We have now, we have nothing.
And if you read from Slate the mining tax questions
at the University of Canada and the Institute must first
among the original first Nations of the Autonomous University,
Barcelona and Guadeloupe used history experience. The
and the ground
enabling teams to research on videogame accessibility
and the implementation of easy to understand.
And before joining the research team in transmedia Catalonia
of the Autonomous University of Barcelona,
she had some experience in localization
as project manager and copywriter for the application of SAP.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Alonso.
And thanks to you for being here.
Well, I'm in my first year of my Ph.D.,
so I'm going to be showing some things that we did, and I think
I'm going to be talking about CS games
and how to make them accessible for people with cognitive disabilities.
So that's my main topic.
Accessibility in general in video games.
And for this group of people.
So I think we all know that.
But video games are really, really important nowadays.
In the last decades, I think they have become one
of the main format for entertainment and they even compete with cinema.
So and we have to work with them.
That's what we have.
And at the same time we have a context in which accessibility
from the rice,
for example, we
have this really important, I think it was mentioned
before in European initiative.
We have the Convention on the Rights for People with Disabilities
and which is not
at European level.
And we have different laws that have been passed in this context.
Of course, accessibility
is also important in video games, so methods,
but then there's still a really long way
to go.
And in order to ensure that video
games have actually accessible
are talking particularly about serious games,
I think we probably all of us know what they are, but
basically a simple definitions of the produced markets
are used for purposes other than grades and payments.
So that basically means, of course they should be entertaining.
Thus that's a key thing, but that's not the only purpose.
So they
will serve as some kind of therapy, for example,
or the intention is to teach something by using them.
So that's the important thing, right?
It's not only entertainment.
The thing is that serious games share a lot
with typical video games, you could say
in the way they are created.
So the developed
and they have more or less the same things
in this in the sense that they will probably have texts, assets.
They're going to have video assets, they're going to have all the assets.
So in this sense, I think we could apply
a definition of game accessibility, which is fairly general.
I think it applies to every video game probably
in this case.
And this definition follows the social models model of disability
game accessibility would then be avoiding a conflict
between the abilities of a player and the barriers of a video game.
What are these barriers then?
And so you want it also to be free.
And I think the explain fairly well what we're dealing with.
So the first thing that we have to do
in a video game is of course receiving stimuli.
So for example, we have to see something in the screen
or we have to hear something, right.
In a sense, this could be a barrier of course, for someone
who was blind, for example, or someone with that.
And then we have to determine our response.
So we have received the information and then we have to say what we do
with this information. So how to progress in the game.
In this case, someone who has
a maybe a cognitive disability
will find some barriers in this place.
And the last thing would be providing an impulse.
Okay, we know how to progress.
We have received information.
We know how to progress, but
we have to press a button or we have to move a seek
so that the character will move or will shoot or will do something.
And in this case, probably someone with multiple disability
and with have some kind of problem or that would be a barrier
for someone like that, right?
Concretely, I want you to talk about cognitive disabilities.
So we have seen that
and they may vary it be the determining in our response
because cognitive
cognitive disability would affect some functions
such as attention or memory or any other cognitive feature.
And in this case,
I wanted to make a couple of
I want to comment on a couple of things,
which is basically I'm going to be talking about cognitive disability,
even though there's there are some other terms,
but cognitive disability and incivility is the terminology
that you can find when researching about accessibility media games.
So in all of the recommendations made
by developers or made by
researchers in general, they use cognitive
accessibility.
So that's basically the main reason why I am using it.
I have seen also intellectual disability, but
I would choose this one to be honest because it seems to refer to
things that affect intelligence
and there are some cognitive disabilities.
Or we could include some things in cognitive disability
that add to the effects intelligence at all.
For example, autism
could be either something that we might deal with in cognitive
accessibility, and autism does not affect intelligence in any way.
And then neurodiversity, really and termed
as being used in order to avoid the other
is worthy of recognizing disability
and which has some bad connotations
in this case.
I know you've seen it because, as I was saying, cognitive disabilities
are the most common, but I think in this case both are synonyms for me.
So neurodiversity would work as well.
But I'm choosing the other because it is the one that is used in the area.
And another thing is, as I was saying, what is then cognitive disabilities?
There are a lot of things that affect cognition.
So I, I have checked some classifications.
For example, the ICD, which is the the international
classification of disorders by the World Health Organization,
and then the DSM five, probably you'll know it
because it's the most common among psychologists and
doctors
and they have a fairly
a a really big classification of mental disorders.
There are a lot of things, all of them affect cognition in some way.
That's the thing.
But they are they are really different and they have
really different characteristics.
So, for example, I think when we all think
about cognitive disabilities, we probably think about,
I don't know, like Down's syndrome maybe or disown.
As I was saying, but we could talk, for example,
of our learning difficulties
and this could fall in the umbrella of cognitive flexibility, right?
We have someone who has dyslexia, for example,
and some of the things affect cognition as well.
So for example, mental health issues affect cognition.
Depression might affect and the injection of a person.
So just to give you a general sense
of what cognitive flexibility actually includes, which is that a lot
I going to be talking in general terms,
but I want you to talk about that because it definitely affects
is really it's a really complex area
now in particular and
how do we make a accessible use case then?
So I researched it in the area and I think the most common approach
would be probably what I have called the targeted design,
which is basically emergency use games that
correspond actually to games for health, which are games that serve
as a therapy or that they can help people in some way.
And I have some examples here.
So for example, I am Diana Ireland, a game that was made by researchers.
And the idea is to help children with
some kind of cognitive disabilities
so that they can improve their their executive function.
So, for example, adjusting to changes and all these kind of things
and then they could destroy you.
This was made for people with Down's syndrome.
And the idea is to teach them some healthy lifestyle.
And they would have me book that was made for people with autism.
And the idea is to teach them how to breathe properly.
And they might be.
Game, for example, is for people with dyslexia
the idea that they can have some phonology training.
So as you can see, all of these games have a particular target,
a group of people when they were designed
so the developers followed
particular
workflow in order to make a game
that was designed particularly for these people.
But what happens with other kind of games?
So they are, for example, and video games.
I have this one, which is the Broomsticks, which is a video game
that's oriented to towards people who know about medicine.
And the idea is that they can train some kind of surgeries.
So what happened with this was we are not targeted
to certain kind of people with a certain kind of disability.
In this case.
In this case, I think we should follow an inclusive design.
And this is where the
game accessibility guidelines
will be important.
I have got it for Here we Sit, which are the most common
of a lot more
in this case, and I think they have
this inclusive design in the sense that they are pretty general
and they have a lot of recommendations for all the barriers
and for all the barriers that we have that I have mentioned before.
So you have recommendations for people who are blind, deaf,
who have some kind of cognitive disability or might or disability
in this case
taking these
accessibility guidelines in particular for cognitive accessibility.
These are some of the things that we could apply.
So the serious game is accessible.
So we have allowed for playability.
So for example, we could modify game difficulty
and we should make that star clear
and they should appear and at all times.
Or we could consult them and then we should have tutorials.
So a space where a player can play and they're not going to be punished
if something if they do something wrong.
And then of course, we should
be able to modify the controls.
We should be able to know what the conscious do at any time.
So a certain kind of reminder, maybe
an in progress, we should be able to save the progress of any time.
And then some
things that are more related to divinity.
So for example, we have the user interface.
So the way that we show information, so for example,
not having many elements or if we have some kind of background
that could be disturbing or something like that, maybe
giving the player the option to disable
this dog and then takes this.
So for example, the size and color of the text readability.
So we are talking here about fonts.
What kind of font are we actually using your chance.
So it should be important to separate music effects and dialog.
There should be a different tenor
for each of them and we should be able to modulate the volume.
And then of course, avoiding flickering images and motion blur.
So these are some of the things that we could do to make a use game
that is not targeted to a particular group of people
accessible.
As you can see, I was mentioning
reliability and then perfectibility,
but there is one thing that has not been mentioned,
not not nervous much, which is comprehension.
Only one of the guidelines that I checked mentioned actually
that you should have a simple, clear language that is easy to understand,
but it doesn't specify really how it should be made.
And in this case, one of my proposals
would be implementing the easy to understand language,
which is a simplified form of a language that is supposed
to enhance comprehension and originally was.
It was designed for people with cognitive disabilities.
But the truth is that
it could be useful for people who are illiterate or people who are
maybe a bit old and they have
some kind of cognition problem and they might find difficult to read.
And I think it will fail in media games
because he has been testing it in other I'll give you some quotes.
So examples they have there have been some experiments in websites
and the results are very promising actually.
And they they have been shown to enhance
actually the comprehension of the text.
So I think it could be useful to have these two versions
if I view them, for example,
of the text of a video gaming the menu or something like that.
So we could change
doing the standard version
and then the second version and
really fast completions,
so many schemes accessible basically
because they have been the same with our target group in mind.
So this is what I was calling the targeted design.
But then for some others, we may need to follow
some of the recommendations that we have out there.
I have commented on some of them.
This would be the inclusive design
on one of the future line of research, which I hope that I can
explore, is actually implement NBCC to understand language.
I think that could be really,
really useful for CS games and videogames in particular.
But in general
I think muscle
based on.
So we have time.
Maybe for a quick question.
Yeah. Okay.
So first of all, thank you for raising
a bit of awareness on accessibility.
That's where I work.
So it's so important and I have a question related to easy
to understand language.
Do you think that it is really
thought to video games?
I mean, there are many rules, fixes, structures
that need to be used in order for it to be effective.
So for example, I was thinking about this sentence division,
but do you really think that we can have like
eight lines, which no one thinks would be
just one would be?
I don't know how to say that it would be
visually beautiful
to have eight lines in a video game or.
I know what you mean. Yeah.
I know what you mean.
I think the thing is that we should probably evaluate where
we implement these decisions, understand?
And we so
of course, I think it would be easier in many ways or
in some places where you are like taking for the information
about the word building, for example. So
I'm thinking
about mass Effect, which is fairly and there is an RPG
which is fairly based on on the story, and there's a lot of information
of all the things that have been happening in the world and all that.
And in these cases you have menus where you can navigate
and then
there's like a lot of information about particular things of the work.
So for example, I think there could work perfectly,
but maybe in a dialog.
So I guess that's
what you're thinking in the subtitle or something like that.
Maybe it would be more difficult to implement.
I think we, we should definitely
reference some reception studies so that we
we see where it fits, where it actually fits.
But, but in some places I'm pretty sure that's probably even work.
Yeah, Thanks for the question.
Yeah, I was just wondering, I know nothing about video. Sort of
like Yeah, I mean, just
I was wondering.
It's a stupid question if it is having two versions.
You said maybe.
Well, it's been there.
One and a language.
And would it be better just to have that You think one or one.
Does that mean in
either social studies that way performing websites and
there were some affection some some effect in
in user satisfaction so it was performed with users or who
who will be benefited by easy to understand language.
And then you'd say like the normal users or typical users,
typical users would would say that they didn't like them much.
The easy to understand version.
So then there was like a different reception
study where they gave like these two options
the standard regression on the easy to understand version and then
the satisfaction level was better.
So I think it would be better in the versus in order to
to avoid this victimization, I would say, yeah.
I'm just one question.
What extent do you think that text is important
as regards user level?
Do you think that
because the users
of video games, very often they just play
and they are very intuitive about this and perhaps they don't care
about the so much about the text, do you think that's important
or at least it's got to be there, It's got to be done.
But I think it depends
heavily embroiling the user, of course,
but also in the video game generally, probably
because in RPG, I think
players who play RPG
are going to be interested probably in the story
and they're going out, probably read
a lot of the things that have been implemented.
But of course, if you're talking about someone who plays Call of Duty
or like a soccer game or they're not going to
give any kind of importance to the text.
So it depends on the game entirely.
I think.
But I think testing is done.
The understanding, which for example, would be for some kind of game
that is more story, story treatment, for example.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you everyone so much.
Thank you to the two speakers.
Great, brilliant ladies.
We have more questions.
Of course, during the coffee you come ask them.
Thank you. Thank you.