[games_access] Game accessibility survey journal article

[Eleanor]

Excellent article Eelke - your students did a great job!

The one thing that becomes ever more clear as one researches this field 
is how can someone quantify the need for accessibility accommodations 
when there are several unresolved issues:

1.Many people who play games don't consider themselves gamers and don't 
respond to questions about video gaming positively because there is a 
social stigma associated with the term "gamer".  Most women will not 
identify themselves as gamers.  Frequently, if you question someone who 
does not consider themselves to be a gamer further, they will say oh 
yes, I play a couple of online computer games, or I play casual games on 
the computer, or I play bowling on the Wii, but I'm not a gamer..  How 
then can you then get an accurate figure for the actual number of people 
who play games?  I believe we have consistently under-estimated the 
number of people who play games - especially among older people.

2. This in turn leads to an inability to estimate how many people are 
prevented from playing games because the games don't have accommodations 
to allow them to play.  We have a pretty good handle on the number of 
people who have one or more disability.  We can say what it will take to 
make a game able to be played by them.  What we can only guess at is the 
actual number of people who are prevented from playing games because of 
the lack of accommodations.  We can't estimate with any degree of 
confidence because we really don't have a good handle on the actual 
number of people who are gamers. 

The next question is would people with one or more disability be more, 
less or equally likely to play games if the accommodations were in place 
to allow them to play?  I tend to say equally likely if given the chance 
- but I may be wrong.

Given all that, if we had better information on these issues, we could 
do a better job of estimating the revenue loss game companies are 
incurring by not including accessibility accommodations in their games.

Eleanor Robinson
7-128 Software