Game Accessibility - Strategies For Improving Accessibility

Strategies For Improving Accessibility

There have been several attempts at composing a set of game accessibility guidelines similar to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. 2012 has seen three major launches, Best Practices in Video Games in April 2012 by CEAPAT, Game Accessibility Guidelines in September 2012 by a group of developers, specialists and academics, and Includification, also in September 2012, by AbleGamers.

Previously of note the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Special Interest Group on Game Accessibility proposed 19 accessibility guidelines in 2004, which were derived from a survey of 20 accessible games. The majority of the games surveyed include games for the visually impaired, and several support motor or hearing impaired gamers. The Norwegian Medialt organization published a set of 34 game accessibility guidelines on their website, based on the 19 IGDA game accessibility SIG guidelines as well as their own set of guidelines.

Based on the three different types of accessibility barriers, accessibility strategies can be classified into higher level accessibility strategies

• Hearing impairment and Visual Impairment
  • Enhance Stimuli: for example, high contrast color scheme, increased font size, color blind friendly color scheme and zoom options.
  • Replace Stimuli: for example, subtitles or closed captioning, audio cues, sonification, speech synthesis or haptic cues.
• Motor Impairments
  • Replace Input: for example, support for direct voice input or a brain-computer interface.
  • Reduce Input: for example, switch access scanning and remove or automate inputs.
• Cognitive impairment
  • Reduce Stimuli: for example, limit the number of game objects, or simply the storyline.
  • Reduce Time Constraints: for example, slow down the game.
  • Reduce Input: for example, remove or automate inputs that needs to be provided