As the chairperson of the gaming industry’s lobbyist group to raise awareness and help designers find solutions to accessibility issues, I’ve worked with several companies to help them take the first steps toward making their games more accessible. But I’ve also been afforded the opportunity to learn exactly how important games are to people’s lives.

I receive emails and phone calls every week asking about accessible games and controllers. Some come from the potential gamers themselves, which usually consist of vivid descriptions of a recent accident and a plea to help them find a one-handed controller because they’ve just lost a hand or an arm. Some come from doctors of veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq who contact me not just because of the potential games have for rehabilitation, but also because they have patients who are suffering from intense depression as a result of their injuries, for whom gaming used to be a big part of their civilian lives. Using assistive technology and accessible controllers, videogames can be brought back into the lives of such veterans—and learning to play games in a new way helps pave the way to wanting to learn how to do other things in a new way. It can be a first step towards returning to life for such people.

Perhaps the most emotional calls come from parents, who often start the conversation by telling me that before their child was in an accident they felt that videogames were a waste of time, at the very least, if not actually dangerous. Now, unfortunately, their child cannot play with his or her friends and they want to know if there is any way to get them into a multiplayer game of some kind. They want their child (and their friends) to understand that even though one of them has a disability, life goes on—they are still friends, and they can still play together.

It’s hard to get these calls and emails and know that the gaming industry as a whole has not done much to respond to the call for increasing the accessibility of their games. Fortunately, there are a lot of garage hackers and hobbyists who have taken up the cause to make sure that there are at least plenty of controller options for all the latest systems—Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Nintendo’s Wii, and Sony’s PS3 all have specialist devices available.

This is only a part of the battle. Even with an accessible controller, many—too many—games do not allow keys/buttons/control sticks to be remapped so that players with accessibility issues might be able to play them. Although smaller companies may struggle to develop on the funding available, many high-profile games are now developed on budgets in excess of $20 million and could easily afford to support such a feature (which many players without disabilities might also benefit from).

Other issues include lack of closed captioning, poor audio cues, inability to change colors, font sizes that are too small to be read, and many more. Before discussing these kinds of issues in more detail, however, I want to leave you with a few quotes that nicely capture what it is that gamers with disabilities want in a videogame experience. These are taken from a 2006 survey that asked blind gamers what they are looking for in commercial videogames [VanTol06]:

Games are often social experiences. Although these are just two opinions from blind gamers, the desire to play with non-visually impaired friends as well as being able to have bragging rights (just as their sighted counterparts have) resonate with gamers who have other kinds of disabilities. In an article on CNN about a game called AudiOdyssey (Gambit, 2007) that was designed to be played by both the blind and sighted together, one blind gamer was quoted as saying “It’s important that games be mainstream and inclusive—rather than “special” and [only] for blind players.” [Mollman07]

There’s a term in the computer and web accessibility worlds called universal accessibility—meaning that all computer programs and web pages should be able to be accessed in some way by all people. Here the emphasis is on education and productivity applications, operating systems, and getting information from websites, usually in areas where it is required by law for a company, school, or government agency to do so (these laws vary by country, but most countries in North America and Europe have adopted some variation of these laws). However, the laws are not as clear when referring to games.

Ideally, we might want to make all games accessible for everyone, but the reality is that there are some game experiences that cannot be transformed to be accessible and, more importantly, to be fun, for every type of gamer—with and without disabilities. As a result of this, I don’t stress the idea of all games being accessible to all, but rather push to have as many games as possible accessible to more people—aiming not for universal accessibility, but simply for improved accessibility.

I’ve been at industry shows and have been asked why a one-button version of a first person shooter would be fun for anyone since it takes the “aiming” away from the gamer (by using a utility that performs an auto-sweep of screen). You just press the button over and over—how can that be fun? This sort of comment represents a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of fun. Yes, playing with an auto-sweep or auto-aim may not be fun for an FPS expert deeply immersed in the challenge of these games, but these games deliver many other experiences that can be fun (something Chris explored in Step 3). For a gamer with a profound disability, being able to play these kinds of games at all can be fun, and although simply clicking a button to fire may seem like a limited form of play, it’s not wholly unlike the earliest of videogames in its simplicity.

We show work like this at conventions not to show designers that all games should be made this simplistically but rather to demonstrate that they can be modified—whether it’s by the game company or the modding community—to make them more accessible. Taking things to extremes can be useful and fun for some players, even if it doesn’t seem fun for those who prefer to play the game the way the designers intended. This naturally creates some confusion and may make some designers wary about implementing changes in their designs. Game designers should trust that players will not use an option that will remove what’s fun about a particular game for them—but adding a simplified form of the game can support many different kinds of disabled gamers at very little development cost (not to mention those players who are not disabled, but simply not competent at the game!).

Before I move on to the descriptions of disability types, I want to bring up a question that I’m often asked. What game genres are most popular for gamers with hearing impairments or gamers who only have one arm? As is the case with all gamers—with and without disabilities—everyone has different preferences with regard to game genre. Gamers with disabilities have just as varied opinions about which game types are fun for them as do gamers without disabilities. Having a disability doesn’t mean that your preferences are exactly like every other person with a similar disability.

As a result, you can’t assume that including closed captioning in a FPS title is going to mean that everyone with an auditory disability is immediately going to buy a copy. However, it does mean that having it there and letting that potential audience base know it’s there will result in increased purchases from those with auditory disabilities. This will happen firstly because you’ve made your game accessible to gamers with an auditory disability who already enjoy FPS games—as happened with Half-Life 2 (Valve, 2004), which contained closed captioning after a large lobbying effort by deaf gamers. And it will happen secondly because you’ve opened up another opportunity for gamers with auditory disabilities to consider a genre they might previously have ignored because it wasn’t accessible to them.

Visual disabilities relate to problems of sight. Three types of disability exist: blindness, low vision, and color blindness.

Blindness refers to the complete loss of vision that is not correctable even with lenses. Some lights and shadows may be seen, but most experience “total blindness” and in all cases the sense of vision is not enough to rely on even in the most limited situation. It makes all forms of visual feedback in games impossible to use and a blind gamer relies on feedback delivered through other senses; for example, via sound cues or force feedback cues [IGDA04b].

A gamer with low vision may be able to detect motion and may be able to differentiate between images given sufficient magnification. Such players need ways to raise the font sizes (which may then overlap with the game’s other visuals), and may have parts of their visual field occluded such that they can see fairly clearly in spots but not at all in other places.

I’ll talk about “official” statistics later, but one disability that developers rarely think about is one of the largest subtypes—color blindness. This is estimated to affect at least 10% of men (it is much rarer in women) [Saunders07]. Color blindness leads to confusion with regard to certain color schemes. The severity of the condition ranges from total color blindness, meaning the person sees in grayscale, to specific color differentiation problems, where the person may be unable to tell the difference between red and green (the most common variety) or blue and yellow. Depending upon the severity, the user may have difficulty with specific color use in a game, or may be rendered effectively blind. Games that rely upon color differentiation, such as color-matching puzzle games, may become unplayable [Bierre05].

Hearing problems vary between mild hearing difficulty and total deafness. Deafness naturally causes problems with picking up audio cues, and any non-subtitled dialogue will be missed. Music and atmospheric sound design will also be lost, potentially changing the feel of the game [Bierre05].

Hearing difficulties (separate from total hearing loss) may lead to problems too. Although people with hearing difficulties may be able to hear dialogue, they may lose the sounds if music plays while characters are talking. Any given audio cue may be missed due to similar issues, and the increased cognitive demands of having to read on-screen text while looking for signs representing specific audio clues can cause players with hearing difficulties to miss important information that would normally be apparent.

Mobility disabilities include paralysis (via accident, disease, or a birth defect), neurological disorders, repetitive stress injury, and age-related issues. These factors lead to a loss of mobility and steadiness, which may result in the players being unable to press a button rapidly enough, unable to react quickly enough to events on-screen, or unable to use commercial game controllers because of lack of movement in their hands or arms [Bierre05].

In the introduction to this chapter, I described an unbelievable gaming scenario that three roommates without disabilities encounter. However, swap out some of the text and you have the “real-life” scenario of gamers with little or no movement in at least their hands and arms. This could be a person who is quadriplegic or has a disorder that limits arm or hand movement, such as muscular dystrophy. Alternatively, it could be someone who has the use of only one hand and thus cannot use all of the dozens of buttons on a typical videogame controller.

Custom interface devices may be required, ranging from ergonomically designed controllers to ease steadiness problems, to single-switch mechanisms allowing paralyzed users to exert control with, say, small head movements.

Fast action games are unlikely to be enjoyable for users with mobility issues. Other styles of game, such as turn-based games, may be more suitable. Strategy games and classic adventure games (text or point-and-click) effectively wait for the players to instruct them, reducing or eliminating the need for rapid response on the part of the players.

Commercial custom peripherals (such as dance mats, light guns, guitar controllers, and the like) may aid or hinder users with mobility problems. For games of this nature, controller design is a core aspect of the game’s design, and should include the same considerations regarding accessibility as any game.

Problems with cognition are wide in scope, taking into account memory loss, attention deficit disorder (and other learning disabilities), and dyslexia [IGDA04b].

Games can better support users with cognition problems by offering support tools. For instance, weak memory can be countered via in-game automatic note-taking devices (such as journals, self-updating maps, and so on). The effects of dyslexia may be reduced by minimizing the need for reading, by recording dialogue, or by offering symbolic/iconic representations of actions in addition to text. Learning disabilities can be countered via free-access tutorial systems, save-anywhere features, and by the presentation of game material in tight, controlled bursts.

Allow all controls (mouse, keyboard, gamepad) to be remapped to better suit accessible controllers.

Alan, who is quadriplegic, uses a special game controller called a “Quad Controller,” which was introduced at the beginning of this chapter. It allows Alan to play his favorite game titles entirely with his mouth via a series of tubes that he breathes in and out of, depending on the buttons he’s trying to press. There are also levers to move up or down and buttons to press, and movement is controlled via a mouthpiece. He can get through a fair number of games with it, but he is hugely frustrated that hardly any of the videogames he bought let you remap any of the controls. There are times when he’ll start up a game only to find out very quickly that he’s not going to be able to get anywhere in it because he has to press a two-button sequence constantly—requiring him to puff air in one tube and sip air out of another tube at the exact same time—which is entirely impossible...

Remappable controls are still common in PC gaming, but are extremely rare in the world of console gaming. It is not unheard of for a console game to allow full remapping of controls, but it is far more common for games to offer a finite set of predefined control schemes, presumably because this is easier for the Quality Assurance process.

Fully remappable controls allow users to define the game inputs irrespective of the hardware they are using to control the game. Predefined control schemes may not suit specialist interface hardware, of the sort required by users with significant mobility problems, and are thus a barrier to accessibility.

It may be that developers are avoiding remappable controls on consoles because of the problems they produce in QA. This is understandable, but this problem isn’t going to disappear if developers don’t start tackling it. If necessary, we can petition the console manufacturers to provide support for this kind of feature in the tools they supply for development, but this would be easier to achieve if developers joined in the crusade to establish remappable controls as an industry standard.

Add closed captioning for all dialogue and important sound effects.

Maureen, a deaf gamer, can play games in which the sound and dialogue aren’t important to gameplay. But often—far too often—she picks up one of the latest titles to discover that there is an audio cue that she has to hear—otherwise her avatar is going to keep on dying over and over and over until she decides to write the company in disgust. She doesn’t know what’s more annoying—games that have subtitles for some things but not for everything, or games that just don’t even bother.

The vast majority of contemporary games offer subtitles for in-game dialogue, but make no attempt to provide full captioning for other important sound cues. Sound effects, which are vital to a full understanding of the gamespace (as opposed to the representational space of the game), are needed in order to alert deaf players—or even players who choose to play with the sound off, such as commuters playing on a handheld device without headphones.

Note that closed captioning might not be the best solution for certain audio cues, specifically vital cues that occur very regularly. Visual effects that represent the audio cues in question obviously provide the same support for deaf players as well as players of standard hearing, and are usually inexpensive to implement.

Half-Life 2 includes full closed captioning, and is considered a pioneer case. Doom 3 (iD, 2004) has been modded by its technical community to provide a closed captioning function. The mod is called Doom[CC] (Games[CC], 2006) and the project was led by Reid Kimball, a hearing-impaired gamer and game developer (and an IGDA Game Accessibility SIG member!).

Provide documentation in an accessible format (HTML or plain-text).

James, a blind gamer who is an avid player of first person shooters, uses sound cues in the games not only to play the game but also to beat everyone in the neighborhood. He uses a screen-reader—software that “reads aloud” the text on-screen—to read through the game forums on the web for tips, new mods, and so on (some gamers with cognitive disabilities that make reading quickly a nearly impossible task also make use of screen-readers). Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with his console system so he can’t have it read the game text.

He’s often annoyed that he can’t access the game manuals from the company’s website. Sometimes companies will put them online in PDF form, but manuals are so graphics-heavy that his screen-reader fails. He wonders why they just don’t put up a text-only HTML document, or even just a plain-text file so he can listen to them. Half the time he wants to know more about a game directly from the game manual before he considers buying the game so he has a better idea if he’ll be able to play it. Most of the time the manual is inside the game’s DVD box, which he has to break the seal on and then he has a hard, if not impossible, time returning the game. If developers had accessible versions of their manuals available online, it’d probably save him, the game store, and even the company a lot of grief.

Outside of the game itself, documentation needs to be more accessible. The use of screen-readers or even Braille-output devices (an assistive technology solution that produces Braille on a special hardware device so that gamers can read rather than listen to the documentation) by some visually impaired gamers requires some sort of “meeting place” between developers and gamers.

Accessible documentation is especially needed when it comes to “manual heavy” games such as role-playing games and strategy games. A player that cannot use paper manuals needs to be able to refer to the game documentation in easily useable formats. So in addition to paper manuals, documentation supplied as HTML or plain-text allows for a great deal of flexibility.

Provide assist modes (auto-targeting, training options, and so on).

Platform games have always been Mary’s favorite genre but in almost all of the titles she tries, there are several points in the game that will stop her gameplay cold unless she can find someone to take the controller and, say, get past a very tricky series of jumps that require more fine motor skills than her muscular dystrophy allows. This is a pain because it means once she finds someone who agrees to try to help her move past the point where she is stuck (and more often than not she finds a lot of well-meaning but not very skilled volunteers), she has to swap out her accessible controller because, even though she can use it doesn’t mean anyone else is going to have an easy time of it when used to a standard controller!

Mary uses a hacked controller that used to be a fighting stick controller from Japan but is now connected to several “switches” (large single-button pads, not unlike the buttons on the walls at school that open the wheelchair accessible doors, only more colorful). She has an arcade-style playstick on it, and someone has also drilled into the controller and rewired it so that the four main buttons that she uses are each connected to their own switch. It’s cumbersome but it is “function over form” when it comes to gameplay, she always says.

The thing is, it would be nice if some of these companies knew about these specialist controllers because if they did, maybe they would understand why she doesn’t care if it’s “cheating” to call upon some kind of assist mode that would allow her to make the jumps a little more easily. For Mary, she just wants to play and enjoy the game—she has no desire to enter some videogame competition where that would make a difference.

Game design in the 1980s was necessarily challenge-oriented. The zenith of twitch gameplay was to be found in the arcades, an environment that made money by tempting the player to pay to play. Design elements like bosses evolved to provide reward (visually, and in terms of a significant post-boss score boost) while killing the player as often as possible. If a game were easy, skilled players would hog the machine on a single credit, and profits would be impacted.

The role of challenge in mainstream action games began to change when games became playable at home. Although home systems were available throughout the ’80s, the games released for them were heavily inspired by arcade games. As the ’90s progressed from SNES to Play-Station, elements other than challenge became part of the game designer’s remit—for instance, game environments post-1996, the year of Mario 64 (Nintendo), Resident Evil (Capcom), and Tomb Raider (Core Design), attempt to mimic the logic of real-world environments, as opposed to merely providing a game experience. Compare these kinds of games with classic side-scrolling games such as Sonic the Hedgehog (Sonic Team, 1991), which features completely surreal worlds, for instance.

The 2000s brought a new spin, in the idea of games for non-gamers. Players who refer to themselves as gamers (the “hardcore”) generally require a certain degree of challenge, as they are adept at certain game forms—they are game literate and pick up new games very rapidly. New players—those who never played a Mario or a Sonic, let alone Strider (Capcom, 1989) or Cannon Dancer (Mitchell, 1996)—aren’t seeking challenge. Much of this book discusses this broadening of the role of videogames from challenge-oriented Hard Fun games to a multiplicity of roles suitable for different audience types.

Although it is natural to design games of a different style for new audiences, it also makes sense to maximize audience potential for existing game genres by the inclusion of player assistance. It should be noted that, although play-aids may allow players to enjoy games of a given form, they do actually alter the nature of the gameplay—using aids actually changes the game. But as I pointed out in Mary’s scenario—she doesn’t care, she just wants to play and enjoy the game even if she doesn’t play it in the exact same way others do. Should she be prevented from doing so because a small number of gamers are offended by providing the option to “cheat”?

The trend is fortunately in favor of more support for players, as it is becoming undeniable that reaching into the mass market requires these kinds of changes. Driving games, for instance, began to feature braking aids and steering assistance, a trend that led to the active racing line representation of Forza Motorsport (Turn 10 Studios, 2005). This aid can be turned off, but does generate gameplay (playing with the line is effectively a different game experience than playing without the line).

Halo: Combat Evolved (Bungie, 2001) demonstrates a similar principle. It’s a console-based FPS game that employs an auto-aim system to make up for a lack of accuracy in a console twin-stick controller when compared to using a mouse to aim (as with PC-based FPS games, the standard of the form precisely for this reason). The aid works by snapping the player’s aiming reticule to a live target when the reticule nears that target; this stops the players from getting into a feedback loop in fine aiming. This aid is not optional, and forms a crucial component of Halo’s play design: its core play becomes biased against fine aiming, and instead becomes more positional in nature (the relative positions of the players and enemies become more important than the speed of aim).

The trend continues in this direction with each passing year. Alone in the Dark (Eden Games, 2008), although suffering from some flaws in its gameplay design, features an innovative system that allows players to skip any challenge and move onto the next one. The developers were motivated by a desire to make the game more like a DVD experience, with an eye to reaching a wider audience. Although many gamers confessed that it “felt like cheating,” this kind of mechanism is a boon to the many millions of players who struggle with some of the tougher challenges in videogames, effectively allowing them to get past any obstacle.

But the industry can be extremely resistant to these kinds of changes, because of objections like “it’s cheating” or “why would anyone want to play like that?” Chris informs me that just a few years ago a publisher stopped him from including a feature that would allow players to continue to the next challenge after failing because of the objection that, with such a feature, “it wouldn’t even be a game anymore”.

Player aids such as Forza’s racing line and Halo’s auto-aim naturally allow less-skilled players to participate in play, as well as allowing gamers who are using assistive technologies/accessible controllers to play. Alone in the Dark’s “skip” feature allows anyone to see the whole of the game, without any risk of being stuck. But features such as these also change the nature of play: the game might be realized in different ways than those the designers idealized. It takes a certain amount of courage to accept this kind of transformation, especially because the people who make games sometimes feel that the game is theirs. But designers are being paid to make the game, while others are paying to play it. Don’t the people who buy games deserve some influence over what they are buying?

In theory, there is no limit to the amount of aid a player can be given without diminishing the sensation of play, and it is necessary for games designers to continue to develop such mechanisms in order to expand the accessibility of games in general to the widest possible audience (everyone). Problems only emerge in the space of competition. Simulating the same level of competition using different degrees of aid is impossible—as noted—and the use of aids fundamentally alters gameplay. So players in direct competition using different levels of play aid are in fact playing different games against each other. Naturally, this is a problem only if the players have extremely “hardcore” sensibilities, and not for the many gamers who are just enjoying the game experience in their own way.

Provide a broad range of difficulty settings, from incredibly simple to highly challenging.

Troy’s son, Brent, has autism but often enjoys playing a variety of games when the mood strikes. But Brent, who is 10 years old, will often get stuck in spots and will want to move to the next level now. So he screams in what feels like some kind of panic until Frank comes into the room to disarm the situation. Because Brent is only allowed to play games rated “E,” Frank gets frustrated, because even though he’s showed Brent how to set up the game to “easy” mode (it’s part of Brent’s “script” he follows when he plays his games—a script that must be repeated “just so” or there will be trouble), “easy” mode is often far from it for Brent! And Brent won’t allow his dad to take over the controls and help him past the stuck point, so usually the game ends in frustration and tears until Brent can be soothed by something else. Frank wishes that some of these designers would realize that children with disabilities play these games, and that there needs to be some mode that lets them just play through without much difficulty.

The thing is, Troy also likes to play videogames on his new PS3 (Brent has his old PS2), even though he doesn’t have much time to play. He knows that if his friends knew what a “newbie” gamer he was that they would give him complete crap about it. But it’s his system and there are times when he’s exhausted and just wants to blow off some steam. So he wants to just be able to set his games to “amazingly easy” and kill everything on-screen with lightning speed (definitely not an “E” rated game!), except that option rarely exists.

Broadly, there are two aspects to challenge in games, one that may be related to interface, and one that may be related to parametric design. The former, involving the difficulty of mastering the interface of the game (that is, the mechanisms that allow the player and game to communicate, which include the game controls, HUD data, vision modes, audio cues, and so on) can be made easier via player aids, as discussed previously.

Parametric difficulty is based around the qualities of the contents of the world. Games are made up of numbers, such as the health points of an enemy, that enemy’s distance from the player’s gun, and the damage levels inflicted by a direct hit from that gun. These numbers—parametric values—can create difficulty. If the enemy has a million hit points and the gun does one hit point damage per hit, the enemy will take one million hits to kill. If the enemy fights back at all, setting the damage so low will naturally make such a fight rather difficult.

Both types of difficulty must be addressable by players. This is true of all players—they have paid for the game, and so they should expect to be able to play it. Games of Hard Fun, however, thrive on being just slightly harder than players can deal with on their first play; if players can decrease the difficulty, this can be seen as a “cop-out” or “cheating”.

This doesn’t cause problems with a classic difficulty selection system (which involves a player choice before the game begins, usually between easy, normal, and hard modes—although even here players are at the mercy of the developer’s interpretation of these terms). But there is a general assumption within the games industry, possibly still a holdover from challenge-oriented twitch arcade games, that because interface difficulty seems to decrease as the game progresses (because the player gets better at using the game), parametric difficulty must increase. Not only that, but it is often assumed that the overall difficulty at the end of a game should be significantly higher than at the start.

Although part of this fits the idea of Flow you learned about in Step 1, these assumptions can become highly dubious in practice: no one can know in advance how much better an individual player will become from continued play, and without access to this kind of information, it is impossible to know if it is appropriate to increase difficulty.

To maintain full accessibility, game difficulty should be manageable by the players on the fly, at any point in the game. This suggestion may immediately incense any player who is primarily concerned with Hard Fun. If a reasonable strategy to bypass a bottleneck in parametric difficulty is to choose an option from a menu, surely the point of the game is completely diminished! But since such players consider these kinds of changes to be “cheating,” doesn’t this problem become self-limiting? And of course, players who play for any of the many other reasons players play games need not fear this at all.

Videogames that have allowed for flexible difficulty settings throughout the game include Magic and Mayhem (Mythos Games, 1998), Disgaea: Hour of Darkness (Nippon Ichi, 2003), and Oblivion (Bethesda, 2006). Since Oblivion has sold more than 3 million units, as well as scooping up several Game of the Year awards, it can safely be assumed that allowing players to change the difficulty setting at will isn’t a significant barrier to commercial success anymore.

The fact of the matter is that people who work in videogame development routinely misjudge just how difficult their game might be for someone with considerably less game literacy, let alone someone with accessibility issues. There is no need to shy away from making supremely easy difficulty settings, because players seeking a challenge will not choose a setting called “ridiculously easy” or anything of the kind (such players often balk at playing on Normal!). Making the easiest difficulty setting in a game as simple and easy as it could possibly be will benefit a vast number of players, and not just those with disabilities.

Make interface fonts scalable.

Mike can see, technically, but not without special glasses and even then he still needs things to be enlarged. He’d like to play more games—sometimes he does okay with simple games like solitaire where he can take his time—but he hears such great stories about some of the videogame titles on the market. He’d like to try them, but so many of them have so much on the screen and the text is so small that he doesn’t know what’s going on. And he knows he can’t change the font size even though he thinks by this day and age he should be able to. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to try them out so he knows what his friends are talking about.

With the advent of HDTV, it seems to be assumed that tiny text is acceptable in console games, because the quality of the display will make up for it. This is clearly not the case, and many users with impaired vision are unable to comfortably read text from their screen, irrespective of its size and resolution. PC games suffer less from this problem, having a more standard visual display, but text size is still an issue. Where in-game help functions are incorporated, it is imperative that they are easy to use.

According to some game design professionals, having large readable text is even more important in games than in productivity software because of the lack of a standard visual display and the need to read text quickly in order not to interfere with gameplay [Saunders07]. Magnification options would solve this problem. Note that spoken dialogue does not diminish the requirement for legible text; deaf players cannot hear it, and many players prefer not to listen to the spoken dialogue, since reading is generally much faster.

This may be another area where QA concerns are the substantial barrier. Since getting text to display properly on-screen is a problem for most game titles, having scalable fonts represents an even bigger problem—especially when localizing into languages such as German, which often produces incredibly long menu names. This may be another instance where the console manufacturers need to be lobbied to provide supporting tools to developers before any significant progress will be made.

Allow for high-contrast color schemes.

JoAnne’s husband loves a good puzzle, so she is confused as to why he won’t even try to play the games she likes to play. JoAnne is a casual gamer but is obsessed with a wide variety of puzzle games, and she’ll lose track of hours in what seems like no time at all when she’s playing them. But her husband just becomes annoyed when he sees JoAnne playing her games, and tries to distract her by asking her to play board games with him instead. Conversely, she just cannot understand why he finds those games so much more fun than the computer games. She likes both, but right now she’s really into the puzzle games on her computer and she wants to be able to play some of them against him, and compete with him for higher scores.

Seemingly out of nowhere, he agrees to play one game she’s been raving about and she’s thrilled! But what she doesn’t quite understand is why he can’t seem to “get” the game. It’s simple—just match up the different colored boxes. And then it dawns on her... oh... my husband is color blind! It all looks the same to him!

Alternate vision modes could potentially enable a large audience of new players. Color blindness and low vision are not rare conditions—the former affects roughly one in ten men, whereas low vision is harder to quantify (but consider the number of people who wear glasses or contact lenses...). Settings that allow for high-contrast visuals or alternative color schemes can give these players access to a game that would otherwise be impossible for them to play.

One guideline that has been suggested is never to use color contrast as the only way to convey information—so if something has to be red and green, make sure it’s shaped differently or has a distinctly different look to it as well. Games that use power bars often use “green” for full health and “red” for poor health, which can be problematic—but color blind gamers can at least use the length of the power bar as a cue in these instances [Saunders07].

Add audio tags to all significant elements (actors, doors, items, resulting actions, and so on) in true spatial 3D.

According to Jim, who is blind, there are very few audio games out there that are any good. He’d like to play adventure games he hears about on TV but there’s no way for him to know in what direction he’s going. In the “real world,” he can navigate pretty well thanks to his companion dog, but he doesn’t have one that can help him in the virtual world.

Significant elements include doors, items, resulting actions, and so on. Blind players should not be assumed to be experiencing the same game as sighted players, but this does not necessarily mean they are unable to enjoy the game. Non-time-dependent games such as point-and-click adventures (especially those with a significant amount of dialogue) may be enjoyed irrespective of their graphical displays, if audible navigational tools are included. 3D sounds representing directional points—North, Northwest, and so on—can be used, for example.

Chris tells an anecdote that illustrates this point nicely. He worked on several point-and-click adventures while he was with Perfect Entertainment, who made the popular Discworld series (1995 onwards) of point-and-click games. At a convention, he met with a blind girl who was a huge fan of the games. Chris was surprised and amazed that she could play a game that depended to a great degree upon seeing what was on-screen, but she assured him that although it took her a long, long time to make any progress, she could at least play these games, because when you clicked on a tag the game spoke.

Players with visual disabilities are much more patient with videogames than many typical gamers. Because such players are inherently limited as to which games they can play, they are much more likely to tolerate what might, to a sighted player (or game designer), seem intolerable. By providing reasonable audio feedback—and especially if this feedback can be provided in full 3D so such players can orient themselves properly—the door can be opened for many players with visual disabilities to enjoy games that otherwise would be impossible for them to play.

Allow for a varied range of control over play-speed.

Mary has a friend who also uses a similar accessible controller to hers (a larger flight stick and buttons rewired and hooked up to separate larger buttons, or switches). Her friend, who was born with cerebral palsy, finds that most of the time games move too fast for him to enjoy them. He likes to play games but there’s no way he can keep up with what she would consider a reasonable speed (and remember, Mary is the platform game lover with muscular dystrophy) but that’s the lowest speed that the game allows for.

Another aspect of parametric difficulty, the speed at which a game moves (and the relative speeds of entities within that world) is defined by the numerical values that make up that world (as well as the technological limits of the hardware). Users with mobility or cognitive difficulties may wish to experience gameplay at a different pace. Slowing the entire game helps compensate for slow reaction times, difficulty with rapid controller manipulation, cognitive difficulties regarding the processing of visual information, and so forth. Once again, this may feel like “cheating” to some gamers, but access to these kinds of options makes the world of difference for certain players with disabilities.

Some games use relative speed changes as part of their core play design—bullet time, for instance, typically slows both player and enemy movement speed within the game world, but slows enemy speed more greatly. It might be a more difficult proposition for developers to allow players to perform fine-tuning of this nature, if only from an interface perspective.

The exact needs of users can be determined only by testing, however, and the games industry has only scratched the surface of user-solicited difficulty features. At the very least, developers should not assume that the speed they comfortably play at is the only speed at which the game can be enjoyable, or even challenging.

Announce accessibility features on packaging, websites, and forums.

Finally, once you’ve included your first accessibility features—and of course you’ve tested these new changes with gamers who have the disability you are trying to address in your efforts—you need to advertise this fact!

Game packaging is slowly evolving; it is currently normal to include information on boxes regarding suitable age range, number of players, save game requirements, required PC specifications, and so forth. In order for accessibility features (player aids, alternate color schemes, closed captioning, and so on) to be of value to the players who require those features in order to play, it is necessary to inform the players of the existence of those features before they buy the game. This creates a necessity for clear information on the game packaging regarding accessibility options. A useful side effect of such a measure is that it helps legitimize the features themselves, in the minds of players and also in the minds of developers.

A word of caution is perhaps required: don’t just put subtitles into your game (because localization made you do that anyway...) and announce that your game is now 100% accessible to the deaf. Without subtitled cut scenes or having ambient sounds addressed visually or in some other appropriate manner, you may be able to claim your game “contains subtitles,” but you cannot call this closed captioning. Subtitles are only part of the problem—without the rest of the follow-through, you haven’t made your game accessible to deaf players. Too many times a company has made this particular announcement only for it to result in disappointment and a lot of complaints by deaf gamers [Hight08]. It’s okay, you have to start somewhere—I just wanted to remind you that there are always additions to make along the journey to being a more accessible game company.

I recommend you read game forums thoroughly, because gamers with disabilities will often post a specific problem they are having (that’s how Valve got into the closed captioning game!). You can also visit disabled gamer communities such as AbleGamers to read about issues that members of the community may feel more comfortable posting at that site [AbleGamers]. And don’t shy away from using accessibility to promote your own projects! If you learn about any accessibility solutions, say a mod that makes a part of your game more accessible, post it on your own website! It’s good publicity for your game.

Accessibility features are worthwhile only if people find out about them, and it’s up to you to make sure this happens.