Game accessibility is the practice of making games that are universally accessible to all, regardless of age, experience and disability (www.igda.org/accessibility). Developing accessible Shockwave content is important for many reasons:

• Accessibility enhances the user experience for all users
• Accessible Shockwave games can be used on public websites that must be Section 508-compliant (such as educational and government sites)
• Accessibility creates goodwill
• Games are a quality of life issue
• Games are used in contexts other than entertainment (such as "edutainment" and as content for online courses)

Director is a great tool for making games and simulations. It also features speech synthesis support which enables you to use the speech APIs that come with Mac OSX and MS Windows operating systems.

At Pin Interactive we develop 3D games using Director. We received the "Innovation in Audio Award" at the Independent Games Festival for Terraformers, a downloadable Shockwave3D game that is accessible for low vision, vision impaired and sighted players.

When implementing game accessibility you may need to use hardware sound APIs and alternative hardware controllers. The reason Director is a great tool for this task, and what really sets it apart from Flash, is that Director comes with an extensive SDK (called XDK) for C++ developers who can extend Director in any direction with the help of "Xtras". There are a great number of available Xtras available for download; open source, free or commercial. Director is itself built upon the XDK architecture with a modular design. For example, the Shockwave3D engine supports OpenGL and DirectX hardware rendering, but it is only included if 3D is used in the project.

The script engine in Director is also very powerful. In this article I'll describe how you can implement 3D sounds with scripts alone (no third-party Xtras needed) and how you can setup a sound compass to enable blind gamers to orient themselves in your games. The concept of a sound compass is one of the features invented and developed specifically for Terraformers. This method of audible navigation applies to 2D games as well.

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you'll need the following software and files:

Adobe Director 11

• Try
• Buy

Sample files:

• shockwave_accessibility.zip (ZIP, 292K)

Prerequisite knowledge

This article assumes that you have a basic understanding of the Director interface. If you want further information, see the Director Help files and Dean's Director tutorials. Basic understanding of Object-Oriented Programming concepts is helpful but not required.

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