Accessibility Criteria and Universal Design for Educational Games
Digital educational games are those that can be treated as a teaching resource on building knowledge because they can combine elements such as engagement and motivation with fun in favour of the teaching-learning process. Game production is a complex task that involves a multidisciplinary team, such as programming, design, pedagogical and management. Given that education is a universal right, those games need to attend everyone. They need to be projected to include people with disabilities, without distinction. One way to pursue that purpose is to aggregate to the production process the concept of Universal Design, which aims that everyone can learn with the same resource, removing the impeditive barriers. Game accessibility guidelines set standards and recommendations which intend to help managers and developers on the accessibility conception or evaluation. However, those guidelines have not been enough to guide universally inclusive games production. In this context, this work aims to build, describe and validate an accessibility set of criteria, named ACUDaGames (Accessibility Criteria and Universal Design for Educational Games) that can be used on the accessible educational games production process towards people with and without disabilities following the approach of Universal Design. For that, a literature mapping review was conducted about accessibility recommendations proposed in papers that presents accessibility requirements or criteria that help to create accessible educational games for people with particular impairments or that follows the Universal Design principles. Following that, a narrative review was conducted to complement the initial criteria set, besides a complement with three game accessibility guidelines (GAG, Includification, EduGameAccess). The ACUDaGames is the result of systematic and narrative review and is grouped by the conceptual framework of game design Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics (MDA). The quality of ACUDaGames was validated by 13 specialists on game design, human computer interaction, informatic education and accessibility through an online survey. The result of the specialists opinion analysis shows good internal consistency, according to Cronbach's alpha coefficient, and indicates that ACUDaGames is complete, correct, authentic, consistent, clear, unambiguous, flexible, and it is usable. However, in the future, the set will pass through practical validation within a production of an educational accessible game, to test its efficiency and identify improvements points. In general, the results of this work point out that ACUDaGames have potential to be used in the creation and production process of educational accessible games, following the Universal Design perspective.