Building Knowledge and Empathy for Accessibility through Educational Games
Over the past decades, there has been significant progress in digital accessibility, driven by better tools, stronger governance, and increased awareness. However, shifting economic priorities and limited understanding of accessibility concepts threaten to stall this progress. For many developers, accessibility remains a vague and complex area — a checklist of standards without a clear sense of how to meet them or why they matter.
Accessibility is a broad field, encompassing diverse types of impairments — from visual and auditory impairments to motor limitations and cognitive challenges. Importantly, these impairments may be permanent, temporary (e.g., an injury), or situational (e.g., a noisy environment or glare on a screen). By designing with accessibility in mind, we improve digital experiences not just for those with disabilities, but for everyone.
This project examines how interactive and educational games can be utilized to promote empathy and understanding of accessibility challenges. The idea is to simulate different impairments through playable web-based scenarios that highlight common accessibility failures. Players will experience the frustrations faced by users with impairments and then be guided through the process of improving the design, seeing firsthand how the same content becomes more usable and inclusive.
Possible contributions of the project include:
- Designing and implementing an accessibility-focused learning game
- Simulating impairments such as blindness, color blindness, dyslexia, or motor impairments
- Demonstrating common accessibility barriers in websites and showing how to fix them
- Evaluating learning outcomes or user experiences with a prototype
This project is ideal for students interested in inclusive design, human-computer interaction, educational technology, or web development. It offers a chance to combine technical work with a meaningful social mission.
Project ideas
These are eight scoped contributions within the overarching project. Three continue existing prototypes built by previous master's students; two build on artifacts or insights from that prior work; three are new. Continuing a prototype is not a lesser task — it requires understanding the prior work, identifying gaps, and moving the tool closer to something usable in real education.
1. Cognitive accessibility review game
Continuing an existing prototype
This project continues a prototype where players review interfaces, identify cognitive accessibility barriers, and connect them to WCAG principles and the problems they cause for real users. The existing game established the core mechanic and an initial set of scenarios; this project extends it by identifying gaps, developing new scenarios, and evaluating whether the game achieves its learning goals.
Focus: How can interface review games develop practical cognitive accessibility literacy?
Possible contributions include:
- Analyzing the existing prototype and identifying gaps in coverage and usability
- Extending the scenario library and WCAG mappings
- Measuring learning outcomes and empathy through user studies
2. Mobile accessibility simulation game
Continuing an existing prototype
This project continues a mobile-focused prototype where players experience accessibility barriers on phones. Mobile introduces distinct challenges — smaller targets, touch-only interaction, screen reader behavior that differs from desktop — and brings accessibility into the everyday devices most people already use. This project extends and evaluates the prototype with a focus on situational, temporary, and permanent barriers.
A particular direction to explore is reverse simulation: rather than simulating an impairment in the person — for example asking a tester to physically shake their hands to mimic a tremor — the effect is simulated in the interface itself, with on-screen elements shaking, drifting, or resisting input. This inverts where the difficulty lives, and a central research question is whether this is a valid and faithful way to simulate these impairments. The project should explore reverse simulation more deeply and gather evidence for or against its validity.
Focus: How can mobile simulation games communicate the situational, temporary, and permanent nature of accessibility barriers, and is reverse simulation a valid way to convey them?
Possible contributions include:
- Analyzing the existing prototype and identifying gaps in scenarios and experience
- Extending the game with new barrier types and mobile-specific challenges, including reverse simulation
- Investigating and evaluating whether reverse simulation faithfully represents the impairments it stands in for
- Evaluating user experience and learning outcomes with the prototype
3. Story-driven visual accessibility game
Continuing an existing prototype
This project continues a 2.5D pixel-art game that explores visual accessibility through narrative and metaphor, using the Mirror of Renaissance and the Accessibility Codex as central elements. The prototype established the game world and core narrative direction. This project extends the story, refines the experience, and investigates whether narrative framing can build empathy in ways that direct simulation cannot.
Focus: Can narrative and visual metaphor build deeper empathy for visual accessibility challenges than direct simulation?
Possible contributions include:
- Analyzing the existing prototype and identifying gaps in story, mechanics, and accessibility coverage
- Extending the narrative, visual scenarios, and player interactions
- Measuring empathy and player experience through evaluation
4. Physical accessibility problem card deck
Building on prior work — extends the cognitive accessibility card deck from project 1
The cognitive accessibility game produced a structured set of barrier cards describing cognitive accessibility problems. This project extends that deck into a broader physical learning tool suitable for organizational use, adding visual and motor accessibility problems drawn from the other master's projects. The result is a card deck grounded in the gap model — each card describes a mismatch between what a design demands and what a range of users can do.
Focus: How can a physical card deck support team-level accessibility awareness using the gap model of ability and demand?
Possible contributions include:
- Reviewing and systematizing the existing cognitive barrier cards
- Extending the deck with visual and motor accessibility barriers
- Designing and testing the deck in organizational or educational settings
5. Mobile screen reader teaching tool
Building on prior work — draws on insights from projects 1 and 2
Screen readers are one of the most important assistive technologies, yet most developers have never used one. Desktop screen readers vary significantly across operating systems and browsers, making them difficult to learn consistently. This project creates a structured learning experience for mobile screen readers, where behavior is more predictable and devices are already familiar. It draws on what projects 1 and 2 established about cognitive accessibility and mobile barriers to design a tool that reduces the barrier to getting started.
Focus: How can a structured learning experience reduce the barrier to understanding and testing with screen readers?
Possible contributions include:
- Designing the learning experience and supporting tool or guide
- Covering key concepts such as focus order, labels, headings, gestures, and common failures
- Evaluating comprehension and confidence before and after use
6. AI-assisted accessibility
New project
AI code generation tools are trained on code from the internet — and most code on the internet is inaccessible. Without guidance, AI produces the same accessibility failures most developers produce: missing labels, divs instead of buttons, no keyboard navigation, generic alt text. But when developers use AI deliberately — with explicit accessibility requirements in prompts, a working understanding of where AI tends to fail, and verification steps — it can become a useful tool for building and reviewing accessible interfaces. This project investigates that gap and explores what it takes to make AI-assisted development part of a sustainable accessibility practice.
Focus: How can deliberate, accessibility-aware prompting improve the accessibility of AI-generated code, and what does this imply for how we teach accessibility?
Possible contributions include:
- Analyzing how common AI tools handle accessibility by default and where they consistently fail
- Developing and testing prompt strategies and evaluation criteria for accessibility-aware AI use
- Designing a learning resource or tool that helps developers use AI more effectively for accessibility
7. Early-phase accessibility design toolkit
New project
Research and practice consistently show that accessibility problems caught early — in requirements, concept, and design — are far cheaper and more effectively solved than those found in testing or after deployment. The theory is established; the question is method. This project investigates whether a practical design toolkit is an effective way to support early-phase accessibility thinking. The toolkit might include situation-based prompts, accessibility risk questions, barrier cards, and quick evaluation activities grounded in the gap model. The research direction is games and interaction design: designing the toolkit as a structured activity, evaluating its effect, and iterating based on results.
Focus: Is a design toolkit an effective way to integrate accessibility thinking into early-phase design work?
Possible contributions include:
- Developing toolkit components grounded in theory and the gap model
- Testing the toolkit in real or simulated early design processes
- Evaluating whether earlier accessibility consideration changes the quality of outcomes
8. Situational accessibility simulation kit
New project
This project creates a physical classroom and workshop kit that lets participants experience temporary and situational accessibility barriers directly. Props include gloves that simulate hand tremors and glasses that simulate different visual conditions — low vision, tunnel vision, blurred vision, or extreme brightness. These are paired with structured activities and guided reflection. By experiencing these constraints rather than reading about them, participants come to understand accessibility as a mismatch between a person's current ability and what a design demands — not as something limited to people with permanent disabilities. The research question is whether this kind of embodied simulation produces lasting change in how participants understand and reason about accessibility.
Focus: Can physical, embodied simulation of situational and temporary barriers shift participants from a medical model of disability toward a contextual, gap-based understanding?
Possible contributions include:
- Designing the simulation kit, props selection, activities, and facilitation guide
- Running and evaluating sessions in classroom or workshop settings
- Measuring change in mental models and attitudes before and after
Also worth considering
Accessibility board game
New project
A tabletop game for groups of three to five players built around accessibility challenges. Players collaborate to identify and solve barriers — low contrast, confusing forms, missing labels, keyboard traps, cognitive overload — working through a structured set of scenarios. The board game format makes accessibility concrete and creates space for team discussion without requiring digital infrastructure. This is the most exploratory of the ideas listed here, and best suited for a student who wants to combine game design with accessibility research.
Focus: Can a collaborative tabletop game format build shared accessibility understanding and vocabulary within small teams?
Possible contributions include:
- Designing the game mechanics, scenarios, and physical components
- Facilitating and evaluating sessions with real teams or student groups
- Iterating on the format based on participant feedback and learning outcomes