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Sighted players gain spatial awareness within video games through sight and spatial awareness tools (SATs) such as minimaps. Visually impaired players (VIPs), however, must often rely heavily on SATs to gain spatial awareness, especially in complex environments where using rich ambient sound design alone may be insufficient. Researchers have developed many SATs for facilitating spatial awareness within VIPs. Yet this abundance disguises a gap in our understanding about how exactly these approaches assist VIPs in gaining spatial awareness and what their relative merits and limitations are. To address this, we investigate four leading approaches to facilitating spatial awareness for VIPs within a 3D video game context. Our findings uncover new insights into SATs for VIPs within video games, including that VIPs value position and orientation information the most from an SAT; that none of the approaches we investigated convey position and orientation effectively; and that VIPs highly value the ability to customize SATs. 

Video games created for visually impaired players (VIPs) remain inequivalent to those created for sighted players. Sighted players use minimaps within games to learn how their surrounding environment is laid out, but there is no effective analogue to the minimap for visually impaired players. A major accessibility challenge is to create a generalized, acoustic (non-visual) version of the minimap for VIPs. To address this challenge, we develop and investigate four acoustic minimap techniques which represent a breadth of ideas for how an acoustic minimap might work: a companion smartphone app, echolocation, a directional scanner, and a simple menu. Each technique is designed to communicate information about the area around the player within a game world, providing functionality analogous to a visual minimap but in acoustic form. We close by describing a user study that we are performing with these techniques to investigate the factors that are important in the design of acoustic minimap tools.