Accessibility In Games Is Still A Work In Progress

Whilst more and more groundbreaking accessibility options have been creeping into games over the years – The Last Of Us Part II has particularly put the work into making itself accessible – it continues to be a matter that needs attention. I mean, it’s 2020 and we’re still dealing with a nightmare plague of tiny fonts in games.

When we talk about accessibility in games, too often we see developers only doing some of the work. Colorblind text and marker options are important for those who need them but are also one of the most commonly seen accessibility options. There’s also increasing the font size, increasing the HUD size, or turning on and off indicators for interactable objects.

Too often, players with physical disabilities are left behind. There’s an industry habit of doing the minimum or of tacking on accessibility features when they could be doing a lot more and expanding their audience in the process. It’s only in more recent years that gaming hardware itself has developed accessible options. Microsoft, in particular, has put competitors to shame with an official Xbox Adaptive Controller.

It’s important to be clear that the idea is not about making games (insert dramatic, sarcastic air-quotes here) easy. It’s not about limiting them or changing them so fundamentally that you lose the core integrity of an idea. When implemented well from the start, it shouldn’t ever call for that. This is understood by the people who need the accessibility most. Here’s a quote from “Includification: A Practical Guide To Game Accessibility“:

“Instead of looking at things from the perspective of universal design, we need to consider an alternative approach to including people with disabilities in the gaming space that acknowledges that 100% inclusion is not feasible, but access to entertainment is.

Our goal is to make gaming as accessible as technology will allow to the widest group of people with disabilities on a game-by-game basis, and to further increase the alternatives available for people who may not be able to play a particular title. In short, we need to work to get every title to have the broadest audience possible and make sure that, for those left out of a particular title, there are other titles waiting for them to play.”

“Includification” was written by the AbleGamers Charity, which was founded in 2004 with a simple goal of making games more accessible to those with physical disabilities. It’s about enabling them to play games for fun or for rehabilitation purposes and providing assistive technologies to make that happen for those in financial need.

As part of that, they’re also behind Accessible.Games, which has a stockpile of resources to aid developers in making sure that their game is accessible from the jump. As they say themselves, making a game accessible isn’t hard if it’s thought about from the start. It’s a fundamental principle of accessible design in all walks of life. You can apply this line of thinking to the design of buildings, for example. At the start of design is not only the best place to begin implementing accessibility, for the designers or developers, it’s also the cheapest.

At the time of publication in 2012, Includification became a groundbreaking set of guidelines for making games accessible to gamers around the world. In 2018, they launched Accessible.Games, which now provides the standards for APX (Accessible Player Experiences). There’s also the Certified APX Practitioner Course, which is a two-day course designed around teaching, learning, and applying APX principles.

AbleGamers are doing incredible and important work. So are Can I Play That, who formed in 2018 and have become an important resource for accessibility information in video games, providing news and reviews, and influencing players and developers in the process. AbleGamers and Can I Play That are just two names, though: I’d like to direct you to this list, which has countless links from within the gaming accessibility community. In its service as a directory, it’s an important resource in and of itself.

These resources, though, can only go so far in offering the information. From there, it’s up to developers to be willing to listen.