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PowerUp: an accessible virtual world

Published: 13 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

PowerUp is a multi-player virtual world educational game with a broad set of accessibility features built in. This paper considers what features are necessary to make virtual worlds usable by individuals with a range of perceptual, physical, and cognitive disabilities. The accessibility features were included in the PowerUp game and validated, to date, with blind and partially sighted users. These features include in-world navigation and orientation tools, font customization, self-voicing text-to-speech output, and keyboard-only and mouse-only navigation. We discuss user requirements gathering, the validation study, and further work needed.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Assets '08: Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2008
332 pages
ISBN:9781595939760
DOI:10.1145/1414471
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 13 October 2008

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  1. 3d
  2. accessibility
  3. virtual worlds

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  • (2024)Surveyor: Facilitating Discovery Within Video Games for Blind and Low Vision PlayersProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642615(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Accessible learning objects: a systematic literature reviewUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-023-01025-723:4(1931-1945)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
  • (2023)“The Guide Has Your Back”: Exploring How Sighted Guides Can Enhance Accessibility in Social Virtual Reality for Blind and Low Vision PeopleProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3608386(1-14)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Mathematical Content Browsing for Print-disabled Readers Based on Virtual-world Exploration and Audio-visual Sensory SubstitutionACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/358436516:2(1-27)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Inclusive Social Virtual Environments: Exploring the Acceptability of Different Navigation and Awareness TechniquesExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3585700(1-7)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)"My Zelda Cane": Strategies Used by Blind Players to Play Visual-Centric Digital GamesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580702(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)VRBubble: Enhancing Peripheral Awareness of Avatars for People with Visual Impairments in Social Virtual RealityProceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3517428.3544821(1-17)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Demonstration of VRBubble: Enhancing Peripheral Avatar Awareness for People with Visual Impairments in Social Virtual RealityExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519657(1-6)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
  • (2021)NavStick: Making Video Games Blind-Accessible via the Ability to Look AroundThe 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3472749.3474768(538-551)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2021
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