   Game Design for the Blind
  My grandfather is recently blind and I've been reactively developing a voice recognition "media center" for the last few months and suddenly realised that I should put some games into it for him.He's pretty content with the idea of giving him voice control over the Who Wants to be a millionaire series of games but it'd be nice to have some diversity.Anyone know of some game's or game ideas that would be enjoyable for a blind person? (voice recognition preferred but a simple keyboard commands are still fine).   
  Text adventures, potentially, would work.   ;  How about spatial sound game, where the user travels through a sound scape (using spatial audio) and shoots toward the desired audio object. Maybe a typing game where each key is mapped onto a tone and the user needs to type the tone they hear, essentially a word shooting game.A ball balancing game where balls drop from the ceiling and bounce off a drum, the bounce direction and velocity is encoded in the drum sfx. The user has to use that to move the drum left/right so that the drum catches the ball again. See how long they can keep the ball in play. Added points for juggling more then one ball.Good Luck!-ddn   ;Quote:Original post by MeshGearFoxText adventures, potentially, would work.This would get my vote. There are a few text adventure/interactive fiction engines around (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Text_adventure_game_engines) and writing a text<->speech front end for one of these should be a pretty reasonable undertaking and would allow a large library of games to be played.   ;  You could make a game where you wander around in 3d space and all you have is sounds to guide you.For instance imagine this... your "camera" is always level with the horizon, there's no pointing it up or down.There is no graphics, only ambient and point based sounds.you can press a button and it does a sonar beam type thing where it'll beep faster the closer a wall is in the direction you are pointed.you could press another button and it juts out a stick.  if the stick hits anything it makes a noise based on if the thing is made out of dirt, wood, metal, etc.You could do something like that and could do a couple of things with it...#1 - Make a game where you have to make it through increasingly difficult mazes using sound alone as your guide and it times you.  He could get people to play against him and laugh as he annihilates them :P   You could make it randomly generate maps for this if you wanted.#2 - you could do this and make some kind of first person shooter with it where the enemies moved slowly or didn't attack that often but you would move around and shoot them.#3 - some combo of the above 2?  You could have a world you wander around in by sound only and objectives to complete and monsters to fight, and a narrator could take the place of where you'd want to display text or cinematic on the screen.#4 - you could have a game where you as the player are stationary, operating a gun turret.  You hear sounds around you and have to turn and shoot at them.  Waves of guys come at you, you try to survive for as long as you can.All this would require a good sound library of course, but it might be kind of neat (:shrug :P   ;  oh you could also do something where the keys on your keyboard each played a tone, and have the tones on the keyboard be arranged logically (like piano style perhaps...).Then you could do a lot of interesting stuff where the player has to play notes or sounds.For instance, a musical simon, where the computer plays one note then you copy it.Then it plays the same note and another note and you have to play those 2.try to see how many notes you can get!shrug :P   