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Place Your Bets: How Accessible Is PokerStars VR?
Accessibility advocates from Equal Entry rated the accessibility of the popular VR game PokerStars VR. The article highlights a couple of articles written by the participants in this area, covering 360 video audio descriptions (which I covered in dai11y 01/01/2021) and VR from a deaf person’s perspective.
The group recall being immediately dropped into a public space, without any training, and being a bit overwhelmed by being approached by strangers before they’d had a chance to orient themselves.
One of the group, Meryl, is deaf, and had to pull her goggles up to check the Google Meet captions and chat box. In doing so, she kept accidentally turning off her goggles.
Holding cards, and picking up poker chips, was difficult, even with full mobile dexterity.
It’s not all bad news though: when testing the game in greyscale, the team noted that the poker chips had their value in text, and card suits have different symbols, so the game doesn’t rely on colour alone to denote information. It did note that the hearts and clubs are in the same shade, however, and would perhaps benefit from two different shades.
The group concluded with some recommendations for PokerStars VR. The game needs:
- Addition of subtitles
- Ability to change size and contrast of text
- More use of haptic, alongside visual/audio feedback
- Controller remapping
- Display settings (e.g. brightness, contrast)
- Several improvements to controlling movement/locomotion/rotation
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