Grand AB, or sorry, not 11:00 AM. 10:20 AM, Grand AB Game Accessibility 101. And if you're not at CSUN, I hope you enjoyed this video. And if you're a blind person listening to this podcast, maybe this piqued your interest. There's a link in the description for where you can acquire Wicked Quest if you're interested in trying it out or trying games out. If you are a developer, hopefully you might have got some ideas if you are making sidescrollers. But even like if you're making other kinds of games, this stuff can be adapted to another type of game, so there's options there. But thank you as always for listening. We hope you enjoyed the podcast and we'll see you next time.

Narrator:

You've been listening to Access World, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. Access World is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind, produced at the Pickle Factory in Baltimore, Maryland. Our theme music is by Cosmonkey, compliments of artless.io. To email our hosts, Aaron and Tony, email communications@afb.org. To learn more about the American Foundation for the Blind or even help support our work, go to www.afb.org.