Team:Toulouse INSA-UPS/Inclusivity
Inclusivity
As synthetic biology is a most promising field, we wanted to reach out to people not necessarily connected to the world of science. In this scope, we got in touch with UNADEV, an association for visually impaired or blind people. Because the sense of smell was central to our project, we decided to adapt our Elixio game for them. They showed a great interest both for synthetic biology and in helping us since many games are not adapted for them. It was a true life lesson as we broke down their clichés about synthetic biology while they did the same about our misconceptions of how visually-impaired people perceived their environment. While we did not have enough time to fully adapt the game, we collected their precious advice for further development of the game after the competition and to allow future iGEMers to follow in our footsteps.
EXCHANGES WITH VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEOPLE
Aim : to adapt our game to a visually impaired audience
Target : visually impaired people
The goal of our game was to bring knowledge about the world of perfume and biology. So, the concept of our game was based on the odor recognition and on biological knowledge. As nothing need the sense of vision in these principles, we think that it could be great to try to adapt the game to visually impaired people. Moreover, we hypothesized that they would be better trained and more able to recognize odors.
In order to understand how we could adapt our game for visually impaired people and how they are educated to odors, we do an intervention in an association for the visually impaired (UNADEV). They were kind enough to welcome us in their offices and to gather members to test our game.
More able to recognize odors?
We asked them questions about their sensitivity to odors. We thought that since one of their senses was impaired they might have a more developed sense of smell and that they might benefit from odor education. This proved to be wrong: they explained to us that they did not have a particularly developed sense of smell but rather that they were more sensitive to it. Not being able to see or seeing badly, they concentrate more on other things in the environment such as smells and are therefore more sensitive to them than seeing people.
How to improve our game?
We tested our game with four persons regularly participating in the association. This intervention was very constructive, they gave many tips to improve our game and adapt it to their disability.
When we arrived, we knew that our cards were not adapted at all and we thought that the easiest way was to transcribe them into Braille. However, we were wrong. They explained to us that actually only 2 % of visually impaired people was able to read the Braille. They told us that young people easily learn Braille but people who become visually impaired later in their lives have more difficulties, and many never manage to learn this language.
For many reasons, Braille is not well adapted. For example, people who do manual labor may have less sensitivity in their fingertips, making it difficult for them to read Braille. In addition, the texts on our cards were too long to be translated into Braille: the cards would be too big.
For all these reasons, they told us that it would be more adapted to do vocal card. They spoke to us about system like “Pen frame”, that actually pen with pre-record audio. The concept is to made card with code that can be scan by the pen and launch the audio corresponding to the card.
In the same spirit, a system with a central box could read cards with codes and serve as a voice board.
They gave us feedback about our perfume card. They suggested making 3D circles in relief on the "Perfume" cards in order to position the tokens indicating the collection of odor-plasmid correctly
About the tokens, they can feel the differences between the two sides, one smooth and one with an engraved lock. The color of the tokens was not optimal since they are the same color as the card they will be placed on. For the blind people, this does not change anything, but for the visually impaired, it can be difficult to discern the two elements.
The yeast pieces can be improved too. We made our pieces in 4 different colors but that this is not optimal enough. It would be necessary to make 4 pieces of different shapes or to add different marks on the back of the pieces so that they could be easily recognized with the fingers.
We had our tray engraved on a wooden board. They could follow the engraving but it was not deep enough for them to recognize the squares on the board.
They felt it would be easier to recognize a texture made in 3D than an engraving.
It would also be necessary to adapt the board with a system allowing to lock the pieces in the squares to prevent accidental shift of the pawns.
We brought dice with small engravings for the numbers. They could recognize the numbers on the dice but they would need a larger dice to make it simpler.
They also gave us an overall feedback on the concept of the game. For them, it was interesting to mix knowledge of smells and biology. The level of the questions on the cards was not always appropriate for them. They suggested to us to implement several levels of difficulty in the questions or to propose team games.
They were very excited about our game and our initiative to adapt it to visually impaired people. In fact, there are not many suitable games for visually impaired people. They were interested in helping us to adapt the game, testing it again and supporting us in its production.
We will not be able to implement these recommendations for this edition of iGEM, but we hope that future teams will be able to use them to better adapt their efforts to the visually impaired.
