Co-designed mini-games for children with visual impairment: a pilot study on their usability

Digital games aimed at improving cognitive and/or motor-sensory skills need to be carefully designed to take into account the characteristics and needs of particular categories of users. Several novel mini-games explicitly aimed at children with visual impairment (VI) were co-designed by a multidisciplinary team which involved computer engineers and a therapy team from the Robert Hollman Foundation (Padova, Italy). These games are played by children moving within a large-scale interactive environment – i.e., a floor portion placed under a motion capture system capable of tracking one or more people – with the game linking the players movements to the audio and visual output to produce meaningful interactions. We report on a pilot study of the usability of the system involving 11 children with VI. The results allowed us to improve the system and to define a set of guidelines useful for designers and developers of similar systems.