Resources for game developers
SIG guidelines, top 10, poster, and more
The production of 2004 white paper that kicked off the SIG in earnest contained an initial set of guidelines for how games could be adapted to enable access.
These went on to be separated out and fleshed out into a free online resource, and updated in 2010. These initial guidelines are archived here.
At the same time the SIG was exploring other means of communicating accessibility needs and solutions to developers, in particular in a smaller more digestible format for people just starting out. This was particularly important in the landscape of the time where most developers had no knowledge or experience of accessibility.
The first effort towards this was a condensed top ten, produced in 2005. In 2010 this top ten was updated in collaboration with UK game accessibility charity SpecialEffect, and refreshed again in 2015 in conjunction with the Film Victoria work mentioend below. These three sets of top tens are archived here. It was refreshed again in in 2021 – the current SIG top ten is available here.
Another effort was to communicate a condensed form of the initial guidelines through a game accessibility poster, a collaborative effort between the SIG, GCCIS, game-accessibility.com and UA-Games. It was initially produced for Future Play in 2007 but also used at GDC and made publicly available through the SIG website. This was refreshed in 2020, resulting in a set of five posters.
In 2011 the SIG was brought in by Film Victoria to establish accessibility guidelines for their funding programme to support the local Australian games industry, based on the SIG’s top ten. The guidelines were updated in 2015, with a refresh of which guidelines were included and more detailed guidance on implementation.
In 2012 a team comprised primarily of SIG members launched a resource to address the issues of existing materials usually being either to too short to be useful or so detailed that they overwhelm. This was in the form of a free website – www.gameaccessibilityguidelines.com. The site is a living document, regularly updated since to reflect new technologies, new practices, and new examples of good practice.
In 2019 two resources were produced to help developers understand the CVAA legislation that the industry now fell under – both a brief CVAA summary, and a more in depth CVAA guide.
2021 saw the production of an accessibility quotes screensaver, a collection of gamer and developer quotes about accessibility collated from the break slides at the various GAconf events.