escape room games

1 minute read

I recently played escape room with some family and friends near San Ramon.
If you are not familiar with escape room, it is a game where your team is put into a room (usually based on some theme) and you are required to find and solve a series of puzzles or riddles to unlock a series of locks to escape the room in a given time. The game was fun and puzzles were intermediate complexity, not very easy to be boring and not very hard so, you could actually escape.
for a blind person though, the puzzles were not accessible. They were all based on printed materials and lights.

However, as I played the game, it was obvious to me that it is really easy to make almost all the puzzles accessible for a blind person without actually changing the game or puzzles or the sset up at all.
For example, all the rpinted matter can be provided as braille very easily. For people who don’t know braille, they could provide some kind of NFC labels or QR codes with each puzzle that can be read by a smart phone app created for this purpose.
Almost all of the props used in the game were stationary and can be marked up similarly for a blind person to identify.
The clues based only on light or colors may need some more design to make accessible but is definitely not something that cannot be done.
Finally, if a blind person is attempting this alone or everyone in the group is blind, we may need an extra 15 minutes or so in the beginning for the people to become familiar with the room.
This is similar to my earlier post about accessibility with toys. As blind and low vision people try to become a part of mainstream society, they do need access to same kinds of recreation as the rest of the society.

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