Abled Body Where can-do is done different

As some of you know, apart from Game Accessibility Day last week in Boston, I was also busy … getting married. On Saturday, May 29, I wed Gregory Papajohn in Old Greenwich, Conn. It was a perfectly lovely evening, and it was great to see my family and friends. A highlight of the evening was dancing with my father to “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” by James Taylor. You can read the New York Times announcement here. I’ll be taking a much-needed hiatus for my honeymoon to Napa, Calif., and will be back in action on June 14. Check out my personal Facebook page for wedding and honeymoon photos! And of course, if you haven’t already, please join the abledbody Facebook page for the latest posts and updates. See you all in two weeks! keep reading »

Now we’re gonna rock out at Game Accessibility Day. Sri Kurniawan, an engineering professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, worked with graduate students to make the drumming game Rock Band accessible to people with visual impairments. The modified version uses haptic and audio feedback, in addition to audio. To make Rock Band work for visually impaired gamers, the team figured out a way to strap vibrating pieces using velcro on a gamer’s upper and lower arms to represent the drumhead cues, and also on the ankle to represent the kick drum cue. Auditory information is used to provide feedback on correct and timely hit (with various drumming sounds) or errors (with a click sound). This is an incredibly cool modification. Reading the menus, song titles and scores requires only a computer’s standard speech synthesizer. Kurniawan and her team evaluated the game for people with various levels of visual impairment. ... keep reading »

Here at Game Accessibility Day, I’m in a three-person challenge with Adam Coe of Evil Controllers and very well-known hacker Ben Heckendorn aka Ben Heck. We’ve been charged with hacking a real Xbox game controller to modify it for AbleGamers.com associate editor Steve Spohn, who has a rare type of Muscular Dystrophy called Spinal Muscular Atrophy. SMA is a progressive disease that weakens muscles impairing motor functions. We first interviewed Spohn, who is a serious gamer, up in his hotel room, to get a sense of how he plays video games. Steve is severely immobile. He currently has use of his right thumb and forefinger, and can use his left thumb to wedge the controller between his hands. He can slightly move his shoulders and flex his calves. Then the three of us brainstormed together. In a conference room, the two hacker experts — Coe and Heck — spliced wires, ... keep reading »

Tobi Saulnier gave a talk on how gamers can consider making Nintendo DS — the popular handheld game console — accessible for people with disabilities, particularly kids. Saulnier is founder and CEO of 1st Playable Productions in Troy, N.Y., just outside Albany, where she specializes in making video games for young children. Handheld platforms like the Nintendo DS are great learning devices for kids. They use a touch screen that operates via stylus or fingers, as well as tactile arrow buttons. But they have some limitations in terms of design for people with disabilities. Saulnier tries to add accessibility into all of her games, which include Cabbage Patch Kids and Club Penguin titles. Her company also created Winter’s Tail, which is based on the book by the same name and follows the story of an animal heroine with physical disabilities. keep reading »

Chuck Bergen is giving today’s keynote address at Game Accessibility Day, an all-day workshop that’s part of Games for Health 2010 in Boston. Chuck is famous in the disability gaming world for selling a football video game, one that’s very similar to Madden NFL, to Electronic Arts — the world’s largest game maker. ‘My Football Game’ is a CD-based game that can be played by gamers with physical and cognitive disabilities on a PC desktop or laptop with a Windows XP or Vista operating system. The game is compatible with a USB XBOX 360 game controller, a keyboard and most USB adaptive devices. Bergen designed the game and released it last year through his company VTree. “’My Football Game’ proves that you can make a game for the special needs community that looks and feels like a traditional game,” says Mark Barlet, founder of AbleGamers.com, a website that ranks video games for ... keep reading »

Last month, I wrote here on abledbody.com about a new captioning application for the iPhone that lets deaf and hard-of-hearing moviegoers follow the dialogue of almost any movie in any movie theater in the nation. Subtitles, as this app is called, was developed by Dan Walker, who did not realize that it would greatly benefit deaf and hard-of-hearing moviegoers. Movies are hardly ever captioned; deaf and hard-of-hearing people usually frequent select movie theaters that show movies with open captions or use the Rear Window Caption System, usually at specific times of day. Because I am deaf, using the Subtitles app I was able to watch “Avatar” at my local movie theater in New York City, two blocks away from my home, for the first time — even though I have lived in this neighborhood for four years. Earlier this week, Dan Walker was notified by Apple that his app violated ... keep reading »

Amtrak’s website was down, and I needed to book my ticket from Stamford to Boston for the sixth annual Games for Health conference. G4H focuses on many uses for videogames and videogame technologies in health and healthcare. I’m speaking at Game Accessibility day on May 25 about games for people with physical and mental disabilities. So I decided to use TRS — telecommunications relay services for the deaf — to call Amtrak instead. What should have been a three-minute online booking experience turned into a one-hour, agonizingly slow relay call, reminding me again why I chose to get a cochlear implant to help me hear on a regular telephone, which I can use most of the time. Sometimes I like relay because I can ensure that I’m getting the right information, and I get the automatic 15% Amtrak disability discount. It’s all about the perks, right? It can be so frustrating for ... keep reading »