FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Hearing-Impaired Players
To help support hearing-impaired players, consider the following:
■ Display visible cues for audible events. If a car scrapes along a railing, show sparks; when a gun fires, show a muzzle flash. Naturally, you can't do this in some circumstances. In horror games, scary sounds often come from unseen sources, and that aspect is critical to creating the desired emotional effect. But for games that aren't in the horror genre—which means most of them—you should be able to design for hearing-impaired players by including visual cues for the most critical audible events.
■ Offer two separate volume controls, one for music and one for sound effects.
Be sure the player can mute either one entirely. Hearing-impaired people often complain that they cannot filter out background sounds from foreground ones, so conversation becomes impossible in noisy environments. In a video game, music can prevent them from hearing important sound effects. If you can, separate spoken dialog into a third category and let the players control its volume level, too. Make these controls easily accessible from a pause menu—don't require the player to save the game and return to a shell menu to adjust them.
■ Use the rumble (vibration) feature of the controller if the controller includes one. If you do this, players will be able to feel events even if they cannot hear them. Also allow the player to turn vibration off—not all of them like it.
■ Supply optional subtitles for dialog and sound effects. (This feature is also called closed captioning.) It is very inexpensive to implement and enormously helpful to hearing-impaired players. The biggest drawback of subtitles is that you must leave space for them on the screen. Half-Life 2 includes closed captioning and uses different colors to indicate different speakers.
For more information on accommodating hearing-impaired players, visit Deafgamers. com at www. deafgamers. com.
