An exciting month in accessibility

Accessibility in gaming is never a dull field to be working in, the pace of change is ever accelerating. So often I find myself thinking what an incredible month it has been, topping anything that has gone before. The past month - mid May to mid June - has been no exception.

Game UX Summit

So first of all the inaugural Game UX summit on May 12^th/13^th, organised by Celia Hodent of Epic Games. A day of conference talks in Durham followed by a day of masterclasses at Epic HQ down the road in Cary. Myself and Josh Straub of DAGERS were invited, I was due to do a talk during the conference, and Josh to do one during the workshops. The invite itself was a big deal for fan-boy reasons, sharing a line-up with the legendary Don Norman. I’d highly recommend his Design Of Everyday Things book, which should be required reading for anyone doing any kind of design in any industry.

Octogenarian UX visionary Donald Norman exploring play at Epic HQ

I’m going to go a little off-piste now, but bear with me, I am going somewhere with it. I work across a few different industries, as a UX designer as well as an accessibility specialist, and elsewhere I’ve been a bit jaded with UX. I’ve often come across other UX designers who are solidly focused on the X at the expense of the U. Walking the walk and talking the talk, but ultimately more driven by defining novel interactions than representing the users.

So because of this (and other reasons too) accessibility in other tech sectors can often be regarded by otehr disciplines as being a technical issue, an inconvenience to be left for programmers to worry about. But developers can’t magically turn inaccessible designs into something accessible, which means that UX can end up being a blocker to accessibility.

But it shouldn’t - can’t - be like that. The U in UX / UR stands for ‘User’. User eXperience, User Research. It does not stand for ‘certain proportion of users who don’t currently happen to have any kind of impairment’.

Accessibility is something that all disciplines make a difference to, but UX is the one where it is literally written into your job title, where through expert reviews, recruitment profiles and especially through sharing video footage of sessions amongst colleagues you can make a really incredible difference both to individual games and to the level of accessibility maturity across the organisation.

It’s not all bad by any means. There are many many excellent truly user focused UX designers and user researchers, but coming across 'UX' colleagues outside of gamedev who are actively opposed to the needs and goals of some of the people they're supposed to be representing can be pretty demoralising.

So how is any of this relevant to the Game UX summit?

The summit was a very big deal for me. Seeing it the way it should be. I've done just coming up on 60 conference talks now, and following this talk I had more people approach me over the course of those two days than I have had from any other in the past. And all had the same attitude and mindset... People who understand, care, and see how it fits perfectly into their discipline. UXers who care about their whole audience. Excited to learn about ways to give a better experience to more of that audience. The response to Josh’s talk was no different. And it wasn't just the delegates either, Epic were paying close attention over the course of the two days.. always fantastic to see more big players taking an interest in accessibility.

Josh Straub speaking at Epic HQ

So aside from the usual awareness raising and so on that comes from speaking, the summit also excised some personal demons for me. My experiences there were certainly something that gave me great hope for the future.

If you have the opportunity to work with her either in-house or publisher level user researchers, ask them about accessibility, they’ll be able to make a big difference.

GAAD

Following on from the Game UX summit was Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a worldwide event aimed at raising awareness and understanding across all industries. As part of that I took part in a 24 hour stream of accessibility talks called Inclusive Design 24. ID24 runs every year and has never had a gaming talk before, but this year they had three – as well as mine they also had Bryce Johnson from XBox on platform level accessibility functionality, and Naughty Dog/Sony on accessibility in Uncharted 4.

There were also a number of other nice articles, talks and so on taking place throughout GAAD from people like Turtle Rock, MeepleLikeUs, AbleGamers and OneSwitch, which I’ve written about separately, and I've also shared some of my favourite quotes from throughout the 24 hours.

Games

Naughty Dog/Sony’s ID24 talk was tied in with the announcement of a raft of motor accessibility features in Uncharted 4, which came about initially through collaboration with an accessibility consultant, and furthered by user research sessions with motor-impaired gamers.

But the features don’t end there. There’s also a fair bit of accidental accessibility, in the form of unlockable bonus modes. Thief vision, chalk dust, slow motion, bullet time – all great for reducing vision and motor barriers. Thief vision in particular has generated a fair bit of excitement amongst legally blind (defined as significant impact on life but can still have some residual vision) gamers. Combined with the targeting assist and bullet time modes, Uncharted 4 could quite easily be the most accessible game of its genre for low vision gamers.

And hot on the heels of that, the launch of Overwatch. Another hugely popular game, again with fantastic accessibility consideration. Some of through options, such as detailed and separate remapping profiles available for each individual character. I’ve seen lots of heartfelt stories now about the difference that remapping has made, stories such as this one, from a gamer with cerebral palsy. And some simply through design, from the outstanding audio design to the huge variety in classes. The difference in playstyles between the classes allows access by a huge variety of players, all able to fill a valuable role on the team according to their own abilities. If you can’t handle the dexterity requirements of leaping around between rooftops, leave that to someone else, and play a valuable role as Bastion.

And although not released, we’ve also had the announcement of a slew of vision-focused accessibility considerations coming in Madden 17.

The above examples are the games that have been getting the major press coverage for their accessibility efforts, but were great things being done elsewhere too, from Doom’s wayfinding assistance and timer-free text to Battleborn’s configurable team colours and extensive array of motor accessibility options.

Games considering these kind of things isn’t something new, indies and AAAs alike have been including individual features like these for years. But to have all of this hitting at the same time is big, and for them all to be such highly rated big name games is even bigger again, they can’t fail to have an influence on the industry, on other games that follow them. We’ve seen it before, strange now to look back and think that as recently as 2014 colourblindness was a rare enough consideration to be big news, all it took was a first couple of big name AAAs to get that of media coverage for awareness to raise, for it to move from rare to commonplace, approaching standard.

Xbox@E3

Next came E3. A key part of Microsoft’s E3 announcements were unprecedented commitments to accessibility –