Game Accessibility Through Shared Control for People With Upper-Limb Impairments

Accessing video games is challenging for people with upper-limb impairments, especially when multiple inputs are required in rapid succession. Human cooperation, where a copilot assists the main player, has been proposed as a solution, but relying on a human assistant poses limitations in terms of availability and co-location. An alternative solution is to use partial automation, where the player is assisted by a software agent. In this work, we present a study with 13 participants with upper-limb impairments, comparatively evaluating how participants collaborate with their copilot in human cooperation and partial automation. The experiment is supported by GamePals, a modular framework that enables both human cooperation and partial automation on existing third-party video games.