Accessibility Best Practices: In-Game Communication

[Music] hi welcome to the gdc summer 2020 session accessibility best practices in game communication i'm karen stevens and i'm ea sports accessibility lead now before i go into detail a general disclaimer this is purely a best practices presentation based on observation experiences and there's no way a promise as to how past present or future games may or may not be made also if you have any questions that are legal related please can you talk to your local legal counsel i'm not a lawyer and i'm not authorized to make any sort of recommendations along those lines so disclaimer out of the way what is accessibility i consider accessibility the correction of a mismatch between a person and their environment this is more than just disability this this includes things like if a tall person can't fit in an

airplane seat well they have an accessibility problem or if a deaf person needs captions in order to follow something that's also an accessibility problem i happen to be deaf so that one's pretty uh near and dear to my heart in general if settings are not accessible then they may as well not exist so for a game such as madden we have added in the concept of a welcome screen this means that as soon as you get into the game as soon as the game boots before it's even fully installed there's a setting screen that lets you turn on all the really important settings for people with disabilities this can include volume control this can include the in-game communication things we'll be talking about today and this allows people to turn on the settings they need before the game even begins and i can tell you from a captioning perspective how important that is because i have sat through many intros and games and not have been able to turn on captioning until well later in the game

and by then i'm lost this is true of all settings it's really really important that they're there from the very beginning and if you're wondering why even have an accessibility menu well it's true that technically all user settings are accessibility settings however especially when it comes to early install not all of those settings will always be available so for the case of madden every setting we considered super important for that type of scenario we had gathered up into the accessibility settings screen now some of those settings are actually in other screens as well such as volume control but this means we can guarantee that those settings are available in a wide variety of places at any given point in time without having to worry about any other technical complication so it greatly simplified the problem for mata in particular fifa this is screen from fifa also has an accessibility screen now we're going to talk a little bit briefly today about the importance of legibility of font and other things for in-game

communication i will say that i gave a gdc talk several years ago about madden accessibility that covers this in great detail and i strongly recommend going back through and watching those presentations because it even concludes how to use this and source code in the actual presentation file so i recommend looking at those for more information because we really don't have time to cover it here but it is a really important topic for madden and many other ea titles we believe in putting the accessibility menu in as many places as possible for here for example is a way to get to it from a pause menu it's important to be able to um for any setting including those for in-game communication being able to get into those settings and as you see here we actually have icons and those eye counselors help those who have trouble reading but can follow icons much easier to be able to easily find those settings so i've already mentioned in-game communication a lot of quite a few times

also it's in the presentation title so you're probably wondering what i mean by that the goal here is to allow players to communicate with one another in accessible way this can include voice chat text chat can chat contextual chat emotes and more navigation is also important because again if you can't get to these settings and use them they're not very helpful so menu narration is one way of handling navigation for people who have different types of vision issues but before i get into any more details since this will come up and there there there's always always a good time to discuss it electrical font legible font is one of the biggest issues we have for accessibility in the game industry at this time i mean i recommend a minimum of 28 pixel tall 3 pixel wide font on a 10 ep screen and that comes from a variety of user research that may seem rather big but if you're talking about the television industry

their minimum font size recommendations on things like captioning is actually 10 is actually 80 pixels tall in this scenario so 28 pixels really isn't very big and we recommend a 4.5 to 1 contrast ratio or better i have i actually have a slide at the very end that links to a tool to find this out but basically this means you have to have enough contrast between your text and your background so it stands out enough so people have the best chance of being able to see it so keep that in mind also recommend for all types of venues including those relating to game communication use sans serif fonts so things without a lot of flourishes examples could be ariel helvetica veron donna and comic sans this presentation is actually in verdana and i can guarantee you that everything on this presentation is 4.5 to 1 contrast or better i highly recommend using these types of fonts comic sans tends to get a bad reputation but really it's a very very good font particularly for dyslexia

those with dyslexia have trouble distinguishing different characters and the way comic sans is made makes it very easy for them to use more so than most actual fonts made for dyslexia so i highly recommend that keep in mind that font is so important in so many places that like the defense industry a lot of places insist on using that font for all business documents simply because it's easy to read so keep that in mind there it is okay to have alternate fonts so if you have a fancy font that fits your game style it's okay to do that but it's highly recommended to have an option to turn that off which i've seen more and more games and that's that's really a great thing um yeah if nobody can read your text then again it's sort of like it may as well not exist so none of us are sitting down and saying let's make games people can't play or let's make menus people can't use so it's important to keep these things in mind resize is recommended however that's not a pass to say you should have super tiny font to begin with i do recommend having larger fonts like

these minimum sizes it's okay to make your resize go smaller but just keep in mind that that shouldn't necessarily be the default when it comes to subtitling you do want to make sure you don't cover the entire screen but at the same point in time for most text it there really is no maximum size so if you make an ok button that fills the entire screen technically speaking that's perfectly fine so you're probably wondering what i'm going to get to the topic of menu narration this means many narration means providing an audible way of navigating menus and game experiences the primary audiences are for people who are blind low vision have cognitive issues sensory processing issues or just those who just in general have issues reading maybe they don't know english or whatever language your game is in these help all those groups one thing to keep in mind is that wording matters now when you're doing menu narration you

have to describe everything that's on the screen in some useful way it's particularly areas that involve navigation this includes things like specifying what the control names are what they do what their current setting is and that's actually the setting current setting is actually really important let's say you're going up to a light switch in a room and that light switch controls a light in a different room if you're turning it on and off if you walk up to a switch it's just a button and it says toggle light switch is the light on is the light off are you turning the light on there's no way to know the same problems exist in games it's important to say what the current setting is and but it's also okay let's say if you have something like a slider to shorten it while you're using the thing so let's say you have you say the beginning you have a slider and the current value set is 50. that's fine let's say you're sliding the slider you don't have to set it every time you can say 5152 that's perfectly acceptable so keep that

in mind it is also important to narrate items that require user action that are not navigable it is recommended to make everything navigateable but if that doesn't fit your needs then it's okay to narrate things at the when the screen first floats so but that's still important to do if you need more examples we'd like more examples beyond what this presentation covers today i highly recommend trying turning on windows narrator if you type in in the start menu narrator you can find out how to turn it on very easily and it will narrate your your pc the way a blind person would be navigating it and i will say that our design teams for everything i showed you today did that if you have an apple then you can use voiceover it's it does the equivalent and in fact even mobile apps have the ability to do screen reading so i recommend turning it on your platform of choice and using that to determine more examples of how you things should

sound because there is there are many different options and more information you have the better choices you'll make so that said let's listen to what pre-recorded menu narration sounds like in a game welcome to nhl 20. for accessibility settings press y your nhl experience i am new to sports gaming this offers simpler controls in gameplay [Music] settings and accessibility press lb rb to navigate accessibility categories visual accessibility color blindness default exproatenopia red week audio accessibility master volume 9. one option to quickly turn off all audio on or off 10. your nhl experience i am new to sports gaming this offers controls nhl 94

two button controls only basic actions available difficulty rookie you are new to the game gameplay presets preset 2 traditional 4 minute periods nhl 20 settings thank you for setting up your hospitality settings you can make changes to these at a later time by visiting the settings screen go back and continue so in case you're wondering this is actually the initial experience for nhl which is why it's called the hospitality screen the hospitality screen and the welcome screen are essentially the same thing now potential benefits of pre-recording your menu narration it's relatively straightforward to add to the game you can add it roughly the way you would add any other sound effect to an option it does sound exactly as intended because it's literally a recorded voice the biggest drawback is that it needs

updating when the menus change if you don't keep them up to date then your narration may not match what is actually going on or you may have gaps and missing audio um so it can be a lot of overhead to have to keep on re-recording things as they get updated over time it also if your game has a lot of menus and you want to narrate them it may require a lot of audio files and i will say if you're wondering what to narrate it makes a lot of sense to be able to narrate to get into the game and also to be able to get to all the settings because those settings do matter for being able to use your game and also be able to modify the way you communicate with other players so keep that in mind that those are both very important now the flip side to pre-recorded menu narration is generated so let's listen to what that sounds like enlarge on field graphics op enlarge on field graphics option is set to off enlarge on field graphics option is set

to on bright voiped mass audio mix option is set to custom audio mix option is set to broadcast in-game commentary set to 100 set to 99 set to 98 depth 1 neymar wilson position qb morale modified morale 50 speed rating 86 acceleration rating 9 agility radio comes r wilson 90 hb you have four options see carson 87 overall is selected are penny 78 overall now the most obvious thing i'm sure you've noticed is it may sound robotic because it is literally a robotic voice on the plus side this actually lends itself to audio speed adjustments if hypothetically you ever wanted to make speed up the audio it's actually designed to be sped up if a blind user is using a pc for

example they typically have the audio set to many times what standard speech is so it's like a super sp fast micro machines commercial that's just how blind users are used to using their pcs so the ability to have that option to put that in your game is is really powerful it also it may not sound that odd to those who are expecting it this tool that we used in madden is called flight and i will have links to it later of course you're welcome to use in your own games it's a third party type tool and this tool is used in many different games so because of that when they heard it the the gamers heard it they're like oh we do use flight didn't you and they totally expected it they accepted what it sounded like it wasn't a problem at all so yes it does sound robotic but that's not necessarily a bad thing so pluses in general no audio files are required

this means that um we can change the menus as many times as we want and it will always be exactly up to date there are no additional recordings of audio required deep ui integration can result in great coverage in madden 20 we literally did this at the low of a level as possible so we narrated a button we married a slider we narrated a table and you saw some of those things in the video and this meant that it wasn't just that one slider we did which is what it would be if we did pre-recorded it was literally every slider in the entire game same thing with button literally every button in the entire game this meant that we have an enormous amount of coverage for this in madden with really not a lot of additional work the original work was put in to be able to get to all the settings for especially accessibility but in general all the settings be able to get into the game and then we saw we were at there and the answer was very very far but then it seemed weird

that things like the depth chart you saw earlier are the also the one where you're listening what the quarterbacks were that's a table and that's not in that critical path but the team is like we've gone this far we have to do this too so that's why so much of madden is done but most of it was not like done as a we must make sure this entire screen is done it was done at the widget level and just huge amounts of the game turned on all at the same time now the drawbacks is that it is more technically challenging to integrate it this way for example you have to actually have make take that text send it to a module that module translates it into audio it sends it back and then you have to play that audio which is simpler than just pushing a button and playing audio i'm sorry it's more complicated than pushing a button and playing audio um so that's important to keep in mind there is processing power required for doing this um in fact the point where if you're

wondering why madden does not have narration like madden 20 does not have many narration while the ball is physically in play it's because there is just not quite enough processing power to be able to handle that at that time so there are technical challenges it is possible to use cloud services and in that case you would actually take the text send it to the cloud the cloud translates it and it sends it back that does reduce the amount of processing power required however it does require transactions and there's latency and you don't necessarily have a lot of control of how long that takes so it's possible that by the time the audio comes back it's not very timely if you do you do use a locally generated tool it will generally be more timely than a cloud also clouds have transaction fees not all but most i've seen do so it's important to keep in mind that every time something is translated it may have a cost

there may be a subscription fee or some other types of uh monetization that you have to take account of so that's also important to know language support may be limited and it varies on tool some tools do more than others english is the most popular but just keep that in mind that what tool you pick may limit what languages you can follow so moving on from menu narration text chap is literally being able to enter text like using a keyboard style interface or literal keyboard and being able to enter it into the screen now the funny thing is i actually had a really hard time getting a picture of a keyboard and text at the same time because most games use system level keyboards and um there are benefits in doing that but it also means if you're using a system level keyboard it doesn't screen capture very well so covering what text chat is um

avoid holding down multiple buttons this is actually true of games in general because you don't know how much dexterity a person has and when you require them to hold something at an angle they may not be able to accurately do that so it's pushing one button at a time or one direction at a time and confirming works much better than just attempting to say yeah hold this over in an angled and hit a and then angle it again it gets harder stay in the game it's important to not require somebody because this is used in a multiplayer scenario to pause the game leave the game to enter not necessarily but pause pause the actual gameplay and enter text that way it should happen while they can still tell what's going on potential window options to make this more friendly may include position size transparency and we will look at that in a minute um chat history and scrolling is also important especially if you have lots of people talking at the same time

you should have some amount of history maybe 100 lines or so that people can scroll back to keyboard narration matters if you're using system level keyboards which is one of the reasons why they're popular they come with menu narration you don't have to add anything it's already directly supported and generally works really well so keep that in mind if you do not use a system keyboard it is important to narrate it yourself and also keep in mind that yes blind people or people who are unable to read may still be using a keyboard that is still a scenario you don't necessarily know why people are using a feature for example i know that text chat is very popular among women because there is a lot of toxicity in the gaming space still and it avoids harassment if they do not voice themselves so that makes synthesized really really popular and speaking about it there's a lot of overlap between text chat and voice chat um because when you're doing doing

accessible communication and you're doing text chat it's important that you narrate the text chat too and we'll talk about how those two overlap um here's an example of voice chat now important things are the icons that show who's talking if somebody is deaf they may not even realize chat is happening so it's important to show that this is the person talking and have some sort of thing here you see a little headset next to my icon i'm i'm f and um that lets people know that i'm talking and that lets people who cannot hear know they have to turn this menu on now for games such as madden voice chat and text chat output the same screen meaning that when you type things in with text in your chat window it shows up on the screen that shows a text history and you can scroll through and see everybody who's talking if i was to talk and somebody had transcription turned on so they had speech-to-text turned on instead of

text-to-speech it would show all of my text in the exact same window it's highly recommended to actually combine those all to the same window so there's only one place someone has to look to see in game communication and from their perspective the perspective of somebody who's deaf um it it is the same information it really doesn't matter where it came from but it was spoken or typed it's the same information now vice versa is also important so not just the ability to capture text but you have to be able to narrate this text too transcribed audio may use text chat for display purposes but narrating that is also an important as an option and you can use cloud software and things to make this happen so in both both ways and i'll cover that a little bit as to what types of services are available for chat transcription but it's not just the transcription it's also the narration of it and you can go back to using that tool let's say it's english for flight that i said

there are other tools out there that support other languages but i do highly recommend that it goes both ways that they're options and they should not be tied to one another anybody should be able to enter text and anybody evil should be able to see anything that was entered and everyone should be able to hear if they want to the text chat and the audible chat now it is perfectly okay to not do all that at the same time to make those separate settings just the important thing to remember is that both of those are important ways of consuming information and both those are ways of producing information speech and um writing so keep that in mind so for an example of what voice chat with transcription sounds like this video is actually muted so i can speak through it and what you see here is a menu in this text window in madden which could be either text or voice input you can't tell because that does not show the screen

keyboard and you can actually change the position and the transparency of this window anywhere you watch so when you go in game you can decide if contrast is more important to you or seeing the game behind it is more important to you so then it becomes a relatively seamless experience where somebody is able to have a chat follow what's going on and still be able to play with somebody else with minimal interruption now another thing that's useful is can chat this is an example from anthem of what can chat may look like in this case it's a wheel it is often the form of a list or a wheel nhl uses a list you often have pre-selected fake phrases and the nice thing about that is that you don't have to type those in it's still important if you have tech the cancer to also support text chat because not everything is covered by cancer phrases can be context-based so for example in football it's okay if offense

and defense have different can phrases available for example as always avoid holding down multiple buttons including sticks and d-pads because it can you don't know what people can do so here's an example of can chat in progress i will say the first half of this video is the ability to um see how it looks when somebody else is using it then the second half of the video is at the examples of it being used helmet here level one cancel that i think this place could use a looting making contact with enemy promise let's move this way i hope you're with me i'm gonna raid this area here too slow gotta hop up here never mind gotta hop up here my eyes on this sector let's go over here go company now the um

interesting thing about apex it actually has a ping system so it's contextualized so you may have noticed there that the cursor is over various objects on the screen and i could say talk about this more or less and it would give information specific to that so an example i gave before of the maybe it's the offense or defense halves of a sports game it could be i'm pointing to this object tell me about it another important thing is the ability to customize this chat so here in apex i should say it is a list of options you can pick from and a list of what you want to see and allows you to add some flavor as to what types of things you want want to say quickly and that really helps if even more beneficial if there is a way to actually enter your own text but considering it's using npc type voices to voice these things that's perfectly fine but um you it's just a way for people to customize

how they want to communicate with others one last thing to talk about is emotes emotes are basically a way of having a gesture to be able to explain um what someone is thinking so maybe a wave and maybe come over here that those are all can all be in the same type of window as we saw before for can chat it's also important to narrate all of those as well because if you can't don't narrate the different options people aren't going to know they're there and how to use them and the whole point here is to make communication as accessible as possible so for an example of what an emote looks like here is a clip from anthem the radio signals so as you see it's a click a quick little emote but it's really helpful just to give another way for people to communicate

now before we wrap this up i am going to push this point again legible font none of these menu options matter if people can't see them it is really really important to have legible font throughout your entire game ideally on a 1080p screen at least 28 pixels tall 3 pixels wide it's ok if it's larger the 4.5 to 1 contrast ratio is also super important along with having simplified fonts and resize when available so just saying that again um if you catch nothing other point remember that so i'm sure you're interested in what tools we're using um for the menu narration that is roboticized it is flight which is the cmuflight.org i recommend pausing this video or going to the slides themselves in order to get this information most of ea's games is using ibm watson for its text-to-speech speech-to-text

and that means it's using it for the taking and transcribing people's voices into text and also it's using it for taking that text and then on it making it audible for specifically in-game communication and having an actual voice conversation so it uses watson both ways i will know that there are other there are other tools out there i know xbox one has some good things built in as does windows 10 so keep in mind there are other tools out there do a little investigation this is just simply what we're using at ea for additional tools i do recommend contrast ratio.com just use a little eyedropper and paint and find out where your values are and this tool takes rgb and it takes hex and it lets you determine if you're at least 4.5 to 1. if you're not i strongly recommend increasing your contrast until you reach it i do have like i said other presentations that cover these things so please look in the gdc vault for more information on ea's titles

ea.com able has lots of information there if you're looking to contact me ea underscore accessible on twitter is the best way if you want to give feedback on games i strongly recommend using the ea.com able accessibility portal we do have more information there for um being able to submit bugs and things and those get in the database and they're extremely hard for us to lose you can also email me at able ea.com but keep in mind that as i pass emails along after a while they kind of get lost in the shuffle so i strongly recommend using the portal whenever possible so thank you so much for coming to the presentation i hope that you have lots of good information you pulled out of it i do have an ask me anything session scheduled for later in the week so feel free to join me there if you wish to ask any questions and thank you again for your time [Music] bye