Avaliação heurística de usabilidade em diretrizes de acessibilidade para jogos eletrônicos

Abstract

More and more videogames have tried to ensure that people with disabilities have an experience that is as good as everyone else's. With that in mind, they have included features such as subtitles, visual cues, alternative color palettes, and custom controls. Despite this, many recent products still resort to excluding mechanics (e.g.: button-mashing or quick-time-events) and have serious flaws when it comes to navigation, communication, readability and visibility. To demonstrate what are the most common mistakes and the best solutions, experts have created guidelines for designers and developers and made them available on publicly accessible web pages, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the Game Accessibility Guidelines (GAG), the BBC Games Global Experience Language Framework (Games-GEL), the Accessible Player Experiences Guidelines (APX) and the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines (XAG). For at least two decades, several researchers have evaluated these guidelines and criticized the way in which they are presented to their target audience, especially in terms of vocabulary, organization and adaptability. As these pages undergo periodic updates and many of the problems were pointed out a few years ago, it is essential to evaluate the usability of their current versions. Therefore, this research aims to carry out a heuristic evaluation of usability in accessibility guidelines for video games, so it is possible to determine whether there are still serious usability problems in these tools.