By Mark Barlet
Steve Spohn
Universal design is a wonderful practice for most areas of digital media. Thanks to champions like the W3C and individuals like Kel Smith, the best practices for compliant digital content are well known, and in most cases, now baked into most development frameworks. As the Web continues to evolve, designers are challenged to remember that blind and low-vision users need additional accessibility. Thankfully, adding this technology is relatively easy; almost every coder knows how to include font size changeability in the CSS and the necessary tags to allow screen readers access to the content.
When it comes to websites, the battle is not can it be done, but why is it not being done. For the most part, a standard content-driven website has little excuse for remaining outside the reach of people with disabilities. Due to the fine work of groups and individuals like those mentioned above, a developer can only feign ignorance or laziness in most cases when challenged on the missing accessibility features in his or her content.
With one area of digital space largely conquered by tools and know how (the Web), let's take a look at one of the largest growth sectors in technology: video games, which have also been one of the biggest drivers in consumer computing for the past 20 years.
To understand the challenges, we need to first break down what makes this industry thrive. Modern video games are built on a mix of gameplay and storyline, all wrapped up in as stunning a visual layer of eye candy that technology can provide and money can buy. From the first line of code to the packaging the game comes in, the visual layer is what defines the video game industry. Given the visual nature of video games (video game process/video games sales strategy), the application of best practices on this industry, especially when addressing the needs of the blind, is an incredibly daunting task, if not outright impossible.
Adding to this already complicated issue is the addition of real-time gaming in massively multiplayer environments. More and more video games are no longer stand-alone experiences like those in days past, but include a rich online component. This online portion can exclude gamers with disabilities who are challenged by processing and reacting in real time. The mainstream gaming public has little tolerance for less than peak performance.
For the mainstream gaming markets, the best practices of universal design cannot be applied. At the moment, the technology is not there, not only from the tools perspective, but from the adaptive technology prospective as well. Frankly, the technology may never exist to make every video game compliant in the same way Section 508 guarantees accessibility on the Web. Lastly, given the massive complexity of today's games, the cost-benefit analysis for true total inclusion will never translate to profitable proposition for the backers of a project, and therefore it is a nonstarter.
New Approach 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.
Achieving the Broadest Audience
Using technology and best practices that exist today, such as captioning, changeable font sizes, and mouse sensitivity settings, every mainstream game can accommodate well over half of gamers with disabilities. While most games use some of these best practices, sadly only about 15% of the mainstream titles released in 2010 took advantage of all of these technologically available improvements.
The best practices that can be employed and are technologically feasible fall into one of three categories: captioning, controlling, and visual tuning.
Captioning
Most people know what captioning is: streaming the vocal and ambient sound into text or other visual formats that can be consumed by people with auditory disabilities. This is one area where content producers do the most captioning, but not for the reasons you think.
In a conversation just a few months ago, one game tester at Microsoft Studios told Mark why many games his studio produces have captioning. He explained that a large percentage of the audience who plays the titles he is working on are in the 24-to-34-year-old range, and these households often have young children.
“Nothing would cause issue in the house faster than a video game waking up the baby,” he went on to say. They add captioning so that the game can be played with no sound. This is why deaf gamers find so many titles with captioning: not because the game company thought about deaf gamers, but because no one wants to wake the baby.
Controlling
The second available best practice is Control. Controlling a game is a critical part of playing it. This is sometimes referred to as “remappable” commands. This feature is imperative to gamers with motion impairments. Remappable commands allow motion-impaired gamers to have easier access to any game.
The ability to move frequently used functions to buttons more accessible to a gamer makes the game more comfortable and increases the joy of playing. Unfortunately, developers have mostly abandoned reconfigurable controls in favor of pre-set configurations. Many games offer two to three of these configurations but not the ability to assign any function to any button, which can be the difference between a gamer being included or excluded. The reason for this trend? Tighter budgets, tighter timelines, and more focus on that all-important eye candy.
Visual Tuning
The last best practice falls into the visual enhancement area. Colorblind options allow those with the inability to differentiate between certain colors to change the color for something they can more easily recognize. In fact, many developers are beginning to incorporate colorblind features because of how common colorblindness is.
Paul Barnett, creative director of EA Mythic, refines his game's color schemes with a fine-toothed comb because he is colorblind and understands the frustration poorly designed color schemes can present. The option to change important gameplay objectives to various colors can be added at any stage of development. Other visual accessibility accommodations that can be employed, if the developer chooses, are resizable text and high-contrast settings.
It is because of the work of organizations like the AbleGamers Foundation that the demand for these features is on the rise. These organizations work with content producers to make sure that as many of the above features as possible are included, making a game support as many people with various disabilities as possible. They also help identify where each game falls on the spectrum so that disabled gamers can make informed purchases. Every mainstream game naturally includes some accessibility, whether the developers know it or not.
An Example of How to Do a Game Right
Dragon Age: Origins is an extremely well-thought-out and very profitable title that included accessibility early in the development process, when it was the cheapest and most feasible to include. Dragon Age for the PC features full subtitles, multiple alternative controls, diverse color schemes, a “click-to-move” interface, the ability to pause the game at any time, and auto-save features. The latter features accommodate the cognitively disabled, such as gamers with autism, learning disabilities, and difficulty focusing. The ability to pause the game and to continue interacting, issuing commands at your own pace, and observing the game's environment gives those who have trouble with the fast-paced nature of most video games the chance to play at their own speed.
But even when a game like Dragon Age sets the bar extremely high, some gamers will still be left out. That is where the second goal of this alternative to universal design comes in: making sure that there are games for every person who wants to play.
Luckily, most of the major gaming platforms have created avenues that allow for independent game developers to create content. Great titles, such as In the Pit (a game that uses only audio), or Star Trigon (a game that can be played with a single switch), are able to enter a market space that was out of reach a few years ago. While these games are almost never a commercial breakaway hit, the low cost of development and publishing allows for specialty developers to work on including these smaller audiences with very special needs without the pressure of making huge profit margins. This is the second part of the alternative to universal design—making sure that the entire spectrum of players has games that they can play.
Game accessibility will not always be a profitable endeavor. However, there are 100 million gamers with disabilities worldwide, many of whom have disposable cash for things like entertainment and who shy away from video games because of the possibility of being literally unable to play the game they just bought.
Thankfully, there are websites dedicated to helping mitigate these problems by testing games for their accessibility and reporting the findings to the disabled community. Pressing content developers to include the easy-to-implement accessible features outlined above will bring more people into the market, and this will encourage greater research and development (R&D) into some of the more technologically challenging areas, benefiting even more disabled gamers as gaming continues to advance.
While it is currently impossible to apply universal design practices to the entire video game space, industry leaders are working to make mainstream titles accessible to as many as possible, and they are also fostering the growth of the independent market to fill the gaps the mainstream gaming community cannot. Developers simply need to be aware that adding accessibility is the right thing to do, even though it won't always bring a large profit boost.
Mark Barlet (mark@ablegamers.com) is the president and co-founder of the AbleGamers Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing greater accessibility in the digital entertainment sector and to supporting the development of technology that aids the enjoyment of gaming. Himself a disabled veteran, Mark's lifelong mission is to bring greater access to technology for people with disabilities.
Steve Spohn (steve@ablegamers.com) is the editor of AbleGamers.com, the largest community for gamers with disabilities. Steve was born with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a form of Muscular Dystrophy that has left him with very limited mobility. Steve has, due to personal life experience, become an expert in game accessibility and enjoys a rich social life through gaming.
