When you think of a stereotypical gamer, the first person that pops into your head probably isn’t blind, deaf, or missing any fingers. Even so, a quick search on Youtube will bring up several videos of people finding a way around their disabilities in order to enjoy the hobby they love. There are plenty of hurdles in their way, though—and plenty of ways developers can make gaming easier for them. Game accessibility for everyone is difficult to achieve, since making exceptions for a minority of disabled gamers could mean ruining it for the majority. However, there are a few simple ways to make gaming enjoyable without drastically changing the game. Here are five of them.
5) Remappable Controls
Whether dealing with a motion impairment or just plain lack of mobility, some people only have a select amount of buttons to work with. When a game requires you to press five buttons at once, all across the controller, the task becomes very difficult for them (bordering on impossible). Making a game that has one button and one directional input is one way to deal with that, but it also undermines the whole point of a complex controller. Making buttons remappable allows those with motion disabilities to choose where to put their keys and those without to play normally.
4) Voice Input
Voice input is something which benefits a huge amount of people—including those with vision loss and motor disabilities. Since voice input often takes a huge amount of development time, most games that feature it only do so lightly or optionally. Perhaps you can chat or give orders to your teammates, perhaps you can browse through a menu—but you’ll rarely see a game where actually useful controls, such as regular buttons, have a voice input control option.
3) Stereo Sound
Well, here we have it. The single most useful accessibility feature to a blind person (other than #2, of course). Stereo sound allows players to locate enemies and friends alike, identify barriers in the world map, and track distant enemies. To someone who can only ‘see’ with sound, the better the stereo system, the easier the game will be for them to play. However, stereo sound should also be an option—those with hearing impediments in one ear but not the other will find stereo sound to actually be detrimental to their gameplay!
2) Text to Speech
The single most difficult thing on the list, text to speech is another way to assist the blind. Voice acting can help tons when it comes to cut scenes, but as soon as they are over, gamers have to deal with menus. The huge amount of menus and submenus in role-play games are difficult to memorize, so text-to-speech is a huge benefit for those with visual loss who want to enjoy a classic genre.
1) Subtitles for Voice and Sound Effects
Luckily, subtitles are a common feature in today’s gaming world. However, subtitles with sounds included are still a rare sight. While sound effects can certainly help immerse a gamer in the world, they also help them locate enemies, traps, items, and locations—if a deaf person was playing a game and needed to detect any of these things, they would be out of luck even with subtitles on. This is simple for game developers to add in, so hopefully we will see more of these as time goes on.
“3) Stereo Sound”
When was the last time you encountered a game WITHOUT stereo sound!? I would expect nothing less than 5.1 surround in any game I buy today.
“The single most difficult thing on the list, text to speech […]”
Text-to-speech is not difficult at all. We’ve had this technology since the 1980’s, running on the 7MHz Amiga 500 home computers. Voice input is much more difficult to do than text-to-speech.
Martin – yes, but it’s more the second part of her point that’s important, being able to switch to mono.
While text to speech has been around for a long time, the tricky part is making your game compatible with it. Games on IOS are a great example, lots of screenreader accessible games there, but it’s highly dependent on game mechanic, for most games it’s not possible.
And voice input depends entirely on how it is implemented. A simple volume threshold (search for ‘gnilley’ on youtube) doesn’t give you many options but it is easier to implement and more accessible. Increasing that to distinguishing between a small number of fixed words is much harder to implement, and less accessible for people with impaired speech. Trying to recognise complex input is much more difficult again, and much less accessible.
Everything in game accessibility boils down to two things – reinforcing how information is communicated, and offering flexibility in play style. So if you bear the second one in mind, and offer voice as an option and not the sole control method, you avoid the problems it causes for people with impaired speech.
The example of chatting to your team-mates is something a bit different, being thrown out of online team games is a huge issue for people with impaired speech or hearing. Simple solution, offer fexibility, as Halo Reach did with its ‘chattiness’ matchmaking preference.
Sadly ironic for the Kinect to be the feature image for this article as that’s one of the worst culprits for exclusion thanks to it ignoring the flexibility principle – although incredible for some players with disabilities who don’t have the fine motor skills to easily use a controller but do have good gross motor skills, it completely excludes many others, due to so many games being Kinect exclusive (thanks in no small part from pressure from MS)
In general Martin although Sarah is absolutely correct in saying that these five things are all helpful features for disabled gamers, you are right about the easy/hard thing not being quite right.
The only things here really that are easy to implement are remapping and stereo, even adding in full closed captions (ie. including environmental sounds) rather than simple subtitles can get very tricky when you’re dealing with lots of sounds going on at the same time, especially bearing in mind that people with impaired hearing can have a lower reading age than the general population due to ASL rather than English being their first language, so need more time to read subtitles/captions.
A top 5 of the simplest and widest reaching considerations would look something like –
– Remapping
– Avoiding using colour alone to convey information
– Subtitles, for key information rather than full captioning
– Decently formatted text (size, contrast, typeface)
– Avoiding putting text on a timer (ie. press a button to close the message instead of it disappearing after a couple of seconds)
Implement them and you’ll have made your game more accessible to some of the biggest groups.. motor, hearing, mild-moderate visual, colour-blind and cognitive (14% of American adults have a reading age of grade 5 or lower)
There are lots of other things that are relatively simple to implement, apply across most game mechanics and benefit huge numbers of gamers. For some more see the “basic” section here:
http://www.gameaccessibilityguidelines.com
And also Sarah all I’m really talking about is minor niggles on difficulty to implement, it’s a great piece and if any developer implements any of the items on your list they’ll make a real difference to their players.