Leveling Up Accessibility in Video Games

Imagine stepping into a vast, maze-like dungeon in a video game. Your goal? Find the hidden treasure chest. You move cautiously, peeking around corners, making choices at every turn. You might encounter enemies, stumble upon mysterious trinkets, or take a wrong path before finally uncovering the treasure. The journey—the exploration—is what makes the game exciting.

Now, imagine a different version of this experience. Instead of exploring, you're handed a list of everything inside the dungeon. You scroll through, select “treasure chest,” and the game guides you straight there. You’ve technically completed the challenge, but was there any discovery? Was it fun?

For blind and low-vision (BLV) players, this second scenario is often the reality. While accessibility ensures they can interact with the game, it often strips away the very essence of play: exploration, decision-making, and the thrill of the unknown.

Columbia Engineering researchers are tackling this critical gap in video game accessibility: the lack of exploration and discovery for BLV players. While existing accessibility tools guide players from objective to objective, they often remove the fundamental sense of adventure that makes gaming engaging.

Led by Computer Science Assistant Professor Brian A. Smith, the team from the Computer-Enabled Abilities Laboratory (CEAL) has developed innovative approaches to restore the thrill of exploration for BLV players. By creating systems that encourage independent discovery rather than guided navigation, they aim to redefine what it means to play—ensuring that every step is a meaningful choice, every turn holds new possibilities, and every achievement is truly earned.

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The concept of “exploration assistance”

Smith and his team developed Surveyor, a new tool that assists BLV players in freely exploring large and complex game worlds. Surveyor is an interactive tool that tracks where players have looked and points out unexplored areas, in a manner similar to that of sighted players. This is in contrast to existing accessibility techniques that focus solely on efficiency and guidance. The research is set to receive the Best Academic Research award at this year's Game Accessibility Conference held April 14-15 in London.

“Surveyor shows us that accessibility doesn’t have to be about ‘dumbing’ things down,” said Smith. “It’s about understanding what matters to the experience and designing computers that let us take center stage.” 

This research builds on previous work enabling meaningful access to video games, television, images, and social experiences with friends.

To test the system, the researchers custom-built a 3D adventure video game within the Unity game engine and integrated Surveyor into the game. Two other tools were implemented to represent the status quo in accessible gaming for BLV players– a simple audio menu of point-of-interest and a shockwave utility that pings objects within a room. Multiple blind gamers were recruited for a fully remote study where they played the game using Surveyor, and the paper’s findings show that Surveyor promotes a sense of discovery much more effectively than existing tools. Players exhibited more control and agency within the game with Surveyor despite undergoing a learning curve. In contrast, existing tools simplified navigation at the cost of adventure and immersion.

A new frontier for blind and low-vision gamers

The research highlights important new tools that make video games not just accessible, but truly fun to play. This means BLV players can enjoy games just as much as sighted players, helping to make gaming more inclusive for everyone.

BLV players would “use” the tool itself, though it would be up to game developers and studios to integrate it into their games. An advantage of Surveyor is that it is flexible and works regardless of the layout of the world. The world does not have to be changed or simplified just so that Surveyor works — in fact, the team designed and built the levels in the test game before they even designed and built Surveyor. Not having to change the video game is how they can ensure equivalent experiences for BLV players.

“There is room to make games not just more accessible but also more enjoyablefor players,” said Vishnu Nair, the lead author and fifth-year Columbia Engineering PhD candidate in CEAL. “Ultimately, accessibility isn't solely about access, it's about providing meaningful access. How can we open up even more experiences to more people while also preserving what it means to play a video game, which is to have fun?”

What’s next?

The lab is currently working on creating a plugin for the Unreal Engine (another game engine similar to Unity) that would allow game developers to integrate part of Surveyor’s functionality into their games without having to code it from scratch.

Lead Photo Caption: The player "looks around" by scanning counter-clockwise starting from their right. They are currently looking in the direction of the purple line. The red grid cells represent the parts of the room they have "seen" so far. The black grid cells represent the "cusp of the unknown": the edge between what they have seen and have not yet seen.

Lead Photo Credit: Computer-Enabled Abilities Laboratory (CEAL)