Audio-Based Puzzle Gaming for Blind People

Abstract. Mobile devices provide opportunities beyond communication and productivity. Particularly, they are increasingly used to entertain the nomadic user. Mobile casual games are increasingly popular as their simplicity, lack of commitment required and neglect for particular special skills goes hand-in-hand with the reduced and partitioned time spans associated with daily contexts. Gaming possibilities for blind people are scarce. The extra demands imposed by mobile interfaces and contexts augments this exclusion. Given the paucity of mobile games for blind people along with the recognized benefits of such gaming experiences, we present an audio-based puzzle game for blind people. In this paper, we depict the iterative (participatory) design of the game along with a preliminary evaluation with 13 blind participants. Results show that the game is fun and challenging and suggest that playable counterparts of visual-based games are feasible even in restrictive contexts as is the mobile one