Create Accessible Games with Tar Heel Gameplay

Posted by Claire Harrison on the 12th March, 2019

Do you work with learners who love to watch videos on YouTube?

The fantastic and free to use Tar Heel Gameplay website offers you a way of creating interactive, accessible games using any YouTube video.

This means you can use whichever video most motivates your learner to teach them switch and touch screen access.

Tar Heel Gameplay allows you to use any YouTube video to create a switch or touch accessible game.

All you need to do is paste the URL of the YouTube video into the box on the Tar Heel Game Play website.

There are three options for creating ‘gameplays’, with the video you select from YouTube:  Basic, Precise and Advanced. In Basic mode you can select when the video starts and ends. Useful if you want to go straight to the chorus in a song. In Precise mode you control the time and text for individual prompts. With Advanced mode you can control what the prompts do, whether its play the video again, exit or jump to a specific time in the video.

 You can create opportunities for your learner to be in control by personalising the prompts, asking if the learner wants to continue with the video or choose another. 

There are many useful additional features. The menu page is switch enabled, so you can use one switch to scan the videos and another to choose a video to play. Built-in text to speech will read aloud the title, and you can even have them read aloud in a Scottish accent if you have Heather and Stuart, the Scottish voices!

It’s a fantastic tool, which can create highly personalised, highly motivating opportunities for communication and control

There is also the excellent Tar Heel Reader, but that’s another blog for another day!