If you’re building a sightless escape room and you aren’t someone who is blind or has low vision yourself, you need to hire an accessibility consultant. There’s a reason that “nothing about us without us” has long been used by disability advocates. This helps you to ensure that your sightless escape room is going to be fit for your audience. A good consultant can review your escape room from end to end, including the ticketing/website experience, as well as looking at the individual elements of the game experience itself. During testing you should also try and have test players who are blind or have low vision.
At The Owl Job we hired Sightless Kombat (website link) as an accessibility consultant. His help was indispensable, not just because of his experience, but because he was also a gamer. In the end his influence was more on games’ design more than anything else.
Other Resources:
Access Escape – Website link
Possibly the first ever sightless escape room open to the general public. It started in January 2019 in London and is also notable for employing scent puzzles. Access Escape also wrote a great primer article on making rooms more accessible – read it here.
Accessible Events Guide – Website link
This document from the Hepburn Shire Council gives lots of useful information for a broad range of events and venues.
Accessible Escape Room – Website link
The Accessible Escape Room have made two video presentations that cover their own design processes. These videos have some overlap, but they also cover different things.
Braille Australia: Services directory – Website link
A list of Braille service providers in Australia. We used Information Alternatives for both translation and printing and can recommend them.
Creating a Taxonomy of Environmental Narrative for Video Game Design – Download link
Will Owen’s paper is one of the cleanest and best overviews of the features of environmental narrative design for games. It’s aimed at video games, but there’s a lot of transferable knowledge here.
Game Maker’s Tool Kit
GMTK did a series called Designing For Accessibility that while often specific to video games, still has many useful lessons for game designers of all kinds. It’s an ongoing series includes annual updates. – Video playlist link
Plus GMTKs’ How Level Design Can Tell A Story has lots of useful examples of environmental storytelling – Video link
Sightless Kombat – Website link
Sightless Kombat is an accessibility consultant and a gamer without sight. I can absolutely recommend you hire him, or someone like him, to ensure your sightless escape room is up to scratch.
Vision Australia – Website link
Vision Australia offers both consulting and training services. Obviously this link is Australian centric.
Web Accessibility Initiative – Website link
Good resource for all aspects of designing accessible website.
Plus these overview guides on web accessibility:
– User Zoom: Website link.
– Website Planet: Website link.
3D Printable Arrow – Download link
This is the arrow I used for puzzles in The Owl Job and you’re free to use it in your own projects.