An exploratory data analysis of recommendations for players with cognitive disabilities

Video games have become one of the most relevant audiovisual products in the last decades. Their accessibility is a social, ethical and even economic must [1]. In particular, there are three steps in which any gamer’s performance might be compromised: receiving stimuli, determining a response and providing input [2]. Among these, people with cognitive disabilities struggle when responding to a video game’s expectations. This kind of impairment is the least explored and thus the one that would benefit the most from research [3]. This paper illustrates how cognitively disabled players are currently being addressed via an Exploratory Data Analysis of four of the major video game accessibility guidelines [4,5,6,7]. After describing the state of the art and discussing the suitability of the two most widely used models of disabilities: the medical and the social, we performed bivariate graphical analyses with two objectives in mind. The first one was to overcome the heterogeneity of the available recommendations (they have different goals and different wordings for similar concepts) by assigning a feature of accessible communication [8] to each one of them. The second one was to know exactly for what kind of cognitive disability the recommendations were designed, given the ambiguity of this term (it remains unclear what disorders or difficulties it includes), by assigning mental disorders from a well-known classification [9] to each one of them. We found that there is a lack of attention to the comprehensibility of the information compared to its retrievability, and that developers seem to completely disregard some mental disorders. These results lead us to suggest future lines of research, such as the implementation of the easy-to-understand language in order to tackle the former and the need for a good definition of the term “cognitive disability” in the area of video game accessibility to understand the latter.