Abstract
Video games have grown to become one of the largest forms of entertainment. While they continue to progress, accessibility support for visually impaired and blind users remain greatly ignored. While games that target this audience directly do exist, they form a small subset of video games called audio games and are generally developed by the community. Audio games remove the visual modality and use sound as their primary source of communication. These types of games face many limitations and problems in contrast to their visual counterparts. Navigating and developing spatial awareness for unfamiliar 3D spaces can be especially difficult for blind and visually impaired individuals. In this thesis, the limitations and common problems among audio games are discussed and a new audio game called Audio Maze is introduced to address some of these issues and propose new solutions for the complex nature of navigating 3D space without visuals. Audio Maze establishes 6 new game mechanics, enhanced by using a quadraphonic sound system, aimed to improve a player’s spatial awareness in the game world.