March 2021, 1 week
UI/UX Designer, Illustrator
Adobe Xd, Procreate
In Winter 2021, I took a course called “Video Games and Learning”, which focused on reforming education through a gamified system. For my individual project, I had the opportunity to focus on a topic of my choosing. So, I centered my project around accessibility and universal design for learning in serious educational games.
1. Receive project prompt
2. Envision solution to prompt
3. Conduct academic research on accessibility in video games
4. Develop mockup of an accessibility-first educational game
“Propose a project on any topic in gaming you’d like to explore. This project may take the form of a paper, or you can feel free to be creative (but scholarly) in other media, such as a short film, podcast, or a really impressive diorama.”
The assignment prompt was so flexible that it essentially said, “Do whatever you want, so long as it somehow relates back to games and education.” So I used this as an opportunity to explore how gamified education for elementary school children could be approached from an accessibility-and-inclusivity-first angle. I primarily designed for low vision, low hearing, color blindness, dyslexia, and universal design for learning principles.
To understand how accessibility had historically been incorporated into game design and education, I read through seven academic papers:
1. Cano, A.R., Fernández-Manjón, B. and García-Tejedor, Á.J. (2018), Using game learning analytics for validating the design of a learning game for adults with intellectual disabilities. Br J Educ Technol, 49: 659-672.
2. Hanna, E. I. (2005). Inclusive design for maximum accessibility: A practical approach to universal design. Pearson Educational Measurement). Verfügbar am, 28, 2021.
3. Hitchcock, C., Meyer, A., Rose, D., & Jackson, R. (2002). Providing New Access to the General Curriculum: Universal Design for Learning. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 35(2), 8-17.
4. King-Sears, M. (2009). Universal Design for Learning: Technology and Pedagogy. Learning Disability Quarterly, 32(4), 199-201.
5. Laamarti, F., Eid, M., & Saddik, A. E. (2014). An overview of serious games. International Journal of Computer Games Technology, 2014, 11-11.
6. Porter, J. R., & Kientz, J. A. (2013, October). An empirical study of issues and barriers to mainstream video game accessibility. In Proceedings of the 15th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on computers and accessibility (pp. 1-8).
7. Spencer, S. A. (2011). Universal Design for Learning: Assistance for Teachers in Today's Inclusive Classrooms. Interdisciplinary Journal of Teaching and Learning, 1(1), 10-22.
In addition to academic papers, I looked into the Universal Design for Learning Guidelines, and took inspiration from the Game Maker's Toolkit's Designing for Disability Youtube series.
This project was centered around Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which aspires to make education more widely accessible for those of various backgrounds and abilities. The three core principles of UDL are representation, expression, and engagement. These all support diverse recognition, strategic, or affective networks to get students interested, interacting with, and engaged in an education system that adapts to their needs.
Lunch Rush is a serious game concept that acts as a supplement to students’ in-class learning of fractions. Using the food pyramid model of nutrition, players mix and match sets of food within each food group to create a full serving size of vegetables, proteins, grains, dairy, and fruit for each lunch plate. By taking each characters’ preferential likes and dislikes into account, players must mix and match new fractional combinations of food to complete a serving size.
Through its gameplay, Lunch Rush aims to teach players fractions, empathy, and a basic understanding of nutrition
On the bottom right of each screen is a question-mark button, though only some are clickable. The opaque ones will prompt a pop-up modal explaining my design decisions relating to accessibility within the game. I mainly explored accessibility options through a sample settings menu and through my character design.
In the Settings page, text size and screenreading options were geared towards players with low vision. Audio options were added for players with low vision or who were hard of hearing, since audio cues often relay the same information as visual cues to provide a more inclusive user experience. I also gave players the option to switch to the Open Dyslexic font, which is specifically designed to support readability for dyslexic users on digital interfaces.
As for character design, I envisioned the game having multiple characters with varying types of food preferences in order to encourage experimentation with adding different types of fractions. While I could have easily used the same stock character with different color schemes to distinguish them from one another, that wouldn’t have been good (or interesting) design, as it wouldn’t have accounted for color blindness. So I instead drew out 6 different characters and imbued them each with their own personality.
Designing for accessibility can often mean designing redundancies into a system. Visual cues should be accompanied by audio cues, so that both d/Deaf players and players who are blind or low vision can have the same information relayed to them. Writing out all my design reasoning within the pop-up accessibility modals made me understand how user experience transcends beyond a digital screen and actually incorporates our senses of touch, sight, and hearing.
Looking back at this project a few years later, I really admire the concept and my illustrations as a first foray into designing for accessibility. However, I feel that some things could be improved:
1. All the tap targets are a little too small
2. The text beneath all the food on the gameplay screens are too small
3. Because of how small the ‘Accessibility Modal’ button is, changing the opacity levels does not effectively make it any higher or lower contrast; it is always hard to see regardless
4. The main gameplay screens should show the serving size for each food option, so that players do not have to perform recall rather than recognition when they likely already have cognitive overload from performing mental math