A tour for everyone
Designed with accessibility in mind
Most walking tours assume you can see the map and hear the guide. Ours don't. Every Space-Time Adventure Tour is built so that blind, low-vision, deaf and hard-of-hearing adventurers get an experience just as compelling as everyone else's — not a stripped-down version of it.
How it works
Spatial audio wayfinding
The tour's soundtrack is three-dimensional. Audio beacons sit at the next stop, so you can navigate by walking toward the sound. GPS announcements and verbal directions fill in distance and turns, and the narration warns you about stairs, slopes and hazards before you reach them — and tells you the step-free way around.
Non-visual gameplay
AR moments — scanning a statue, placing an object, finding a time crystal — all have non-visual equivalents. Haptic feedback tells you when you're close and when you've succeeded. Nothing in the story depends on seeing the screen.
Screen reader support
The apps are VoiceOver compatible. Menus, the big red pause button, the settings screen and the map all read out properly.
Captions and haptics
Every line of dialogue is captioned, always on, no setting to find. Haptic cues accompany audio cues, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing player gets the same signals through their hands.
Simple, forgiving controls
One big button. Generous tap targets. No timers, no fail states, no penalties for wandering. If you miss a trigger, the tour waits for you.
Built with Andy Slater
Fair Worlds partners with Andy Slater, a blind media artist, sound designer and disability advocate. Andy pushed us from the first Seattle tour to think about how a non-sighted player would navigate a park, and spatial audio wayfinding came directly out of that work. He also composed the original music and spatial audio soundscapes for the experience. Accessibility isn't a checklist we run at the end; it shapes the design from the first script draft.
Testing
We field-test every tour with sighted and non-sighted players, and with partners including the Washington State School for the Blind. If something doesn't work for you, we want to know — tell us here.
Physical accessibility of the routes
- Seattle Center: flat, paved paths throughout. About a mile.
- Central Park: mostly flat with two moderate hills near the Metropolitan Museum. There are a few steps at Conservatory Water and at Bethesda Terrace; the narration points out step-free alternatives at each.
Guided tours with a host and loaner devices are available by request, and we're glad to plan around any access needs for groups. Details here.