Designing inclusive educational games: accessibility rubric

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51358/id.v20i3.1064

Abstract

Accessibility is an essential component of inclusive design. Through accessibility affordances, developers and design teams can allow players with various needs (vision, hearing, motor, and cognitive) to use any given educational game to its fullest purpose while enjoying the experience, and educators can ensure all students engage in digital activities. Despite the recent increase in accessibility efforts, it can still be challenging for design teams to evaluate accessibility quality in digital educational games. Educational games have an extra layer that aims to promote learning of specific content, meaning its accessibility features have to allow learners to receive and process the content of information. This study proposes an applied and research-based rubric to discuss accessibility quality in educational games. The rubric is designed to support the design process with reflective guiding questions to address educational accessibility challenges.

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Author Biographies

Matheus Araujo Cezarotto, New Mexico State University

Matheus Cezarotto (he/his) is a researcher at the New Mexico State University (NMSU) Learning Games Lab. He provides inclusive design expertise for the team’s educational technology products, including learning games, animations, and virtual labs, and researches how these affordances support learning. Dr. Cezarotto's publications, workshops, and teaching provide practical and research-based resources, including a framework to allow developers and design students to discuss accessibility, identify barriers in educational media, and act in their design processes to make their products more inclusive.

Amanda LaTasha Armstrong, New Mexico State University

Amanda LaTasha Armstrong is a doctoral candidate at New Mexico State University and the Games Lb coordinator where she leads user-testing and teaches youth programs about design. She is also currently a research fellow with New America’s education policy program and a Children’s Equity project Start with Equity fellow. Her work examines representation within children’s media and educational materials, critical pedagogies within technology learning environments, biases within digital and online tools that impact children and families (particularly those persons of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities), and design practices that account for players’ identities and culture.

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Published

2023-12-15

How to Cite

Cezarotto, M. A., & LaTasha Armstrong, A. (2023). Designing inclusive educational games: accessibility rubric. InfoDesign - Journal of Information Design, 20(3). https://doi.org/10.51358/id.v20i3.1064

Issue

Vol. 20 No. 3 (2023)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Matheus Araujo Cezarotto, Amanda LaTasha Armstrong

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)