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

SpecialEffect DevKit
A resource created by SpecialEffect for game developers who are looking to improve the motor accessibility of their game.

Xbox Playbook for Accessible Gaming Events
extensive documentation on how to make events accessible

Rebellion accessibility test brief
Format for a practice assessment for students & aspiring specialists to gain experience and portfolio material

Xbox Accessibility Workshop Toolkit
Resources on how to carry out accessibility workshops

Gamescom stand accessibility regulations + recommendations
Mandatory guidance on how to make booths wheelchair accessible, optional guidance on a range of other booth accessibility considerations

RNIB Devkit
Guidelines on making mainstream games blind-accessible

Rovio inclusive design playbook
Inclusivity guide including chapter on mobile accessibility

VR Gaming Accessibility Recommendations
Guidelines and examples focussed on motor accessibility

Gaming Accessibility Fundamentals Learning Path (Microsoft) (free)
A free training course from Xbox on how development of gaming experiences can be approached through the lens of disability and accessibility.

Introduction to Accessibility (Unreal) (free)
1 hour practical course on creating more accessible games with Unreal.

Practical Game Accessibility (Unity) (free)
A practical introduction to Unity accessibility for intermediate creators. As you complete it, you’ll choose a game to create and work on making that game as accessible as possible.

Advancing Accessibility (Player Research) (paid)
Training courses and guest lectures for gamedev professionals. From ‘Accessibility 101‘ to advanced topics including development strategy and budgeting, for a general audience.

Video Game Accessibility (AbilityNet) (paid)
A deep dive into how to make video games more accessible.

GAconf archives
All talks from our conferences are made freely available on YouTube.

Lived Experience
Playlist of GAconf talks by disabled people talking about their own lived experience

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

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.

Apple Unity accessibility plugin (free)
The Apple Unity Plug-Ins expose a selection of Apple platform frameworks to Unity developers.

Readspeaker (paid)
ReadSpeaker AI offers a market-ready TTS plugin for Unity and Unreal Engine

Unreal

IRIS epilepsy testing plugin (free)
IRIS is a solution created by EA to identify video footage that could potentially cause photosensitive epileptic risks.

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

Readspeaker (paid)
ReadSpeaker AI offers a market-ready TTS plugin for Unity and Unreal Engine

Game Maker Studio

Tolk for GMS (free)
adds support for multiple screenreaders to Game Maker Studio

Godot

NVDA extension for Godot (free)
A simple GDExtension that integrates the NVDA screen reader with Godot

Other

Fonttik
Fonttik is a console application and library created by EA that processes images and videos highlighting text that meets and does not meet desired criteria. The guidelines checked by Fonttik ensure text has a minimum size relative to screen resolution or DPI and that it has sufficient luminance contrast against its background.

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

• 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)
• Audio description in video games? Persons with visual disabilities weigh in, (María Eugenia Larreina-Morales & Carme Mangiron)
• Mathematics and Sign Language Learning With a Tangible Game: An Inclusive Approach for DHH and Hearing Children, (Cátia Casimiro, José Carlos Neves & Carla Sousa)
• Evaluating Accessible Navigation for Blind People in Virtual Environments, (Manuel Piçarra, André Rodrigues, & João Guerreiro)
• Surveyor: Facilitating Discovery Within Video Games for Blind and Low Vision Players (Vishnu Nair et al)
• Detecting Discrepancies between Subtitles and Audio in Gameplay Videos with EchoTest (Ian Gauk et al)
• Representation of Invisible Disability: Exploring the Lived Experience of Teenagers with ADHD to Inform Game Design (Kathrin Gerling et al)
• “I may only be able to sit through 30 minutes”: Gaming Sickness and Its Impact on Players’ Experiences With Games (Anna Chen et al)
• Playing on Hard Mode: Accessibility, Difficulty and Joy in Video Game Adoption for Gamers with Disabilities (Jesse J Martinez et al)

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.

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.

• 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)
• Guest Editorial: Life As A Disabled Gamer (Andrew Monkelban)
• 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)
• DualSense’s haptics need to find the right balance of immersion and functionality (Ben Bayliss)
• How Disabled ‘Elden Ring’ Players Conquered The Lands Between (Grant Stoner)
• Consent And Compassion: How Devs Are Reshaping The Conversation Around Content Warnings (Claire Jackson)
• Speech Accessibility in Multiplayer and Co-op as a Person Who Stutters (Patrycja Polowczyk)
• Why Gaming Is So Important to Players With Chronic Pain  (Geoffrey Bunting)
• “Danger Dumplings”: How Arachnophobia Inspired a New Type of Gaming Innovation (Grant Stoner)
• Why games need a thriving third-party accessibility scene (Geoffrey Bunting)
• How Accessible Hardware Bridges the Gap Between Individuals and Options (Grant Stoner)
• Playing Pokémon By Ear (Stephen Totilo)
• Xbox at Gamescom (Antonio Martinez)
• A Prominent Accessibility Advocate Worked With Studios and Inspired Change. But She Never Actually Existed (Grant Stoner)