An exploration of what it means for Tetris to be accessible — design method and interaction modalities, with working examples of techniques: spatial audio, musical sonification, and a first-person listening experience, running in an ordinary web page.
The claim here is deliberately precise. This is not "an accessible Tetris game": it is research into what accessibility means for a game like this, with a demonstrator showing the techniques in action. The work continues my PhD's rendering case study, which chose Tetris because it is hard, not because it was doable — real-time, animated, built on exactly the kind of proximal, spatial content that screen readers cannot transliterate. The adaptation approach references directly back to the thesis's core: the CISNA Model of Accessible Adaptive Hypermedia (Adaptation / Navigation / Semantics / Inventory / External Content), with the game's events at Semantics, the audio metaphors as Inventory, and the player-facing mixing desk as the Adaptation layer in the player's own hands. The original exploratory build (Java + OpenAL, circa 2009) exercised the architecture; the web demonstrator rebuilds it where the Web Audio API finally provides binaural spatial audio worthy of the design.
| Document | What it is |
|---|---|
| docs/case-study.md | The full case study: what Tetris demands of a player, why assistive technology fails at it, the sonic metaphors and adaptive architecture of the PhD implementation, and the design for this web build. Also available as Word: docs/Accessible Tetris - Case Study.docx. |
| design/DESIGN.md | The engineering design for the web implementation — architecture, audio stage, psychoacoustic rules, layers, and build phases. |
| docs/research.md | Research notes: what others have said about Tetris and accessibility, the audio-game lineage, accessible game design guidelines and literature, open-source implementations, and the legal landscape for falling-block games. |
- An abstract game (grid, tetrominoes, SRS rotation, hold, ghost, scoring) modelled as concurrent state machines, communicating with its user interface only through asynchronous request/answer pairs — so the game can wait for the interface, and rendering speed becomes a user accommodation, not a constant.
- A visual view: clean SVG Tetris — high contrast, colour-blind-safe, keyboard-operable,
prefers-reduced-motionrespected. - A sonic view: per-piece timbres, HRTF-panned positions, a terrain scan that plays the silhouette as melody, a ghost heard as a converging echo, urgency as heartbeat — organized into three switchable first-person listening views (The Wall, The Well, Mission Control).
- A capability layer: the player's mixing desk — independently controllable audio layers with presets from Minimal to Full. The user decides how to experience the game.
Documents and design first; the demonstrator follows the build order the case study argues for — timbres, then terrain scan, then the spatial stage, then a simple, openly-scoped version of the game that exercises the techniques.
Tetris® is a trademark of The Tetris Company. This is non-commercial accessibility research; no Tetris Company assets are used.