Feel the Rhythm

Over the past few decades, video games have grown from a novelty of entertainment into one of the largest media industries in the world. For blind players or players with significant visual impairment, gaming is an activity which is largely out of reach, particularly for certain genres of game. The focus of this paper is one specific problem in games accessibility, which is the challenge of providing visually impaired players with access to the rhythm game genre. This paper presents a new game, titled Feel the Rhythm, in the rhythm genre developed with accessibility as a core design goal in order to implement novel blind-accessible features. The game serves as proof of concept for implementing solutions to this specific accessibility problem and presents the potential to allow visually impaired players access to a generally unavailable genre of games.