Encourage consideration of broader accessibility guidelines
Although wide scale fixed accessibility requirements are neither realistic or desirable for the reasons stated here, platform holders are still in a strong position to encourage their uptake, particularly with first party studios.
This could be approached in a number of ways:
- A general recommendation or requirement that best practices (either internal, such as the BBC’s guidelines, or public, such as gameaccessibilityguidelines.com) should be considered, and implemented wherever reasonably possible
- Simple awareness raising that these best practices exist
- Providing advice on accessibility workflow and processes
- Requiring accessibility information as part of certification submissions process. A proven model is to ask if accessibility is being considered, if the answer is yes, ask in which ways, and if no, ask for the reasons why not. This, combined with examples of the kind of features considered, has been both effective and well received by developers as part of the Film Victoria funding programme
Film Victoria’s accessibility criteria as part of their submissions process