Play Without Barriers: A Narrative Review of Game Accessibility from Audiodyssey to the Barriers Taxonomy

Abstract

Game accessibility---the design that lets players of all abilities play---moved from Bierre's motivations workshop and Archambault's visually impaired survey through Glinert and Wyse's AudioOdyssey and Yuan and Folmer's Blind Hero to Grammenos's universally accessible games, Westin's case study, Newell's forty years, Carr's abledisability, Beeston's developers' motivations, Cairns's design psychology, Goncalves's barriers taxonomy, and Mott's Our Adventure. This article presents a narrative review of that arc's canonical line: Bierre and colleagues's 2005 motivations, Archambault and colleagues's 2007 computer games survey, Glinert and Wyse's 2007 AudioOdyssey, Yuan and Folmer's 2008 Blind Hero, Grammenos, Savidis, and Stephanidis's 2009 universally accessible games, Westin's 2010 Tolkien Quest, Newell's 2011 Design and the Digital Divide, Carr's 2014 abledisability, Beeston and colleagues's 2018 developers' motivations, Cairns and colleagues's 2019 design psychology, Goncalves and colleagues's 2020 barriers taxonomy, and Mott and colleagues's 2022 Our Adventure. The review is organized around three themes: the field's foundings, in which the motivations' workshops, the audio-only designs, and the universal access's frameworks established the play's rights; the design philosophies, in which the digital divide's lessons, the abledisability's critique, and the developers' motivations framed the practice's theory; and the modern practice, in which the design psychology's futures, the barriers' taxonomy, and the text-based adventure's development carried the accessibility into the industry's standard. It is concluded that game accessibility is the play's universal design---and that its arc is the barriers' mapping from the special cases to the design's center.