University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

No Sound, No Problem: Accessibility in Gaming for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Players

No Sound, No Problem: Accessibility in Gaming for Deaf and CHUNYU LIU, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA MENGTING AI, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, USA PHILO WANG, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA RACHEL F. ADLER, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA Video games play an increasingly…

• Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) players actively adapt to design gaps by using external tools, custom audio settings, and visual cue interpretation, proving they are active participants rather than passive recipients of accessibility features.
• The lack of standardized visual translation for directional audio, environmental sounds, and off-screen events remains a primary barrier that creates significant competitive and immersive disadvantages for DHH players.
• Multiplayer voice communication is a major site of systematic exclusion; players identify the lack of real-time speech-to-text captioning as a critical failure that prevents effective teamwork and social interaction.