[games_access] Game Accessibility Research and Upcoming SIG meetings

[hinn at uiuc.edu]

Hi everyone,

Just to let you all know, I'm working on a schedule for SIG meetings that will involve TWO different time slots to hopefully be more convenient for as many people as possible. I know that the time zone issues have been difficult and I'd like to try and work through a couple remedies for that, this being one. I (or someone in my place if I can't attend a scheduled meeting to avoid cancelling the meeting) will attend both for continuity sake and to avoid us just rehashing the earlier meeting with the same results. I know that there was a proposal to have a North America meeting and a Europe meeting but there are too many of us with oddball schedules to even make that work. So we'll just offer two times for now and see how that goes.

After that, I'm going to get some sort of automatic events reminder so that it sends a message to the SIG list a few days ahead of time and then a day ahead of time to better communicate when the meetings are. That "automatic" reminder system might be "me" for a little while -- I'm trying to figure out the best system that will also not result in a bounce or spam message! If you have any ideas for solutions, please let me know!

Also, Game Accessibility Research: Some of you already know this but University of Illinois has an extremely large population of students with a very wide range of disabilities, myself included, and that I've been working on setting up a game accessibility lab. I'm working on an IRB (human subjects data collection review & permissions) that will allow me to formally collect data on game accessibility. If there's anyone that would like a game concept or controller or whatnot with formal data collection and would like to include accessibility tests on this campus, please let me know (offline at hinn at uiuc.edu) and we can talk about adding on amendments to the review and cross-institutional funding and permissions.

Note: the summer isn't the "best" time to collect data on a university campus but it is the best time to get things set up (permission forms, non-disclosure agreements, etc) for the fall.

Michelle
.......................................
these are mediocre times and people are 
losing hope. it's hard for many people 
to believe that there are extraordinary 
things inside themselves, as well as 
others. i hope you can keep an open 
mind.
 -- "unbreakable"
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