Project Adaptive Fun: Accessible Off-the-Shelf Games (4/4)

The chips of the Connect Four game are differentiated not just by colour, but by tactile images, increasing the accessibility of the game.

This is the last article in the “Project Adaptive Fun” series in which Siew Ling, who is deaf-blind, shares the simple adaptations she and her team have made to increase the accessibility of games! Check out the first three articles here.

In my previous articles, I introduced games that had to be adapted to be accessible for persons with visual impairment. This time, I will introduce some off-the-shelf games that are already accessible!

Firstly, we have Connect Four, a game where players take turns dropping their chips into empty slots and compete to form a line of four chips of the same colour. Beyond their colours, the two sets of playing chips provided are also differentiated by the tactile images printed on them – one is of a fish and the other is of an octopus. I got this as a gift from a friend, and have enjoyed playing this game ever since.

Siew Ling built a 3D mini-car with the magnetic building blocks and movable wheels.

I also received a box of magnetic building blocks, which came in many different colours and shapes. There are many 2D and 3D figures that I can build out of these blocks, such as a Ferris wheel, but I ultimately decided to use them, as well as the movable wheels that came with the set, to make a 3D mini-car. It was fun to be able to create anything I wanted, purely based on my imagination. The car was easy to assemble because the blocks had small magnets on their outer edges so they easily attracted other blocks placed around them.

These games are easily available at any mainstream game store, and even though they do not quite shout inclusive to us, they are naturally already quite accessible. There are probably even more such games out there that I haven’t discovered!

The six colours of the Rubik’s Tactile Cube are differentiated with tactile symbols like crosses, dots and squares.

Of course, there are also games like the Rubik’s Tactile Cube and UNO® Braille that were intentionally designed to be accessible to persons with visual impairment. Five sides of the Rubik’s Tactile Cube are marked with tactile symbols (crosses, circles, rings, dots, squares) while one side is left blank – together, these represent the cube’s six colours. We attempted a variation of this last time by adding braille labels denoting the first letter of each colour on the six sides of a puzzle cube.

UNO® Braille, on the other hand, comes with braille embossed on every card, allowing players with visual impairment to play the game straight out of the box with their sighted friends. I’m thankful that this version exists, otherwise it would be extremely tedious for me to emboss braille on each card, given the variety of cards available. I also would have required the help of a sighted person to identify each card and its orientation in the long labelling process.

There are a variety of games out there – some are naturally accessible, some are specially designed to be accessible, and others can be adapted to become accessible. You can try out the games I’ve recommended, find other accessible games, experiment with the adaptations I’ve shared in this series and even come up with your own! Let’s widen the range of games we can play, and enjoy them to our heart’s content! Have fun exploring!