Making STEM Learning in Tyto Online Accessible for Visually Impaired Students
As a former special education science teacher, I wanted to learn more about how real edtech teams use inclusive design practices. I was excited to learn how the team behind Tyto Online worked with visually impaired students through a co-design process to make their STEM game both fun and educational for this often-overlooked population.
Product: Tyto Online
Team: Founder, UX Designer,
4 BVI co-design participants & 2 Developers
Timeline: 6 Months
(October 2024 - March 2025)
OVERVIEW
What is Tyto Online?
Tyto Online is a quest-based online game designed to teach middle school science. Each quest integrates STEM teaching best practices like Claim, Evidence, Reasoning and inquiry-based teaching. It is the original product of Immersed Games.
What is Immersed Games?
Immersed Games is a small edtech startup based out of Buffalo, NY that originally launched Tyto Online in 2016.
In September 2025, the original Tyto Online science product was sunsetted as Immersed Games is now pivoting to offer an authoring platform that allows teachers and/or learning designers to build authentic, empowering, pedagogy-based learning quests based on the principles of the original Tyto Online.
What is this Project?
In September of 2024, Immersed Games won an ACL Awards Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program Grant, which focuses on technology and disability inclusion, for this project to increase the accessibility
The Immersed Games team had been wanting to make their game more accessible to students with disabilities for a long time, and the $100,000 grant allowed them to prioritize this longterm dream.
Immersed Games partnered with with VIA: Visually Impaired Advancement, a rehabilitation and social services agency for blind and visually impaired individuals to introduce inclusive design features through a co-design process.
Goals
01
Improve the navigation of the 3D world of Tyto Online to be effective and enjoyable for BVI learners
02
Implement basic screen reader support within the web browser-based game
Key Team Members
Immersed Games currently has only 12 employees.
For this project, I interviewed Kailin, the UX designer, and exchanged messages with Lindsey, the founder.
Lindsey Tropf
Founder & CEO
Lindsey launched Tyto Online in 2016 with the goal of helping people learn about science, the world, and how they can impact it. She is passionate about inclusive and culturally responsive science teaching.
Kailin Yang
UX Researcher/Designer
Kailin joined Immersed Games in 2019 after graduating with a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction/Design at Indiana University. She is the only UX researcher/designer on staff.
Ray Zylinski
Co-Design Coordinator
Ray, who works at Visual Impairment Association and is a visually impaired gamer himself, served as the liaison for the BVI co-design students while also providing his own valuable insights to the team.
FRAMEWORK
What is Co-Design?
Co-design is a collaborative method where a design team work side-by-side with non-designers through a typical design process. It challenges the idea of designing for users by instead designing with users.
Co-design is incredibly important when it comes to inclusive design (design for people with disabilities) because the lived experience of disability can’t be truly replicated by simulation or interviewing people with disabilities. A true co-design model gives autonomy to the users, allowing them to make decisions directly based on their own lived experiences.
Tyto’s Co-Design Model
NAVIGATION
Pain Points Discovered
The following screenshot highlights the main pain points and problems that the BVI students identified when navigating the 3D world.
1. Overall, players had difficulty reading the text and/or seeing various elements on the screen.
3. The standard paths often went through in-game objects like rocks, shrubs, or trees.
4. The mini-map and wayfinding arrow, which helps sighted player navigate was difficult to see and use.
2. The on-screen arrows or object indicators meant to guide players were hard to distinguish.
Design Solutions
1
Overall, players had difficulty reading the text and/or seeing various elements on the screen.
Added adjustable contrast sliders to customize the level of contrast within the game.
The new accessibility settings panel with custom contrast sliders
2
The on-screen arrows or object indicators meant to guide players were hard to distinguish.
Introduced spatial audio, more audio cues, and sound and/or voice-based audio navigation guides to indicate the location of the next objective.
An example of the new sound-based audio navigation guide.
The pitch indicates the correct direction, and the frequency indicates distance.
3
The standard paths often went through in-game objects like rocks, shrubs, or trees.
Redesigned the game system to avoid obstacles and added optional Navigation Assist Arrows to clearly mark paths.
The visual Navigation Assist Arrows that highlight the path to the next objective.
4
The mini-map and wayfinding arrow, which helps sighted player navigate was difficult to see and use.
Updated the map style to have high contrast on all ground types and added adjustable sliders to cusomize map view.
The enlarged mini map and updated wayfinding arrow with the map background darkened.
SCREEN READERS
What are screen readers?
Screen readers are a type of assistive technology that will read aloud all text on a screen for blind and visually impaired users.
The screen reader will read elements on the page based on how the HTML code is labeled and organized with headings (H1, H2, H2), body text, buttons or other elements.
If elements are not properly labeled, screen readers may read things out of order and/or users will not be able to skip through unnecessary sections of a page.
Developers can use ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) labels to help the screen reader navigate easily on a page.
Screen Readers & Tyto Online
The development team was mostly responsible for making Tyto Online screen reader accessible through implementing text-heavy sections of the game in HTML 5.
Kailin, the UX designer, supported these efforts by annotating Figma designs with HTML and ARIA headings to make handoff easier, especially for future features/projects.
Usability Testing
The Immersed Games team conducted external usability testing through the Center for Accessible Technology (C4AT). Testing was completed in two rounds:
Round 1 was conducted with three BVI adults with extensive screen reader experience with the goal of ensuring that basic functionality was met.
The team made minor updates to the navigation system based on the round 1 results.
Round 2 was conducted with three BVI students (ages 12-13) who had little to no experience with screen readers with the goal of validating functionality with the target audience.
Findings:
GENERAL NAVIGATION
100% of all of participants could successfully navigate with the system.
Even students with limited keyboard navigation experience were able to successfully complete the in-game tasks.
All participants saw the audio cues as helpful.
Testers in both rounds were excited and enthusiastic about the navigation features, since they are not often added in games, especially in edtech learning experiences.
AUDIO CUES
The navigation audio cues are helpful, especially if they are customizable.
Participants differed in their preferences of audio cues, voice cues, or a combination of both types.
Some participants wanted more time between audio cues.
Participants requested the ability to customize the audio cue sound as they didn’t like the piano note sounds used.
SCREEN READERS
While all of the adults were able to successfully complete tasks with the screen reader, the students’ success relied on having past experience with screen readers.
All three students needed adult support to start using the screen reader, but as one student said, “After you get used to it, you’d be like, oh, this is fun!”
Conclusion
This project increased BVI students’ access to quality, inquiry-driven STEM learning experiences.
While Tyto Online is no longer active, the Immersed Games team plans to bring the same accessibility features developed through this project to their content authoring studio tool.
They are actively applying for an additional grant which will help expand on this work and bring additional accessibility customization.
My Reflection
Ever since I learned about co-design in my UX design class last semester, I have always wanted to learn more about the process, especially when it comes to inclusive design. I’m also taking an Assistive Technology course through The NYU Ability Project this semester, and I’m grateful to have gotten the chance to work with a screen reader and speak with a blind individual while working on this case study.
It surprised be that the co-design meetings were largely unstructured rather than following a specific framework or template. However, the co-design meetings reflected typical design meetings at Immersed Games, and it seemed like that environment helped students take ownership in the design process. If I work on an edtech product in the future, I would love to be able to run a similar co-design process.
Kailin also expressed that she was unsure if the results from the low-vision participants would transfer to blind learners as well, since there wasn’t any blind user representation in the co-design group or usability testing participants. This showed me how nuanced inclusive design can really be, and how diversity within disability is often overlooked.
Takeaways
01
When it comes to designing for accessibility, customization is key since no two people with the same disability experience it in the same way.
02
Dividing usability testing into two smaller rounds helped the team first focus on basic functionality with proxy users before diving into testing with the target population.
03
Clear text styles and annotations in Figma aren’t just beneficial for visual consistency, but they can also help developers make products screen reader accessible.
References
Immersed Games, Inc. (2025). Inclusive STEM Learning for Blind & Visually Impaired Students through Enhanced Accessibility in Tyto Online (SBIR Phase I Final Report) (Immersed Games, Inc., Ed.; pp. 1–12).
Tyto Online. (2025). Tytoonline.com. https://www.tytoonline.com/
All in-game images were sourced from Tyto Online
Yang, K. (2025, October 22). [Interview by A. Simmons].