Video gaming is one of the most popular pastimes enjoyed by a large variety of people around the world. As more people are getting involved with video gaming, the video games industry too must grow to help maintain their reach towards the varied and diverse members of their community, such as individuals with disabilities. These individuals require accessibility solutions to help them enjoy video games as their disability can affect the way they play, or in some cases make games unplayable.

However, with the existing accessibility solutions in the industry, little has been done to effectively help hard of hearing (HOH) or deaf individuals identify the spatial position of sounds in video games. Specifically, the spatialisation of audio plays an important role in helping players use the ability of sound localisation to locate and identify the position of the sound source within the game environment. But for HOH and deaf individuals, the use of sound localisation is difficult or impossible to take advantage of and this barrier can impact the enjoyment of these players.

With the problem that persists within the current industry and the lack of development in this field of accessibility, research must be done to solve this problem. This thesis will research and develop an accessibility solution that will visualise spatial audio within game environments to help HOH or deaf individuals locate sound sources within their game and to give additional contexts of the nature and loudness of a sound.

Team:

• Khang Duong
• Dr Dale Grant
• A/Prof Jaime Garcia