The work Reusable Game Interfaces for People with Disabilities, produced by the e-UCM research group, has been awarded the Gold medal of the Student Research Competition organized by the ACM Special Interest Group on accessible technologies, which was held at the ASSETS 2012 conference in Boulder, Colorado.
The Student Research Competition is organized annually by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and it is sponsored by Microsoft. Participants face two rounds. The first round is organized by each Special Interest Group on their respective expertise areas at their official annual conferences. In this round all selected works are firstly presented during a poster session, where they are scrutinized by a panel of judges. A selection of these works make it to the final round, where judges decide the final winners based on a speech where each work is presented to the conference audience. The second phase gathers together all the winners of the local editions, and a different jury selects the three final winners who are formally given recognition at the ACM annual banquet.
The work presented by the e-UCM group is the core of Javier Torrente’s PhD thesis, which tries to improve the accessibility of digital games and other highly interactive pieces of software by introducing alternative interfaces in game development software.