Evaluation and Redesign of a Curriculum Framework for Education About Game Accessibility
Game Accessibility (GA) has been brought to the front of the video game landscape thanks to a recent but major change in the US law called the Communications and Video Accessibility Act; GA is now a legal obligation for game developers in the US. However,
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Department of Computer and Systems Science, Stockholm University, Kista, Sweden [email protected] 2 CNAM/CEDRIC, 292, rue St Martin, 75003 Paris, France [email protected]
Abstract. Game Accessibility (GA) has been brought to the front of the video game landscape thanks to a recent but major change in the US law called the Communications and Video Accessibility Act; GA is now a legal obligation for game developers in the US. However, there is a gap between legislation and practice of GA. This study is based upon a previous tentative curriculum frame‐ work (TCF) for GA. The questions are: What are the opinions among educators and game developers regarding the TCF? How could the TCF be redesigned? To answer the questions, the TCF was surveyed with practitioners and researchers in the GA community. This paper presents an evaluation and redesign of the TCF, divided into different categories, depending on the students’ profiles, scopes and skills. Furthermore, how the curriculum content can be created and shared is also discussed, as well as future work. Keywords: Game Accessibility · Game education · Curriculum Framework
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Introduction
Game accessibility (GA) has been researched since the dawn of the computer and video game industry and there is a significant amount of publications, see e.g. [1, 2]. However, only a limited number of titles from the mainstream game industry offer even basic accessibility features. In the USA, the Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) [3] is about to change this situation: game consoles and distribution platforms now have to be accessible and, from January 2017, game software also has to be acces‐ sible. As USA is one of the largest markets for games in the world, the CVAA have already had international impact; two of the major game consoles were patched with accessibility features for the first time in 2015. However, if these legal provisions are genuine progress and recognition, there is still a gap between the aims and the means. Indeed, game accessibility is still not an identified part of the video game curriculum around the world and students are often not aware of game accessibility at all. This study is a follow-up on a tentative curric‐ ulum framework (TCF) [4], defined as a “modular structure that support creating and sharing educational resources, as well as teaching and learning about game © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing AG 2016. All Rights Reserved G. Wallner et al. (Eds.): ICEC 2016, LNCS 9926, pp. 217–222, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-46100-7_20
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accessibility” [4]. In the framework learning outcomes were related to three outcome requirement levels: (1) Introduced (I) outcomes are not examined, i.e. the outcome does not have to be part of an assignment but could be included in some lecture or reading material; (2) Transitional (T) outcomes may be examined, optional by the course designer, where the student may have to show that s/he has acquired knowl‐ e
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