Recomendações para o desenvolvimento de jogos educacionais: aspectos para a inclusão de pessoas com deficiência visual

Abstract

The use of games as educational resources has been consolidated in recent years, due to the characteristics of these tools, which has the potential to promote active learning along with fun, immersion and challenge. These resources are in some way more related to the way people from current generations learn, once they have been born immersed in digital technologies. As educational resources, it is important that they are accessible to all people, so that their embrancing does not result in the exclusion of some group of people. Given that the main form of interaction used in games is visual, the research process was started on how to create good educational videogames that are accessible to people with visual impairments. The objective of this project is to propose a set of recommendations EduGameAccess, that integrated educational, playability and accessibility aspects for people with visual impairments. This set, or list, was conceived from three consolidated sets of recommendations, selected from a literature review: GAG (2012), PLAY (2009) and Gee Learning Principles (2009). The following scientific procedures and methods were utilised in the research for the construction of the integrated set EduGameAccess: (i) literature review; (ii) evaluation of two accessible videogames developed from an initial set of recommendations; (iii) a case study that permitted an observation of the development process for two educational and accessible games, by a team of game developers. The set under construction was used in all and every stages of the development process, make possible to perform various refinement cycles of the proposed recommendations. In the end, evaluations of the produced games were conducted, following three methods: (i) evaluation by 7 or 8 specialists using the set EduGameAccess; (ii) usability and accessibility tests with users; (iii) evaluation using the eGameFlow, made by 17 or 18 users (5 with no visual impairments, 5 with low vision, 4 or 5 colour blinders and 3 blind). The evaluations made by the experts, using the proposed set, indicated a good convergency in the evaluation of the majority of the recommendation as well as a good understanding of them. The expert's evaluation of the games also pointed out that the most of the recommendations could be satisfactorily fulfilled. Evaluations with users (gameplay / accessibility tests eGameFlow) have showed results very close to the ones obtained with the experts' evaluations, which initially confirms the viability and validity of the set, to help with the educational games development, game that have good playability, are accessible and playable to people with or without visual impairments.