Abstract
After a literature review published by Nascimento et. al. (2017), the research team noticed the lack of studies focused on game controllers’ accessibility during use by children with Down syndrome. In view of that, this research describes a mobile game development and its usability analyses, which were created to evaluate the accessibility of touchscreen gestural interfaces. The methodology was organized into three steps: bibliographic research and the definition of the project guidelines, the game development, and its evaluation. The guidelines used were based on a study made by Nascimento et. al. (2019) of the impairments that children can have, their game preferences found on Prena’s article (2014), games accessibility guidelines for people with intellectual deficiency from the Includification Book (2012), a manual of touchscreen gestural interfaces from Android and iOS and a game development framework from Schuytema (2008). Then, for the usability analyses, the team decided to first submit the game to a group of experts in order to make some improvements before submitting it to the audience. In this way, two evaluations were done, a heuristic test with usability specialists and a cognitive walkthrough with health professionals. The list of heuristics used on the tests was created by a mash up of the Breyer evaluation (2008) and the recommendations of the Able Games Association (2012) and the cognitive one followed the Preece, Sharp and Rogers (2007) recommendations. The results found reveal some challenges in the field and adjustments, mainly in the narrative, game goals and interface feedback, that should be addressed as soon as possible.
Highlights
This project started in 2015, during a master’s degree, when their interest in interaction design and games motivated the research team to understand the accessibility of game controllers
This section will be divided into three steps: the first one will explain the methodology for the creation of the mobile game, the second, the heuristic evaluation and the last, the cognitive walkthrough test
The game development of Parque das Galáxias was a new and challenging study, because it needed to be accessible and engaging for children with Trisomy 21, it needed to deal with zero budget, be created by a team with low experience and only a few successes when dealing with this audience
Summary
This project started in 2015, during a master’s degree, when their interest in interaction design and games motivated the research team to understand the accessibility of game controllers. A literature review revealed the lack of studies in the usability of game controllers during the usage of children with Down syndrome [2]. The percentage of births with the syndrome [4], indicating the necessity of initiatives that promote education, social relationships and autonomy—essentially, well-being. Considering that some educators and therapists were starting to use the new console inputs and computer games during their sessions with the children [5,6,7,8], like Nintendo Wii Fit, there were
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