Advocacy Organisations
To raise awareness within the game industry of the importance of making games accessible, in recent years several advocacy organizations and groups have been formed.
In 2003, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) introduced the Game Accessibility Special Interest Group, founded by Thomas Westin and currently chaired by Michelle Hinn. In 2006, the Bartiméus Accessibility foundation initiated the Game Accessibility project, a project which focuses on creating awareness and providing information for game developers, researchers and gamers with disabilities, led by Richard Van Tol. These two major groups work together as advocates within the game industry for increasing the accessibility of video games for gamers with disabilities.
In 2004 two disabled gamers, Mark Barlet and Stephanie Walker, founded AbleGamers.com, set out to further advance game accessibility in the AAA gaming space. Some of their efforts include: pressuring NCSoft to remove Game Guard from the game Aion and discussing with game developer Blizzard the addition of color blind friendly enhancements to the game World of Warcraft. In 2009 AbleGamers.com started 501(c)(3) nonprofit The AbleGamers Foundation to facilitate their work.
In 2010 the Accessible GameBase was launched by the charity SpecialEffect. This site aims to develop (and is developing) a welcoming, all-encompassing gaming community. This, alongside outreach projects such as accessible gaming roadshows and the development of a significant accessible gaming database, will see positive change.
Despite these, and many other initiatives, the situation is far from perfect: Many game developers are still very much unaware of game accessibility. Developers who acknowledge the importance of game accessibility and want to use it in their designs often don't know how to do so. Games developed in research-projects usually consist of small demos ("proofs of concept") which lack the quality and (re)playability of mainstream games. This is usually also the case with games that have been developed by the small companies and hobbyists. Knowledge about accessible game design that is gained in projects often failed to get documented. Overall, there are too little resources available on the subject.
Read more about this topic: Game Accessibility