Accessibility Best Practices: Mobility Considerations

[Music] hi i'm karen stevens ea's director of accessibility in my presentation today is accessibility best practices mobility considerations this is for gdc summer of 2021. i strongly advocate for accessible presentation templates as accessible as possible so yes i used my own in this case but um this is for gdc 2021 summer now accessibility really matters to me and especially mobility too i have problems with my own hands so i have tendonitis in my wrists and thumbs especially thumbs i have carpal tunnel syndrome and i have centralized nerve damage you put that all together and it's really hard for me to use a lot of games so a lot of what i'm going to talk about today is actually personal observations of things i've had to deal with deal with myself um but this also covers a wider variety

of things that i know others encounter and it's just an overall thing you'll notice a lot of personal notes in this talk just simply because of my issues with my hands so let's go to a few statistics before we get rolling uh this is all from the u.s center disease control so if people who have if you talk about all ages about one in five people have a permanent disability when you get to 18 plus you're at one and four by around retirement age it's two and five by the time you're in your mid seventies it's one and two and statistically speaking the majority of people will be permanently disabled before they die it's just a numbers fact so it's important to try to consider how do we keep people gaming and how do we have as many people be able to game as possible inclusion really matters there is a wide variety of devices out there that help different needs for example you could have an eye

gaze technology which is what the upper left image is where it shows the screen if people they can use their eyes sort of like a mouse um and that allows them to play some games like i know sims 4 can be played that way and you might have vr like the psvr and may have motion sensors and things you could be using a mouse and keyboard or you could be using something like the switch controls that have two different pieces there might be one piece like the xbox elite controller but they have buttons on the bottom there might be a touch screen involved it might be something like the xbox accessibility controller which has a lot of different devices that can be attached to it all of those are super helpful the more things you have and the more ways there is to interact with games the more likely it is there's a combination that will help a person however it's not a magic bullet you still need to consider the games itself because these devices alone is not enough you

have to actually design for accessibility it's not just a device thing so one nice thing i love seeing is that more console games now support keyboard and mice from the get go that is wonderful every time you would allow a different type of device and make it a or type of thing this means that more people can play your game um some people may have easier time using a mouse and people may have an easier time using the sticks it varies by the person and what type of mobility issues they may have or just even their preference now one thing i really love seeing even better than the hello master chief collection's uh preferred device is minecraft has a full keyboard gameplay this means it's keyboard only support so in addition to saying you have mouse and keyboard or controller you also have

keyboard every time you get rid of the and in a device you open doors because some people may be able to use it in other ways um so it's important to try to have as many of those different type of individualized options as possible now when we talk about devices and trying to figure out um what type of inputs and how to deal with inputs dead zones were traditionally exist so if a controller has a tweak on their stick their character may drift so to keep the sticks from drifting you have a dead zone saying that if it's within this area of the controller ignore the input now having this be custom helps people with mobility issues too because it allows them to say by a pan jitter or something it allows them to go through and say okay so i only want to worry about the edges ignore any time my hand shakes i just care if it's full throttle or nothing this lets them be more able to do this

at the same point in time uh this is borderlands 3 screen the this game allows axis dead zones that means that if you have something where you want to bias it so up down left right on a stick is is most of it and diagonals are most like nord they're shifted to the edge it allows you to do that so if you just want to be able to look up and down or left and right and you keep having your controller drift in various ways this gives you more options to do that and i love that that exists analog sensitivity fits multiple means it needs to be faster for those who have trouble with large motions but it needs to be slower for those who lack dexterity to handle small motions so you put that together it's important for sensitivity to both go up and down now some people may have more issues where i accidentally keep looking up and down and i don't want to so being able to set like horizontal and

vertical separately is important even better is to have this on every single axis and for the screenshot here it's portal 2. single sticks i love single sticks um stretching my hands out on a controller hurts um the more i have to stretch the harder it is so only needing one stick means that it gives my right hand a break and my right hand needs as many breaks as possible so diablo 3 i played hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of hours and the main reason being it has one stick you don't have a camera stick you just have one stick most games that i played for hundreds of hours i have noticed have one stick um in addition to this i also have it configured so i don't have to use as many buttons as possible so i can avoid the triggers it's hard for me to stretch so i'm basically most of the time using

one stick a and b and yes it's true that not all builds work great for this but plenty do where i can finish the season and it's not about being the most ultimate number one gamer it's about having an experience it's so important to allow experiences i can play this game with my friends with no problems and i absolutely love that now stick the thing's important too and this is a halo master chief collection screen stick flipping means that if you're left-handed it probably helps and that's probably the reason why most people think about stick clipping but for someone like me one hand is harder to use than the other it varies by day as to which one of my hands is a harder time so being able to move things around and figure out where the sensitivity matters makes it way way easier for people with

mobility issues to play the game so i recommend making things as configurable as possible and stick flipping is great now another thing is toggle versus hold versus button mashing versus quicktime events and this is jedi ball and ordering here you have um you can disable button measures in quicktime events quick time events are usually a wall for me i cannot hit buttons very quickly and if it's using the bumpers and triggers and the face buttons i am going to have a problem especially if it involves bumpers and triggers um because my hands just do not do that that motion very well so the fact you can turn all off is amazing i love it so much um you can also turn off things like if you hold out a and there's like a little you know uh meter to say that you really want to do something you can turn that off and just hit a button the longer i

hold buttons down the more likely my hands are going to be fatigued so the fact that there is a way to turn that off really really matters they also have lots of auto motion like auto walk on target um and auto grip on wall and i'll tell you i probably would not be able to make the jump as you see in the screen here where i'm jumping onto a fence and having to grab the fence having a headed button to jump and then hit a button to hit the fence is probably not going to happen so the fact it's an automatic motion as soon as i touch the fence i cling that's great that lets me be able to play otherwise i would probably just keep falling and falling and falling like i did when i tried to take the screenshot with the character in air it's really hard for me to take screenshots and play it at the same time so i'm really glad these auto motions exist now auto aim is another thing that matters um this is great for a wide variety of

people but when it comes to mobility issues it means that i know if i just hit this button i don't have to try to make a stick to pick something and in case you notice my whole thing is about not having to use sticks very much i have problems um but this means i don't have to use that if i see that there's like this little blue cone this is an nhl20 um if i see i'm within that blue cone that means i'm good and that means that i can just hit a single button and it goes much much better than it would otherwise now i know in this particular screenshot i'm not looking at the actual goal again i have trouble taking screenshots and actually playing the games at the same time i actually did all these captures myself so on my home xbox auto jump any auto anything is wonderful

auto jump with minecraft means most of minecraft is only a one block jump anyway this means that instead of jumping every single time i want to go up one block i just keep moving the controller forward and it just keeps going that is great so i uh i strongly recommend um allowing as many different auto features as you possibly can auto grab auto jump auto open something auto anything the more auto you have the better another thing that matters and this is dragon ball fighter z you wouldn't think you know mobility issues and fighter games vic can work dragon ball fighterz is has a great single player mode and i bought the game specifically for the single player mode and it's really the only fighting game that i have a really easy time relatively speaking playing because

you know it says 26 hits you've got this wonderful combo going as it shows on the screen i think i probably only hit three or four buttons um there are combos in terms of having to do complicated sequences you don't actually have to use them and because of that that means i can only hit a few buttons and it does all this wonderful things it's true that those moves may be slightly weaker but at the same point in time the game allows grinding of levels and story mode which means that even if i'm not doing as much power i will eventually be able to beat it anyway and it's all about having an experience so one nice thing about this game is that it's custom you can fully customize what button does what and it lets you pick certain button combinations like heavy medium attacks of sort of things and it lets you assign one button to multiple button presses anytime i have to hit less buttons it's a win the fact that it originally none of

those double buttons are alias you have to do that yourself you can even alias the menu button so i have the menu button doing something that i think is supposed to be a tapping event i don't know i've never actually been able to do a tapping event my answer do that um but this means that i was able to use some combos just because they're hitting multiple buttons at once and i was able to play the story mode and i had a wonderful time it's true that i probably won't do well in multiplayer because i can't do all the fancy things but at the same point time i still had a wonderful time with single player i bought it knowing of that and it was great you know anytime somebody has an experience even if it's not the ideal experience that's still a win ideal is wonderful too but an experience is really really important it may actually not be that hard to do reduce button modes um this is fifa 20. i believe um

the it has the ability well it has the ability to reduce the number of buttons you play and i think if the two button mode was introduced around 19 or 20 i'm becoming a little vague on what was released when but i do know that actually it was probably released to 19. in 20 they added in like we have the two button modes you have less options to do but then they have in 20 they added in the one button mode this means you just need one stick and one button that's it and that's so similar someone's using an xbox accessibility controller and they have a rudder control attached to it so they're using a foot to move one stick and they have one giant button they're using their arm on that's enough to play fifa that's great this is exactly the type of experience we want people to be having um it's really important to be able to say i can't play

and it's okay if it's not the same for everyone it doesn't matter it's about having an experience now optional haptic feedback is important to me in particular because it makes my hands go numb the more vibrations there are to a device um the harder time i'm going to have playing so it's really important to me to be able to turn that off when i was playing cf solitude as you see here i the menu the main menu has to control your vibrations and i'm like no my hands are already going numb but i immediately went to the menu and i was able to turn it off the thing is it actually had multiple levels of it so i could say i want maximum controller vibrations or i can say i just want the things that are really important and all the you know environmental stuff i don't care as much or i can say none i immediately said none but i really deeply appreciate that they had multiple levels and i also would love to see things like

really vibrations could have tracks like audio has tracks so like when you have environmental sounds and you have uh music things or special effects you could do the same thing with haptic and the fact that you can turn on and off things is wonderful because that means that if it's something that cues in on like oh there's a special key in the room i might still be able to feel that um but at the same point in time i don't necessarily need to hit every single time a bomb drops i don't need my controller vibrating so i love the fact that these exist helps so much provide as many difficulty options as possible easy mode is okay and really easy varies for everyone when it's easy for one person could be impossible for someone else we should not be policing experiences the most important point is to have an experience

this is celeste celeste is known to be hard to play and one of the first things i did is that i set the game to half speed going okay this should be enough maybe i don't need infinite stamina visibility but that least means that when i have this fast moving jumps i might be able to react in time i will say that that was absolutely not true oh my god this game is so hard so fast and i kept jumping and blowing up because as soon as you touch a spike you are dead unless you turn on invulnerability at that point you touch the spikes you're not instantly dead and you can figure out so what am i supposed to do now and you don't have to start the whole screen over it is wonderful that either way you only have to redo a screen but overall um i didn't think i was going to need this and it turns out i very desperately did um and that meant that i played now if i didn't have those options i would have hit a wall very very early that i would not have been able to get past at that point i've only played a

couple percentage points of the game so this means that i can play and experience the majority of the game and story and that's what really matters is having an experience friendly fire now to avoid dragging my friends gamer texans the screen capture of diablo 3 is technically single player however the visualization still applies when i'm playing as a wizard fire is everywhere literal fire is everywhere this means that it's difficult to avoid hitting other people and if diablo allowed friendly fire i think everybody would have a hard time playing it together um so it's wonderful that it doesn't but that type of behavior is true for pretty much any game because i am not going to be trying to attack friendly targets however my hands are terrible so if i'm trying to shoot and somebody

gets in the way or whatever or my hand drifts a little bit or whatever um i'm probably gonna hit friendly targets and i really don't want to shoot my friends that's really not the goal here so i greatly appreciate what option success to turn it off or if it's just not there in the first place like it is with diablo um yeah i love this game so much i love games in general i've played the majority of the games we have here and then some um how much i play varies on my hands and i'm very careful about it but i am a very much a hardcore gamer can chat means less typing so when you're playing with your friends friendly fire is not the only thing that matters communication matters too now can chat's wonderful for so many reasons it means that i don't have to do extensive typing but i can still get the point across it's great for localization and the same playing with somebody who speaks a different language i send a

message they get it in their own language it's great it um it's also great because it um means you don't need a mic you can just pick a number but you know pick whatever you want and what i really really love this is apex legends what i really love the most about apex legends is that you can specify what your quips or okay can shot is i like i prefer friendly messages and like hi how are you doing everything's great you know great game and i can do that and i can pick all positive friendly sounding messages and still have a persona in the game and it's all done to your can chat i absolutely adore this now i will say one thing this is skyrim which i recently rediscovered again starting by playing this and realizing it was re-released i didn't realize it was released now i get to get the achievements all over again so i'm having a great deal of fun um

well one thing i love about the elder scrolls series in particular safes they have saves you can have save as much as you want in so many different ways in skyrim it allows you to save when you're about to go to sleep in the game you can save if you're just like you there's an option to wait so you can just let time pass so if you're waiting for a store to open you don't have to wait game speed you can just jump ahead you can save on fast traveling between locations automatically and you can pick how long you want save periods to happen if you just sing out the character menu and walk away for a while as that goes game goes oh in this case here i said for 15 minutes 15 minutes has gone by and it's like i should probably save just in case nothing happens type of thing and the nice thing about all this you can have as many save slots as you want hard drive without withstanding but i mean i have hundreds um at this point i'm on safe slot thousand something but i i do reuse them i don't have literally that many but i do have

quite a few um i love the fact that the auto saves are all their own slots too that's fantastic that means if if i do forget to say before i do something then i luckily an autosave will be close enough um i save a lot i am terrible at jumping jumping i am terrible at anything that requires dexterity so if i'm going to jump or if i'm going to try to do something and i know it's very likely i'm probably going to fall over and just die from a fall i will say first um this is i love the fact it lets me do this and if i make a mistake like that i can just go back to my previous safe and that's great so next thing another thing that elder scrolls skyrim lets you do is it has mods it's so amazing to see mods being allowed in a console game and what i love is they also have categories for it one thing i would love

to see in the future is an accessibility category um and not just this but all games because then see people who are purposely trying to make things to get past some of the issues they may encounter have an avenue to do this and that would be fantastic it's all about having an experience now to recap i will rattle these off for those of you who are listening only we talked about multi-device support dead zones and sensitivity for each analog input and access stick single stick support stick flipping toggle versus hold versus button mashing and optional quick time events auto action support via john jump aim or anything else simple button presses over combos customizing input layout reduced button modes

optional haptic feedback friendly fire safe custom can chat save options and allow mods and you're welcome to screen cap this as a quick summary to remember of the types of things that really do help people with mobility issues myself included now we i there is going to be a live q a you can check the schedule for it i i don't know the schedule at the time of this recording and i would strongly suggest you attend you are welcome to ask me anything outside of this from my previous presentations to i really don't mind so if you have any questions in the realm of accessibility in general feel free to ask i look forward to seeing you there if you have questions you want to reach me online the easiest way to reach me really is the twitter ea underscore accessible um i am there all the time and if you're looking for more information on electronic arts and accessibility in games ea.com

able is our portal site i recommend looking at it if you're looking for more information thank you so much for watching my presentation and have a wonderful gdc you