Recommendations to Studios
I have a number of recommendations based on my findings and various discussions that will hopefully help those in the UK.
- Contact: Make it easy for those with accessibility concerns, regardless of disability, to contact you and respond with clear indications of what you plan to do with the information (do not just copy and paste a generic PR message). Generic PR messages can turn people off of your company in terms of watching for any future accessibility developments in your products.
- Selling Points: Use accessibility features as a selling point. The day I can buy a game without worrying about the price vs accessibility problem, I will be all the happier to purchase your products in future.
- Publicity: Publicise your accessibility features pre-release as soon as they are implemented and approved for the final game. Doing this enables GWS to rest easy knowing that the game will have features that will assuredly make their playing experience less painful.
- Communication: If your company infrastructure or issues from higher authorities prevent you from implementing accessibility features, let your target audience know what’s going on.
- Testing with the demographic: Get testers with disabilities, particularly GWS in this case who are aware of mainstream gaming practices and accessibility to test your products. Getting direct in-person feedback is invaluable, as points can be put across far more effectively than over a remote connection.
- Test worldwide: Equally though, remote connections can be very effective in communicating issues with accessibility, so if the testers you want cannot come to you, allow them to play your product remotely to get their feedback.
- Wider pre-release access: Instead of just getting popular YouTubers who do not have any accessibility experience to create pre-release content for your games, involve those mainstream GWS who are willing to help and get them to record pre-release game footage for distribution to a wider sighted audience as well.
- Simulation testing: When testing your game or product, try unpacking and using it or playing it where applicable, blindfolded. With a competitive game or game mode, a test like this can change the atmosphere and make for an entertaining competition. In a co-operative experience, it can allow for fixable cracks to show in time to be rectified. With products, it can allow for discovery of where, for instance, an unboxing process might be overcomplicated, or where the product could use additional accessibility features such as voice prompts or a manual that uses plain text instead of numerous pictures for explanations of features.
- Multiple resources: Even if you can implement full narrated menus and in-game UI elements with the MSSA, release your menus beforehand as a plain HTML file so that GWS, if they have no sighted assistance (particularly to turn on accessibility options or adjust music to better hear the game) can do so with relative ease.
Are there any issues with implementing these recommendations in the UK and if so, how might they be solved?
Most of these recommendations for testing and getting accessibility to the forefront of the game development process are pretty straightforward. However, there is an issue with promotion of accessibility in the UK. Specifically, an absence of accessible, easy to get to conventions for those without sight to meet and interact with studios in an environment where their feedback is appreciated and can be discussed directly.
In the US, there are E3, the Game Developer’s Conference (with the Game Accessibility Conference as an event around the same time) and the Evolution Fighting Game Championship (Evo), to name a few events where such opportunities would be fairly easy to come by if you have the money and the sighted assistance to get to the locations.
From my research, there are far fewer scenarios where such opportunities are open to GWS in the UK (though conventions like EGX do exist to showcase what seem to be smaller, independently developed titles for the most part). This could be remedied, I believe, through studios working together so that larger, higher profile games, not just independant developers, can feature in presentations in the UK, allowing for wider audience feedback and constructive criticism on accessibility.
Working with companies like Microsoft and other developers who have offices in the UK in a variety of areas around the country would potentially provide enough accessible areas that GWS who wished to could travel there with sighted assistance if needed.
These areas could host, for instance, accessibility-centric tournaments (such as the Halo tournaments held in Microsoft stores in the US), allowing for sighted players and GWS to go head-to-head in an environment where accessibility might not even be thought about, let alone discussed and reflected on.
Continuing on the theme of conventions, an often overlooked hurdle is that even if you can attend, you will not necessarily know where the items or exhibitors you want to see are located, even if you have sighted assistance as a GWS. The solution to such a problem would be to have staff on-hand to assist those with disabilities, not just those with no sight, to help them through the registration process as well as directing them to the various booths and areas. Such considerations could reduce the strain on those attending conventions and allow for a far more pleasant experience in which accessibility for GWS can be discussed as an open topic.
Other than where games are presented and how accessible these presentations are, whether they are at conventions or not, there is a further barrier. Legislation. In the UK, there’s no equivalent to the CVAA, mentioned earlier in this report, which attempts to force platforms to make their systems more accessible. However, as has also already been highlighted, some companies have found a way to circumvent the ideals of the CVAA. The UK equivalent is the Equalities Act (link to full text) which, unfortunately, only governs the supply of goods and services, but not the goods themselves according to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau.