About the project

Around 2.5 billion people play video games worldwide; of those, nearly 23 million people who play video games have a visual impairment. Video game accessibility has been an increasingly important area for research in recent years, and has become mainstream with the release of popular video games showcasing accessibility excellence, such as The Last of Us: Part II. Audio-based video games, such as BlindSide, have also made it to the market, proving immersive video games can be made using only audio cues.

Despite these advances, low vision players say that the gaming industry is not doing enough, with many players resorting to workarounds using adaptive technology or community-generated mods to help interpret game information by improving color and contrast, enlarge game elements, and add auditory and haptic feedback.

These workarounds are not guaranteed to be compatible with all video games, showing that accessibility solutions should ideally be implemented at the game title level.

Additionally, video game genres are expansive, making the limited catalog of accessible video games restrictive to the gaming interests of all low vision players.

Due to these factors, myself and a team of Master’s students at the University of Michigan School of Information decided to target the topic of video gaming for people with visual impairments for our capstone project in Winter 2023.

Objectives + Goals

Project Objectives

Create a design solution that any developer can integrate into their game to make them more accessible for low-vision across a variety of gaming styles

• Gaming Focus: Heads Up Display (HUD) best practices and customization for open world games with real time action

• Audience: People with low vision who currently play or want to play video games.

Methodology

x2 rounds of research (x1 formative, x1 evaluative) were conducted.

• Formative research goals were to empathize to the low vision gaming experience, particularly how people with visual impairment navigate physical and digital spaces, what their particular gameplay needs are, and the common pain points they experience during gameplay.

• Evaluative research focused on measuring concept desirability and finalizing key product requirements.

The team took a participatory design approach.

• We engaged with our community participants throughout the project with:

  • Brainstorming sessions

  • Passive feedback retrieval
    

We worked with 8 participants.

• Based in the United States and Netherlands

• Embodied a variety of visual impairment types and durations

• Had moderate to advanced gaming experience, devoting between 3 to 11 hours per week to video gameplay.

Timeline

The project, from kickoff to final research socialization, took place over a 12-week timeline.

My Role

This project was conducted by a 4-person team comprised of Master’s Students with the following concentrations:

• x1 Product Manager

• x1 Designer

• x2 User Research

My primary role was in User Research and held key roles in designing, implementing, and synthesizing research. I also acted as de facto project manager and took a “floater” role in interaction and graphic design.

Participant recruitment

All participants were independently sourced by the project team through a variety of recruitment channels.

The following social media and organizational outreaches were the most successful. Participants were offered incentives in the form of a gift card or donation to a charity of their choice.

Formative research and concept development

Process

Key Findings

Industry Best Practices - Despite industry best practices exist such as the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines V3.1, our competitive analysis found that most games had varying levels of adherence success.

Exploration vs Winning - Players are motivated by exploring the new world of a video game. While winning is important for players, it’s not everything.

Learning from the past - Low-vision players heavily rely on past experiences to assess new digital spaces, game environments, and mechanics. Games need to maintain consistency to support learning.

Vision, hearing, and touch - Low vision players use many senses to support orientation. Features such as voice over or haptic feedback benefit navigation.

Concept brainstorming and final concept

Our final product solution must meet the following design requirements:

Industry best practices - Our final design should meet the minimum requirements for low vision accessibility as outlined by the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines V3.1

Customizability - The solution needs to be customizable to suit each individual's needs as low vision varies between players.

Field of vision - The design will focus on ensuring important game information is within the player’s field of vision as low vision players can only focus on limited areas of the screen at once.

Prototyping and evaluative research

Process

Key Findings

Documentation is everything - low vision players do not play a video game unless they have reasonable confidence that it is accessible to them.

Limit information overload - to help focus on critical elements of gameplay.

Recognition vs Recall - simply saying “anything is customizable” can be overwhelming. Users liked being provided a recommendation then accessing fit rather than having a blank slate.

Patterns by visual ability - There are HUD placement patterns based on similar visual need.

Overall, users enjoyed the experience of customizing their HUDs, with all participants rating the experience a 5 out of 5. These conclusions helped us make adjustments between our low and high fidelity prototypes.

Overview

This project aimed to make an accessible and inclusive concept for the low-vision gaming community to address the primary problem statement: Interpreting game information is a barrier to entry to enjoying and playing video games.

To do this, we created a customizable Heads Up Display (HUD) that allows players to change the size, location, color, and other aspects of a game’s visual system. This respects players’ individual needs and empowers players by giving them agency over their own gaming experience.

To model this system, we decided to showcase our design concept using the Nintendo Switch game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This was due to the popularity of the game with our participants, the game’s heavy exploration options, and the Nintendo Switch’s lack of accessibility options.

Watch the prototype in action in a recorded video here.

Features

Customization options

Based on our low fidelity user testing, we identified 5 key types of visual changes requested by players: size, color, counts (adding or removing additional textual/numerical information), element background color, and location.

The HUD customization screen includes these options. Since players found it easier to make changes after being prompted with a few options, each change type is presented as a list of options.

Left: Image of customization screen for adjusting the hearts element. Possible customizations are size, color, adding text support (display heart context), background, and move location.

Presets

Currently, the Options Menu in Breath of the Wild allows players to toggle between two different HUD configurations: Normal (traditional HUD) and Pro (removes all HUD elements except for health). Our prototype adds an additional HUD Mode in this pre-existing toggle called Center which moves all HUD elements to the top and bottom centers of the screen, allowing players with low peripheral vision to have all important elements within their field of vision.

Players can make modifications to pre-built presets to reduce manual customization time. Custom presets can be saved and reaccessed throughout gameplay.

Besides Center mode, other recommended pre-built presets based on participant needs includes Peripheral (placing all elements on the edges of the screen) and Dark Mode.

Image of a a dark mode preset that re-colors all HUD elements to grayscale.

Information display

Games that have multiple HUD elements can be overwhelming for low vision players. To simplify their HUDs, all elements can be removed by changing the size to 0% (the default is 15%).

Longer element descriptions are automatically hidden to declutter screens. Players may access more information about a specific element (such as the mini map) by pressing Y. Informational pop ups appear in the same location for consistency, staying in the player’s field of vision.

Menu voiceover

Players may toggle on the Menu voiceover feature from the Options Menu. This feature verbally narrates menu headers and body text, which allows players to leverage auditory feedback on demand.

Discoverability

In addition to the product features, discoverability of accessibility features is a core need. Low vision players perform rigorous research to understand game title accessibility, and they will not play or purchase a game unless they have reasonable confidence a game is accessible to them.

To ensure that this feature is discoverable to the player base, it must be advertised externally, ideally in developer publications or other marketing collateral.

Next steps

Short term

• Following project close, our short term focus is to share our research to gaming industry professionals to influence the future creation of Heads Up Displays, partnering with the International Game Developers Association communities on Discord (General and Ann Arbor Chapter).

  • Although our team is not directly connected to game development, we can still contribute to the games community through research sharing and creating free assets.

  • Due to lower engineering lift and viability for game patch implementation, we will highlight pre-set HUD views as a way to support low vision players.
    

• With assistance from our capstone professor advisor, we’re proposing for our design concept to come to realization by pitching it as a project concept for University of Michigan Electrical Engineering and Computer Science coursework.

• Ideally, the project is implemented as an unbranded HUD in Unreal or Unity game engines (the two most widely used game engines). Creating free-to-use HUD customization system templates will allow any game developer to plug them into their games.
  
  

Long term

In the long term, accessibility considerations such as a customizable HUD should be integrated into foundational game development planning. Although other games have implemented customizable HUDs as a patch, seamless integration is easier if it’s prioritized during pre-production.

Below is an example of the game development timeline and our recommended corresponding accessibility actions.

Example game production timeline

Discussion

Change in design scope

• During user testing, our evaluative studies prototyped two different concepts:

  • HUD Customization

  • A HUD Walkthrough at New Game Start

• Our final design primarily focused on the HUD Customization functionality as it was considered more novel and important to our participants.

• Aspects of the HUD Walkthrough were integrated into our final design, such as our Information Display features which allows the ability to learn more about what an element displays by pressing Y.

• Our research shows that prioritizing HUD familiarization and game mechanic education early in gameplay is important, and we encourage game developers to continue developing tutorials and documentation to support onboarding.
  
  

Limitations of the prototype

• Video prototype format: Although the high fidelity prototype was built in Figma, the team chose to display the prototype in a video format to show the entirety of functionality including voice narration. As Breath of the Wild is on the Nintendo Switch console, the video also narrates controller commands and actions.

  • Ideas that we couldn’t expand upon include voice over audio feedback for players indicating when a player has selected a new tab.

• Other preset concepts: Based on low vision abilities encountered during the project, some other preset ideas that were discussed but not included in the final prototype include:

  • Dark mode on all elements

  • High color contrast on all elements 

  • Magnified - all elements of the HUD are magnified by 50%
    
    

Future opportunities

• Customization system evaluation: Although our studies confirmed the value of a fully customizable HUD system, it did not include evaluation of the customization mechanics. Thus, the final prototype’s HUD customization dashboard is designed using components found in the Zelda: Breath of the Wild design system and purely based on heuristic best practices.
  
  Additional rounds of testing focused on the customization dashboard will allow the team to assess the usability of the menu design, corresponding controller commands, and content design comprehension.
  

• HUD auto-adjustments: The final design is highly dependent on manual player adjustments, and the team would recommend further study into technology-driven auto-adjustments, where HUD elements are updated based on game context and user-inputted logic.
  
  Based on participant feedback, we believe this idea would be appealing to low vision players and would support gaming immersion and usability.

What I would have done differently

Deeper community collaboration

Due to time constraints, participant recruiting was rushed (1-2 weeks per round) and relied on haphazard outreaches in online forums. In order to deliver sustainable impact and to respect the low vision community advocates we’ve engaged with through this initiative, the ideal scenario is to have implemented this research in collaboration with known gaming accessibility organizations, such as Abled Gamers.

This would ensure that the findings and design recommendations made through this project would have sustained momentum to real-world actualization; additionally, organizational partnership would provide us the funding and resources to compensate research participants at a level fitting of the deep engagement displayed throughout the project’s 12 week timeframe.

Embedded engineering and game development partnership

As a UX Research and Design capstone, the project team’s background was primarily in interaction / product design and user experience research. Although the team dedicated some time at project closure to consider concept realization and technical requirements with technical subject matter experts, the team realizes we are not game developers.

The project would have benefitted tremendously if the team from inception included cross-functional partners with technical expertise in game development.

This project was only made possible by the contributions of many.

• Thank you to:
  
  All the members of the low vision community who participated in our research*:

  Riley, Brandon, Christian, Brian, Prestina, Wilmen, Liam, and Judy

• The following organizations for allowing us to engage with your community:

  • International Game Developers Association (IGDA)

  • /r/blindsurveys Subreddit

  • Michigan Bureau of Services for Blind Persons


• Austin Yarger, Pablo Morales, and Lucy Neiss for your industry expertise, mentorship, and feedback

• Hunter Paramore for developing the Figma Breath of the Wild UI Kit
 (https://hunterparamore.com/)