Speed Sonic across the Span: a Platform Audio Game

We describe the sound design and initial user study of an audio game created for gamers with visual impairments. Despite the wild popularity of platform games such as Super Mario [1] and the development of many audio games over the past decade, the platform genre has so far been all but ignored by audio game designers. To fill this gap and to add to the limited entertainment choices visually impaired gamers have, we developed a platform game that can be played via an audio-only interface. We conducted a study to test our game and audio design choices, to measure the users’ performance and to find out if the game was fun to play. This usability study used 9 participants who played the game as a traditional video game (audio-visual input) and 9 participants who played the game as a pure audio game (audioonly input). The results show that, although it took the audioonly group considerably longer to play through the game, they did not make significantly more mistakes and they seemed to find the audio-only version challenging, yet enjoyable. [