Let’s Play: Increasing Accessibility Awareness and Empathy Through Games

In order to increase empathy and foster conversation around accessibility, we created three games, simulating disabilities, that are geared towards engaging beginner CS and non-CS students to learn about accessibility. Each game has four rounds: game mode, simulation mode, game+accessibility mode, and simulation+accessibility mode. We tested the games on 113 students from two universities and report on performance and survey results that show that playing our games induced student empathy towards people with disabilities and motivated them towards accessible design.

Let’s Play: Increasing Accessibility Awareness and Empathy Through Games

  • Author Kletenik, Devorah; Adler, Rachel F.
  • Publication Title Proceedings Of The 53Rd ACM Technical Symposium On Computer Science Education
  • Publication Year 2022
  • BPC Focus Underrepresented Racial/Ethnic Groups, Students with Disabilities
  • Methodology Survey, Multi-institution
  • Analytic Method Confidence Interval
  • Institution Type NA
  • DOI 10.1145/3478431.3499277
  • URL https://doi.org/10.1145/3478431.3499277