[games_access] Teaching Game Accessibility

[d. michelle hinn]

Hey Tom,

Yes, this is a great point and there are some that are including it 
into game coursework somehow, even if it's not an entire course on 
it. I agree that getting to people while they are learning about 
design and making it into something expected for doing well in a 
course will only increase our odds that we'll start seeing 
accessibility as something much more mainstream.

I have included the topic as part of a game design course and even 
courses on adolescent psychology and Kevin Bierre on this list from 
RIT has also done the same in his courses (Kevin can say more on 
this!). There's a whole bunch of us on this list that are academics 
as well. So you are at the right place! Maybe we could work with the 
IGDA game curriculum committee to get something more official from 
the SIG out there. Any ideas about that? Would you be interested in 
heading up that project? If so, let me know and I'll give you more 
information and e-introduce you to some folks in that committee. :)

But I think that we can only get better at this and include more 
universities. Right now I'm working with DIGRA, which is a good 
organization aimed at academics and game studies, to start up a 
parallel SIG (nothing will change about us but basically we'll be 
working more with the DIGRA people to hopefully build another bridge 
to academia). So hopefully in a few days I'll have the official 
announcement about this additional membership group to the IGDA SIG.

Michelle

>I have been thinking about how to get "mainstream games" more
>accessible, and maybe we need to approach colleges and other higher
>education institutions  that teach game development to teach
>Accessibility to the students.  If game developers are instructed on
>how games can be made accessible, then maybe we can avoid some of the
>problems that we have today.   There is a starting point using the
>Guidelines for developing accessible games  at
>http://gameaccess.medialt.no/guide.php.  Is anyone already teaching
>Accessibility for Gaming in a college or University program? 
>
>-----------
>Thank You,
>
>Tom Roome
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