Whispering Woods - The Journey Home

About the Project

Accessibility in games is often overlooked but is starting to get more attention in recent years, as many players have various impairments of different kinds and severity. A game, Whispering woods, was developed with a focus on implementing accessibility for some of these impairments.

User Testing

The game was tested by people with different levels of gaming experience, two participants had a colour vision deficiency and two participants were less experienced playing games compared to the other participants. All participants agreed that accessible and adjustable settings in games are important, even if not all of them required it themselves.

Results

The game was successful in some aspects and lacking in others. It was perceived as visually appealing, participants appreciated the option to use either WASD or the arrow keys for movement and the adjustments of the movement of the character. The game's intuitiveness and satisfaction was perceived higher and scored an average 5 out of 6 on the final test.

Challenges

However, many features were not implemented at all or fully due to the project's time constraints. Functional filters for color blindness or higher contrast as well as the option to change font size or disable text animations were not fully functional or implemented. This meant that we could not test all accessibility features leading to our research question not being answered to a full extent.

Conclusion

From what we have gathered from the test results however, the players, testers, experience has only been affected positively by implementing accessibility options.