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Implement Accessibility into your game

A topic by marcelojrs created Apr 30, 2024 Views: 904 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 5

Hello, I am a software engineer in the last semester of my college, and I am doing some research on accessibility in games for my final year project, while doing research I ended up here on itch.io and played a bunch of different games, and noticed most of them don't have much accessible features or a accessible mode for players with disbailities could enjoy their game

So here I wanted to discuss with other players and developers about this, what you guys think of accessibility? if you are interested in implementing in your game, you can reach out to me and we can talk more about it!

You could think about creating a "Accessible Games Jam". Explane what disabilities you are aiming for and what are potential accessibility features. You could aim for new games with accessible features, or making existing games more accessible, or both ...

I think there are a lot of developers on itch that are willing to try out something new. But I think that it is important that you give some guidance: For the current project I am working on I have no idea how to make it more accessable (except for color-blind mode).

That´s a good Idea, will be studying on doing this Games Jam, would be interesting.

But on this post here I am willing to help anyone on making games more accessible, if you want I can help you on your own game, will charge nothing for it, just for the experience and the opportunity to add this to my project on university.

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oh neat, a topic about accessibility in gaming!

While not every game can be made accessible for every disability, developers should keep disabled gamers in mind. To shut out a potential playerbase is rude and frankly ableist. We want to play your games, too! I have bad vision and extended wrist movement hurts like hell, so as a rule avoid hyperrealistic games because the vast majority have no accessibility features, to "avoid breaking immersion". Red Dead Redemption's shitty, barely visible collectable flicker my beloathed.

I'm no coder, but here's a list of ways to make a game accessible to players:

TEXT

  • color coded text to show which character says what
  • options for white text on a dark background as well as dark text on a white background
  • text scaling options
  • text/textbox contrast and color options
  • make sure your chosen font is readable! 

VISUALS

  • control screen tilt and shake in a game, as it can cause motion sickness in players
  • control level or turn off flashing and strobing lights, as this can cause migranes, seizures and death if a player goes into shock
  • color filter over characters
  • glow around quest items
  • mark targets
  • counter around collectibles, showing how many items you have taken vs the total available amount
  • control over brightness/contrast/gamma

MECHANICS

  • aim assist
  • auto walk/run toggle
  • auto move to quest/marker/npc

AUDIO

  • audio controls for background fx/music/talking/weapon noise
  • noise to alert player arriving in quest area, near npc or quest item
  • noise that gets louder or softer depending how close or far player is from target

OTHER

  • change button input for controls
  • input to pause/freeze singleplayer game, so player can take a break
  • allow for alternate controllers. Not everyone can use a traditional keyboard or console controller, and many companies are selling custom input controllers for disabled players
  • get rid of microtransactions. It is so easy to sink thousands of dollars into a game by saying "oh its just 2 bucks" every time something new and shiny is shown off, and for us with poor impulse control it is hell.
  • do not put mechanics or game modes behind a paywall. same as above

I do not really know what counts as accessibilty features. How would a painter make an oil painting accessible to a blind person? Making a dexterity based game with hand eye coordination being "accessible" to someone impaired in those areas, how would that even work? It would be a new game. A text and dialoge centered game can have voice, but if the story happens in pictures, that's tough. I would say, making this "accessible" is not merely a feature, it is an adaption with editorial work. I know movies/tv shows that do have such an audio track with descriptions of the important visuals along with the dialoge.

Anyway, I like your list. Most of those should be in games for all people. It is quality of life features, not specialised accessibility features. But most of them can be used to make a game more accessible, if someone would prefer a setting not out of preference, but out of necessity. Like keybindings that require both hands. Or even simple things like wasd with index on f vs. wasd with index on d. All people want configuration choices for their input devices.

As said below, a lot of this could be done on engine level, so developers that use that engine do not need to implement it anew every time. Third party tools can only do so much, and while keybindings are trivial, a color blind mode is not.

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I think this site is not good for it because  it's mostly it can be devs producing games in jams, where the time limit means there's little time for accessibility implementation.

And in a way, that's part of the problem - that it's so time-consuming that devs often can't do it. There need to be better ways for devs to feel able to support a11y, extra tools for engines and the like. It's unfortunate that in some cases I'm seeing the engines themselves not providing key features.

What I would love to see for game jams is that after the submission deadline, there's some way for devs to add in missing a11y features. But when devs are more practiced with it, they would probably be able to do it as they went because they would know the implementation patterns. Particularly where in some cases, the a11y feature is actually the absence of a game mechanic, or is a handy feature for testing, and hence feature-flagging those mechanics straight away means you only need to provide the mechanism to set the flag. I would love to see more discussion about good practice like this.

https://itch.io/games/in-jam 352k

https://itch.io/games/exclude-jam 782k

I would not say that it is mostly devs doing jams here, what with twice the games not being in a jam.

With most games using some sort of engine, the accessibility features should be done at engine level. A single developer has neither the time nor the expertise to develop these things every time. Same as a dev would not implement a save mechanic for a renpy game. It comes with the engine. You do not want to have each developer coming up with their own clever way of saving.

Also, most devs will not have the capability to even test out their accessibility features. They cannot even test the game for different platforms. How does one test a color blind mode, if one is not colorblind?

Hi @redonihunter. Thanks for the correction about jams vs games on this site.

Your discussion of how to make games accessible when their core mechanic relies on ability is interesting. If you did provide options that "nerfed" your gameplay, does that stop someone enjoying the experience of playing it? I actually don't know. You the developer not cannot easily make judgements on the enjoyment that someone may get from playing it. But at least they can experience the game in some way. Take your example of a blind person and an oil painting or visual-based game. The accessibility is being able to give the person a description of it so that they have at least some frame of reference in which to understand it or talk about it with others. They're not left out. With my latest game, despite being a timer-based game, able people were asking for a slower or non-timed experience. Ability may not even come into it!

Of course there are problems if you bring people of different abilities together in some way, like high score tables or multiplayer, but there can be mitigations. But as you say, they take time and effort, which is difficult for the small developer. We do what we can, but it's important that we try to do it.

There are tools for checking some of these things. Colour blindness, contrast levels and text sizes/clarity can all be assessed just from screenshots with simulator tools. Designers usually have studied this a lot so that they avoid problems right from the start before it becomes expensive to correct. You'll often hear things like taking a mobile-first approach, because it's deemed to be one of the lowest common denominators with the simplest kinds of interaction and smallest screen real-estate. 

This site is worth a read, just for awareness of things, https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/.

It is less about nerfing than being a different game.

Every game is a challenge, else it would not be a game. It might be called a game by association of the medium used and there is overlap. But I do not consider a kinetic visual novel or a walking simulator to be games. Maybe there are better words to differentiate between the two concepts. You can experience a kinetic novel, but you cannot play it. It has no gameplay, not even decisions. It has no concept of difficulty level or balancing. No competition.

If you make a game accessible by changing the difficulty, you need a new balancing to make the game interesting at that level of difficulty. The worst a game can be, is boring. So if a game is only accessible to someone by playing on the easiest setting, it still needs to provide entertainment. If the entertainment is looking at pretty pictures and listening to a story, ok.

But if gets boring due to this, there is nothing gained by making it accessible. It would be like translating a joke in a different language, where the humor would no longer work. Now it is accessible, but it ain't fun anymore.

Other types of accessibility improvements would only overcome limitations. Like high contrast. You can present the same puzzle to everyone, and elimination of unintended meta difficulty does not change the puzzle. But put an outline around hidden objects in a hidden object game, and it is no hidden object game. You might still make the game "accessible", but it will be a different game.

Same for the non game example of a painting. Sure, you can have a description. But that is a different experience. And it takes a different skill set to create a good description.

Playing a "game" can be about having an experience. But "beating" a game is also a thing.

Regarding your example with the timed mechanism. People have preferences. Those include game mechanics. Like turn based vs. real time. Trying to do both is efficivly twice the work in balancing to give a fun gameplay.

So I am all for the qol features mentioned above that can benefit everyone, so there is a strong argument to have those in the engines for easy usage. But accessibility on the game mechanic design level, maybe even for competitive multiplayer games ... tough. It is nice where possible, but it also hampers creativity if you do lowest common denominator. There is a place for such games, but some people like to play Dark Souls and they also deserve to have games tailored to them.