I have heavily modified the code for speaking prompts in an attempt to work around Apple’s ever changing and unwritten rules.
I now attempt to speak at the beginning of a gameplay, if I fail, I display a silent prompt “Play”. Touch that, and your game should continue with speech prompts.
I may have broken something in the process. Email me if you find issues.
The code for self registration has changed. Please email us at tarheelreader@cs.unc.edu to get it.
We are developing browser-based games that are designed to be accessible to players with a wide range of physical and cognitive abilities. You can help us improve these switch-accessible games by letting your students play them and giving us feedback. All the games have been tested in the Google Chrome browser on laptops, desktops and ChromeBooks but they are unlikely to work on iOS devices.
In Space Defense you will guess the move that will block the alien spaceship
In Switch Tetris you can play Tetris with two switches and no time constraints. On each turn the
computer allows you to choose between the best and worst move.
In Crawler Game you will explore a dungeon collecting treasure and defeating enemies (soon). This game is a work in progress.
Please give these a try and give us your feedback by completing this form
Thanks to requests from teachers we have two new features in the Settings menu.
Now you can optionally have the prompts appear randomly in different quadrants of the screen. The hope is this will help eye-gaze users learn to access all of the screen.
Also, you can now disable speech on the prompts so that students have to read them without the speech support.
Kate asked for features to help her find gameplays for students learning to use switch selection.
On the Find page we have a new selector to all you to choose either “cause/effect” gameplays that continue on any button hit or “choice making” gameplays that require switch selection.
We’ve also added a new Menu entry to activate a Settings page to enable or disable randomization of choices.
The Favorites page will record the setting of randomization in the URL so you can set things up for your student, save the URL, and get back to the same state easily.
Thanks to Kate for her suggestions and help testing.
If you need a feature, let us know. We may be able to help.
By popular demand I have enabled speech on the Find and Favorites pages. As you step through the games using your keyboard or switches it should read the title of each game.
Tar Heel Gameplay will work with YouTube videos that are private are only shared with a few users. You’ll need to be logged in to YouTube in order to play the game. Simply, login to YouTube and copy the link for your private video. Now go to Tar Heel Gameplay and paste the link into the video ID field. Follow the other steps to create your video and click the Play button. You’ll get a new window with your game. You can share that link with anyone who has access to the video on YouTube.
Please do not save games based on a private video to the site because others won’t be able to play it.
We have pushed out a significant update to the site. There is a new creator and lots of internals have changed. Let us know what is broken or missing.
First launch of Tar Heel Gameplay!
Users have the option to save their gameplay via URL and can share them to others as they please. There is currently the option to choose the video, stop intervals, and the message that is to be displayed when the video comes to a checkpoint.