An Interaction-Centered Perspective on Audio-Based Gameplay for Blind Players
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54337/aau.icdvrat26.42Abstract
Audio is a key modality for blind players to navigate and interact with digital games. This paper presents a qualitative study of blind players engaging with commercial games to examine how audio supports the interaction process. We introduce an interaction-centered perspective structured around a four-stage loop: affordance, actionability, execution, and feedback. Our analysis demonstrates that interaction breakdowns occur when this loop is disrupted, including failures in perception, unclear actionability, problematic execution, and ambiguous feedback. We further identify two design tensions: accessibility vs. challenge and automation vs. player agency. Together, these findings provide an interaction-centered account of audio-based gameplay and
highlight how actionable design supports functional presence in immersive virtual environments, forming a foundation for a broader framework of audio-based interaction.
References
Braun, V. & Clarke, V. (2021), Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide, SAGE Publications, London, UK.
Dourish, P. (2001), Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, MIT Press.
Gaver, W. W. (1991), Technology affordances, in ‘Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems’, CHI ’91, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, p. 79–84. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/108844.108856
Hermann, T., Hunt, A. & Neuhoff, J. G. (2011), The Sonification Handbook, Logos Verlag Berlin.
Heron, M. J. (2016), ‘Cultural integration and the accessibility of gaming’, The Computer Games Journal 5(3), 91–94.
Norman, D. (2013), The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition, Basic Books. URL: https://books.google.dk/books?id=qBfRDQAAQBAJ
Power, C., Freire, A., Petrie, H. & Swallow, D. (2012), Guidelines are only half of the story: accessibility problems encountered by blind users on the web, in ‘Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems’, CHI ’12, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, p. 433–442. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2207736
Slater, M. (2009), ‘Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364(1535), 3549–3557.
Vickers, P. (2011), Sonification for process monitoring, in T. Hermann, A. Hunt & J. G. Neuhoff, eds, ‘The Sonification Handbook’, Logos Publishing House, Berlin, Germany, chapter 18, pp. 455–491.
Westin, T., Hamilton, I. & Ellis, B. (2020), Game accessibility: Getting started, in R. Dillon, ed., ‘The Digital Gaming Handbook’, CRC Press, pp. 37–52.
Yuan, B., Folmer, E. & Harris, F. C. (2011), ‘Game accessibility: a survey’, Universal Access in the Information Society 10(1), 81–100.
