For Developers & Researchers
Collection of articles, resources, papers and guidelines
There is a mountain of great material on game accessibility available online, increasing all of the time. Navigating it can be intimidating, so we have compiled a list of a few of our favourites (in no particular order).
If you think any other sites that should be on here, please get in touch!
Guidelines & guidance
IGDA-GASIG top ten
Ten considerations that make a significant difference to gamers with disabilities
Game Accessibility Guidelines
A straightforward developer friendly reference for ways to avoid unnecessarily excluding players, and ensure that games are just as fun for as wide a range of people as possible.
Accessible Player Experiences (AbleGamers)
22 design patterns aimed at enabling studios to think holistically about disability and the barriers that prevent some players from participating.
Xbox Accessibility Guidelines
A set of best practices that have been developed in partnership with industry experts and members of the gaming and disability community, intended to generate ideas, as guardrails when developing their game and as a checklist for validating accessibility of titles.
Understanding Function to Design for Disabilities (Microsoft)
A reference to provide engineers and designers a way to understand and discuss the aspects of function that can lead to barriers in interaction, and the facilitators needed to overcome these barriers.
Accessible Video Game Design
Create better designed games with these comprehensive guidelines that feature classic design principles combined with modern accessibility standards.
Accessible Gaming Wishlist (SpecialEffect)
Make a start with designing your games for accessibility! To include even just one item from each list would be a wonderful start.
How to do subtitles well – basics and good practices
Top 3 basic fundamentals and top 10 general good practices, well established principles both from within gaming and from other related industries.
Buenas prácticas de accesibilidad en videojuegos (CEAPAT)
Extensive compilation of 250 pages of experiences and studies carried out in Spain on the accessibility of videogames.
Schell Games accessibility matrix
Document to allow developers to brainstorm, research, and implement accessibility features in their game and streamline their approach to limit scope creep, wasted time, and major expenses
Training
Gaming Accessibility Fundamentals Learning Path (free)
A free training course from Xbox on how development of gaming experiences can be approached through the lens of disability and accessibility.
CIPT Workshops (paid)
Can I Play That? Workshops provides accessibility focused workshops and guides. For Disabled Gamers, By Disabled Gamers.
APX Practitioner Course (paid)
Two-day, online training on using Accessible Player Experiences during the game development process.
Videos
GAconf archives
All talks from our conferences are made freely available on YouTube.
Designing for Disability
Extensive tutorial series by Mark Brown of Game Makers’ Toolkit
Gaming Accessibility
Series of animated game accessibility shorts from Microsoft
One Minute Accessibility Tips
Short accessibility tips from specialists and advocates, curated by Many Cats Studios
Articles
- Why Game Accessibility Matters (Richard Moss)
- What It’s Like To Play Games When You’re Colorblind (Cameron Gidari)
- The Physical Glass Ceiling: When the Git Gud Mentality Turns Ableist (Holly Green & Steve Spohn)
- Blind Games – The Next Battleground In Accessibility (Richard Moss)
- Games have basic, huge accessibility problems (that we celebrate) (Daniel Starkey)
- Making Video Games Accessible: Business Justifications and Design Considerations (Microsoft)
- Game Accessibility: An Epic Primer (Ben Lewis-Evans)
- Potent Kindness: The Quest to Teach Games Accessibility Effectively (Cherry Thompson)
- VR & Accessibility (Ian Hamilton)
- Postmortem: Greater accessibility through audio in Killer Instinct (Zachary Quarles)
- Every last bottle cap: How my OCD turned collectibles from distraction to obsession (Holly Green)
- The deaf gamers making gaming more accessible (Anthony McGlynn)
- Why The Very Hard ‘Celeste’ is Perfectly Fine With You Breaking Its Rules (Patrick Klepek)
- The Ins and Outs of Video Game Subtitling: An Interview (Max Deryagin)
- Visually Impaired Video Gamer (Amy Kavanagh)
- The Fun of Inaccessibility (Michael Heron)
- Blind Accessibility – Step One: Get to know your players (Adriane Kuzminski)
- What it’s like gaming with chronic pain, and why I fear the future (Joe Parlock)
- Celeste and Dead Cells: two philosophies of accessibility (Oliver Balaam)
- Accessibility Features Are Not Cheating (Lizzy Lynn Garcia)
- Breaking Down the Wall of Exclusion (Jon Porter & Kat Holmes)
- Deaf accessibility in video games (Morgan Baker)
- Disability and Video games: in 2020, accessibility is no longer an option (FR) (Merry)
- How accessibility consultants are building a more inclusive video game industry behind the scenes (Grant Stoner)
Academic papers
- Designing Universally Accessible Games (Grammenos, Savidis, Stephanidis)
- Characteristics and Motivations of Players with Disabilities in
Digital Games (Beeston, Power, Cairns, Barlet) - Game Accessibility – A Survey (Yuan, Folmer, Harris)
- Game Accessibility for the Blind: Current Overview and the Potential Application of Audio Description as the Way Forward (Mangiron, Zhang)
- Creating Wheelchair-Controlled Video Games: Challenges and Opportunities when Involving Young People with Mobility Impairments and Game Design Experts (Gerling, Linehan, Kirman, Kalyn, Evans, Hicks)
- VibEd: A Prototyping Tool for Haptic Game Interfaces (Nordvall, Arvola, Boström, Danielsson, Overkamp)
- SeeingVR: A Set of Tools to Make Virtual Reality More Accessible to People with Low Vision (Zhao, Cutrell, Holz, Morris, Ofek, Wilson)
- Game Accessibility Evaluation Methods: A Literature Survey (Fortes, Salgado, Sandos, Amaral, Silva)
- Playing Blind: Revealing the World of Gamers with Visual Impairment (Andrade, Rogerson, Waycott, Baker, Vetere)
- Making the mainstream accessible: redefining the game (Atkinson, Gucukoglu, Machin, Lawrence)
- Evaluation and Redesign of a Curriculum Framework for Education About Game Accessibility (Westin, Dupire)
- Enabled Players: the value of accessible digital games (Cairns, Power, Barlet, Haynes, Kaufman, Beeston)
Again this is just a list to get you started, not a literature review. For full academic referencing on the above and a much more extensive set of papers on game accessibility see the IGDA GASIG Zotero list.
If you have any other papers that you would like to add to the Zotero list please email thomasw@dsv.su.se.
Tools
Unity
UI Accessibility Plugin (free)
Make your UI accessible to blind and visually impaired players with only a few clicks.
SInput (donation)
Sinput is an input wrapper for Unity made primarily for keyboard, mouse, & gamepad input, with a focus on making it easy for developers to make more accessible games
Click to bind (free)
A free and lightweight solution for remapping in Unity.
Simple SRT (free)
A simple parser to display subtitles stored in standard SRT timecoded format
Q! Subtitles (paid)
A simple yet powerful subtitle system for Unity projects.
Accessibility: Text resizing (free)
A one-click four step lightweight solution to add in this key accessibility feature. It’ll take you less than 15 minutes.
ReadSpeaker (paid – currently in closed beta, contact Tom DiPietropolo for access)
Unity plugin version of the text to speech solution used in The Last Of Us 2. Launches 1st June.
Dyslektek(paid)
Quick and easy text to speech for dyslexic players.
Responsive Spatial Audio for Immersive Gaming (free)
A Unity plug-in to help developers build accessibility for gamers without sight into 3D game environments.
SeeingVR Toolkit (free)
A set of 14 tools for Unity that enhance a VR application for people with low vision by providing visual and audio augmentations
VR Tunnelling Pro (free)
VR comfort solution for Unity 5.6+. It can be dropped in to almost any project for plug-and-play comfort options, based on grid and periphery shrinking while moving & turning.
Accessibility self assessment tool (free)
This simple tools adds a new window into Unity that allows you to self assess how accessible your game is.
Unreal
Yellow Subs Machine(paid)
Customisable subtitles solution for Unreal Engine 4. Covers as many legal & best-practice recommendations as possible, and player-requested features such as toggleable speaker color, displaying the speaker’s tone of voice, and more.
ReadSpeaker (paid – closed beta starts 1st June, contact Tom DiPietropolo for access)
Unity plugin version of the text to speech solution used in The Last Of Us 2. Launches 1st July.
Menu Input Remapping, Graphic, Audio & Gameplay (paid)
Fully functioning settings menu, including remapping and UI scaling
Accessible Realities (free)
Unreal plugin to make video games and XR accessible for people who are blind or have low vision
Other
Color Oracle
Takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.
Color Contrast Analyser (CCA)
TPGi’s free color contrast checker tool that allows you to easily determine the contrast ratio of two colors simply using an eyedrop tool.
PlayFab Parties
Cross-platform multiplayer networking and in-game chat, including text-to-speech and speech-to-text
Developers image credit – Ubisoft