Wavelength

Stakeholder Engagement | Accessible Design | Team Work

There are very few accessible games that work well for people who are blind or have visual impairments. My team worked to redesign a board game to suit the needs of this group.

Wavelength is a popular party game where players try and guess a target on a given range based on one player’s clue. The original game relies on colors, numbers, cards and other visual methods to communicate information to the players. This visual info is hidden to people who cannot see it. We worked with the Colorado Center for the Blind to create a version of Wavelength that is exciting and easy to play for them.

With our redesign we wanted to focus on maintaining the game experience, and ensuring our users could play completely independently as a true player.

I lead the our stakeholder engagement by organizing weekly meetings with our user group. I met with our users and worked with them to understand how they navigate the world with visual impairments. As a team we used this data to drive our design decisions. I enjoyed the challenge of learning out our users interact with games and how they overcome the issues of the majority of projects not being made for them. Occasionally it was difficult to separate individual likes and dislikes from the features necessary for ease of use. However, working with 7+ people in our group allowed me to find commonalities and shared experiences.

Throughout this project I worked on making presentations and reports on our design and rational of our decisions.

Our final design has the same gameplay as the original Wavelength with accessibility features so both sighted and not sighted people can play. The range cards are digital and are read out as well as displayed on a screen with the push of a button. The game board or ‘device’ is larger with ergonomic handles for easy passing and holding. The outside of the dial has clock numbers so players can easily feel or see where on the range they are. The score wedge has tactile dots for easy feeling comprehension. The pointer is larger with a finger grove for quick selection motions. All moving pieces lock in place with magnets to prevent accidental bumping or moving. These features were specifically designed for people who are blind, however I believe that they could have great applications to many other user groups.