What Does a Blind Gamer See?
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Zihe Ran (2025 MSc Social Science of the Internet) writes:
When I tell people that I study blind and low-vision (BLV) gamers, they usually ask the same question:
“How does a blind person play a mobile game?”
The answer is surprisingly simple: they listen.
Many BLV players rely on smartphone screen readers that read menus and buttons aloud. Games themselves are often rich with audio information. Footsteps reveal direction, heartbeats indicate a character’s health and environmental sounds, birds, wind, temple bells, help construct entire virtual worlds without requiring sight. Players also develop unique touch-screen gestures and memorise complex interface layouts. Some experienced gamers can even play mainstream mobile games almost entirely through sound, memory and rhythm.
These discoveries came from my Association for Computing Machinery CHI 2025 conference paper, ‘How Users Who are Blind or Low Vision Play Mobile Games’, based on interviews with 32 experienced BLV players in China. One of our key findings was that accessibility exists on a spectrum. Some games are designed specifically for BLV players and are fully accessible, but many participants felt they were overly simplistic. Others preferred mainstream games supported by accessibility plug-ins, often developed by BLV communities themselves. Some even played games with no accessibility features at all, collaborating with sighted friends who described visual information while they made strategic decisions.
What fascinated me most was that gaming was rarely just about gaming. For many participants, mobile games provided friendship, achievement and a sense of belonging. They offered opportunities to participate in digital culture in ways that are often difficult in inaccessible physical environments. At the same time, inaccessible game design could produce what some players described as a form of “cyber blindness”, a feeling of exclusion created not by impairment itself, but by technology.
This work later received the Best Academic Paper Award at the Game Accessibility Conference (GAconf), a leading industry event focused on accessible gaming. Since then, I have continued exploring the topic through studies of gaming communities (ASSETS 2025) and collaborations between sighted and BLV players (ICA 2026).
Accessibility is often treated as a technical feature. My research suggests it is something more human. At some point in life, all of us become “non-default users”. The more we recognise overlooked needs and alternative ways of experiencing the world, the more welcoming both our digital and physical spaces can become.
Zihe would welcome conversations with anyone who would like to discuss the work, share related experiences, or explore potential collaborations and ideas. If you are interested, please get in touch with her directly.
