Leap

Description

Game designers and producers mostly focus on child players without sensory inabilities and, oftentimes, games clearly require excellent vision to be played. Given the fact that the number of partially sighted and blind people in the EU is around 12 million people and there exist more than 19 million blind children in the world, the development of games without sensory limits will impact millions of people. The LEAP project is aimed at supporting children who are visually impaired by offering them games with novel, auditive interfaces that they can not only excel at but are empowered from by emphasizing their special skills. They will also help educate them and foster collaboration and connections between them and their fully sighted counterparts in order to reduce or eliminate any kind of social discrimination. The project will address these challenges by creating 3 different games for children who are visually impaired: a) triliza, b) tennis and c) an educational one, which will teach them shapes, curves and graphics through sound and sound fields in three dimensions.

Summary of project results

According to the World Health Organization and the European EBU Platform, it is estimated that worldwide, there are 285 million people suffering from vision problems (39m blind people, 246m partially sighted) of which 19m are children. Children that are blind or have low vision problems face social exclusion problems and significant limitations in getting access to opportunities that will allow them to evolve. Project LEAP contributes to making inequalities diminish and helped blind children have easier access to gaming and education; areas that are crucial for their development. The creation of specially designed educational and entertaining games offered joy, helped the learning process, introduced children in a natural way to the world of technology and motivated them to acquire useful skills. During the development of Project LEAP, they designed, developed and tested 3 computer games the user can play by using just his/her hearing. The 3 games (Tic Tac Toe, Tennis, Curve) have graded difficulty to allow the kids to easily adapt while keeping their interest high. All games have an educational dimension, by allowing the development of different skills. They are accompanied by several smaller games (tutorials) that explain how the game is played and by a tool that makes adding a new language easy. All the games are available for free (www.gamesfortheblind.org), and the code of the game is publicly available under open source licences (github.com). With the collaboration of blindness organizations, they organized successful informing and training events, as well as game tournaments with the inclusion of both blind and non-blind kids. The project attracted much media interest. The LEAP project far exceeded the initial objectives: the games were downloaded more than 2,430 times, some of which are intended for use in a classroom; in a yearly basis, this number is expected to reach 3,500. Throughout the testing, the games got a score of 4,4 out of 5 regarding the usefulness and user-friendliness, and more than 1,500 people participated in the dissemination events and the tournaments.

Summary of bilateral results