Accessibility on a Shoestring

[Music] hello my name is ian and i am an accessibility specialist and that's what i'm here to talk to you about today accessibility and specifically how it relates to smaller studios i've got a few different angles on that to cover but first of all i'm going to go over a few of the basics about what accessibility is and how it works just to make sure that we're on the same page so fundamentals first up what even is accessibility so to answer that question we need to take a step back and look at what disability itself actually is and they have this chap here to help me explain if you're looking at this picture you might be able to have some kind of a guess at what it is that's making this guy disabled you might be thinking that he has cerebral palsy and he does but cerebral palsy is a medical condition and that is a very important distinction to make

so what else you might be thinking about him being the wheelchair but again that's not a disability and that's kind of the opposite of disability it's what's actually allowing him to go about his day which he was doing just fine until he tried to go into this bar and encountered the steps and that's what disability is it's mismatched interactions like this that result in some kind of barrier performing date day tasks and those barriers whether it's steps small text inflexible controls colour use they're usually put there by other people by us and that is a bit of a heavy thing to get your head around that as designers developers content producers we can actually disable people but the flip side is that by being aware of barriers and working to avoid or remove them we can actually prevent disabling situations from happening and ensure that more players are having the kind of experience that we intended and it's that that's known as accessibility

and it matters for all kinds of reasons for the human benefit of the access that games can give to recreation to culture to socialising the financial benefit of reaching more players disabled people make up at least 20 of your target audience to keep up with your competitors and also keep up with player expectations design inspiration that thinking about different kind of problems can give you which is something i'm going to talk about a bit more later the pr value extra visibility word of mouth through new loyal fans and also how it can benefit wide swathes of your players as designing for a permanent physical impairment like one arm also means you've designed for temporary impairments like a break and arm situational impairments like holding a baby or holding a beer and also players different preferences and levels of experience too but it can feel intimidating right it's hard enough designing a game that works for you so how do you design for

something like this and the good news is that you don't have to so if you think back to the guy in the wheelchair earlier this is a list of medical conditions which isn't what's important if you take for example parkinson's and dyspraxia those are two conditions that have absolutely nothing in common with each other medically but they both come up against the same barrier of small fiddly interface elements if you address that barrier you've addressed both of those conditions and you've also addressed a whole swathe of other motor and vision related conditions too so it's really not about the condition and the person it's about our designs and how those designs can be more successful so at a high level it boils down to a few core groups so barriers relating to people's ability to see to hear to take in process and action information and also manipulate controls

and speech two although that doesn't really come up unless you're making something that has player to play communication so even if you just spend a few minutes early in development thinking about what kind of barriers your game presents to each of these groups you'll be able to make a big difference sometimes through the design choices that you make sometimes through communicating information in more than one way like a symbol as well as color or subtitles as well as speech and sometimes through flexibility like giving people a choice of controls some of the barriers in your game will be intentional and an essential part of what gives the experience value and that's fine it's figuring out which barriers are unnecessary that is how we make accessible experiences and that's what we're digging into today so how does this fit in for you where do indies sit in all this the last of us too is an example of where the industry is currently at um it has a vast swathe of accommodations

including being the first chipotle designed from the ground up to be completely playable by people who are completely blind but they are a big aaa with vast resources how can someone with a tiny budget possibly compete it can be pretty tough seeing the industry changing feeling those player expectations shifting but feeling like it's something that just isn't achievable for you so here are a few other games that are way up there at the top of the industry sequenced on in particular by far surpasses the last of us too and the hyper dots accessibility efforts made them a finalist at the game awards i would very strongly recommend checking out these three games even if you aren't matching everything that they've achieved there's still a lot to learn from and be inspired by and even the smallest tweaks can sometimes make a tremendous difference to your players experience these three games are all very different from each other but they have something

in common they were all developed by solely indie developers each made by one person and this isn't unusual either indies have always been at the forefront of accessibility with games like terraformers from 2006 vvvv from 2010 uh sheet one up also from 2010 and again these are all made by solo indies pioneering games like these are still ahead of most aaa's today and triple a's have only really started getting properly evolved in the past few years so the idea that it's out of reach for small studios really is a myth and being an indie even actually has some distinct advantages there are some common misconceptions around accessibility usually some common some combination of these and all of this is demonstrably false they are misconceptions so if considered early enough in development there is a great deal that can be done for relatively little effort and rather than diluting anything down it just means ensuring

that your vision is kept intact for as many players as possible including the over 20 of gamers who experience some kind of disability and these misconceptions can be a huge barrier at triple a's because there are so many people that need to be convinced in order to do anything but smaller companies don't have that problem so the smaller you are the less people need to be convinced right if you want to do something you can just do it and you can do it quickly when legend of grimrock was in development a gamer emailed asking for some on-screen mouse controls because he was physically unable to use a keyboard or a controller and as you can see on the right they implemented it so within the hours of this gamer's email the team had already replied saying the feature was now in the game and that kind of responsiveness that kind of direct personal community engagement um those are things that triple a's can really only dream of

so accessibility is important to you and as a small studio you have some distinct advantages but what about the development itself how can you fit accessibility into tiny time scales and tiny budgets the most important technique actually applies equally to triple a's as to indies so let's go back to naughty dog for a second the last of us two's predecessor was uncharted 4. and uncharted 4 did some cool things a relatively small number of them and late in development that's what you're looking at in this slide and the reaction from the team was the same as it always is in those situations oh man if any we thought about it earlier we could done so much more we could have done it so much better so that's what they did with their next game naughty dog had been really open about what their secret sauce was um for the last of us too and it was simply considering accessibility from early in development there is literally no time at which it is too early to think about it

if thought about early enough there's a lot that can be really cheap and easy even free a simple zero cost design decision like text size if you decide up front that you aren't going to use tiny text that's it job done compare that to a game called the outer worlds now they launched with very small text and they actually addressed that in a post-launch patch and that work took them three months and if you're thinking about accessibility early it can inspire and inform how you design your game so to explain how i'm going to jump back in time a little to the dawn of human civilization back to the first time somebody made a finger mark on the cave wall with some mud and since those days many people tried to reinvent writing resulting in the stylus the quill the pencil the fountain pen the biro all variations on the same theme right

because if you try to answer the same kind of question you're likely going to come up with the same kind of answer but i'm pretty sure that none of you use devices like that for most of your writing anymore i'm guessing most of you are using keyboards right and their keyboard comes from the typewriter and how did the inventor of the typewriter come up with such a wildly different kind of answer by asking a different kind of question the inventor of the first working typewriter was trying to figure out a way for someone who was blind to be able to write letters and what you're looking at is actually one of that blind women's letters so anytime you type anything you're actually using technology that was invented for blind people so that was a little bit of a detour but it is relevant i promise because the same thing happens with games like this game puzzle retreat in the early stages of development they started thinking about accessibility in particular for motor and cognitive

accessibility and they found inspiration in that they liked where their thinking was heading with it and just adopted that thinking as the game itself so they scrapped the idea of timers scrapped move limits scrapped retry limits they even scrapped progression they made all the stages available from the start to complete in any order so he went for more of a like a relaxing zen like experience instead of the usual frantic action puzzler approach they originally ate for so they had made their game accessible by design and in doing so they had actually differentiated themselves from the competition enough that their game was featured on the itunes front page with all the commercial implications that brings so what to consider well what's appropriate for your game is something you'll need to figure out for yourself as it's dependent on the kind of barriers that your game includes and also what your personal vision is for the kind of challenge your game should present but there are a few core basics

to try to hit across all games and these five you're looking at here are the most commonly complained about accessibility issues that's not the same thing as most important for a whole bunch of reasons but if you can nail these and nail them efficiently then you'll be getting good bang for your buck solving issues that have a significant impact on the experience of significant numbers of players first text sites this is by far the most common accessibility complaint there's a pretty wide range of needs so ideally what you want here is scalable ui but even if you can just decide from the outset that you are not going to go below 28 pixels at 1080p which is roughly the size of the text here in lovers in a dangerous spacetime you'll be able to make a huge difference for really zero effort next up remapping so letting people move

actions over to inputs that are more usable for them unity's new input model is supposed to have this covered but it's currently a bit of a pain to work with but there are plugins you can use instead things like c inputs rewired in control and s input but more of those later something that is worth highlighting the simpler your controls are the more effective remapping becomes you know a controller having 16 buttons doesn't mean that you're required to design controls that use all of them always try and keep in mind where the complexity is really necessary and think about physical strain too so things like button mashing or holding buttons down if you can figure out ways around those that can be really quickly too color blindness there's a pretty widespread misconception that this means filters modes and so on don't use filters they aren't what colorblind people ask for and they cause as many problems as they solve and modes should actually be a last resort too

because what a mode is is actually a workaround for inaccessible design choices so instead try to make your game accessible by default like puzzle retrieved it so this means not relying on color alone to communicate or differentiate things so also use something else like shape patterns icons text subtitling most games now have subtitles but they're usually pretty rubbish there's a whole bunch of nice stuff you can do to make them better things like toggleable speaker names and speaker direction and scalable text but if you can just ensure good size and good contrast without too much screen text on the screen at the time you'll be way up there at the top of the industry so what exactly does that mean it means at least 46 pixels at 1080p with a solid playing background behind the text identical app no more than two lines per subtitle no more than 40 characters per minute if you want to take things up a notch

from there a very quick and easy way is to let people change the transparency of the background behind the text and the last is intensity firstly of what you're doing with the camera anything that gives a sense of motion that doesn't match what the player's head is doing in real life can make people ill so that means things like scripts things like screen shake motion blur weapon bob so if you can avoid or minimize these then great but if not then at least let people turn them off and secondly intensity of effects this is the really important one photosensitive epilepsy isn't common but seizures can cause serious injury and they can be induced by flashes flickers and patterns there's actually an internationally agreed standard of what constitutes a reasonably low level of risk and you should try to avoid anything ever falling outside that giving people a warning or a toggle um

doesn't really cut it because the way people find out they are prone to seizures is by having one like the time a boy had his first seizure playing raving rabbits which resulted in ubisoft introducing mandatory epilepsy testing across all of its games what you're looking at here is a setting in a game called everhood the imaging on the right actually sits below that reasonably low level of risk but they still offer a setting to turn the flashy effects off and this is a good thing to be able to do because outside of seizure risk itself there's a whole bunch of other people who intense effects can impact negatively sometimes even painfully with conditions ranging from autism to migraines there's actually paid software called the harding test that can evaluate footage of your game for seizure risk and that's what ever had used and it's what the big publishers use too but what if paying isn't feasible

well that international standard on risk avoidance is publicly available and what you're looking at here is a slightly simplified version of what it is you need to avoid so i'm not going to cover all the details now but it is pretty straightforward stuff so if you can keep this in mind when you're developing your game you'll be able to make a big difference without too much effort so hopefully you can see that nailing the basics isn't too hard and even just covering these will put you in a really good position because it's still pretty rare for any developer to nail them all but what about going further well even on the smallest budgets and time scales there are always low hanging fruit things that are quick and easy especially if you're thinking about accessibility early what you're looking at here is a bunch of accessibility settings in an indie point-and-click platformer called layer of the clockwork gods and here's what the developer had to say about them

it was astonishingly easy to be honest i spent about four to five hours total adding nine chord changes and honestly it was all pretty straightforward easy work which is exactly what i need right now in the scheme of things that's probably less time than i spent choosing the color of the options really and concentrating on the easy things is fine it is totally okay not to be able to do everything i'm going to come back to the idea again at the end another example this time of a specific feature this is from the solo nd title epic eric the developer added a high contrast mode which was just a rectangle between the foreground and the backgrounds it's transparent by default and players can tint it all the way to white all the way to black this is really valuable but very rarely seen across the whole industry and this feature took the developer 15 minutes to implement most of which was actually making the slider ui itself and a very well known example

celeste so this game has been hugely influential on other indie platforms in particular with many games copying and building upon celeste's ideas which were in turn developed in response to how exclusionary cuphead's inflexible design was celeste's whole feature set took two weeks to implement and if you look at the kind of accommodations they implemented that brings me neatly on to the next thing so this is another indie platformer from a few years before celeste called even the ocean if you have a look at the kind of options that games like this and celeste have quite a few of them look an awful lot like debug options options you implement to make your life easier while developing or variables you think with balancing that you then turn off and hide from players when you release the game so maybe don't hide them put them in the menu instead

chances are they'll be a useful accessibility consideration for someone so you may even have built a bunch of useful stuff already without even knowing it but isn't that cheating won't that break the game pushing people further away from your vision with options like these like invincibility and slow motion you might think so in some cases they may be but it's always worth thinking about the full breadth of who might want to play your game for example i know someone who is unable to use his hands and interacts with technology including games by using voice commands so for example he speaks the word jump and that triggers pressing the spacebar as you can imagine that's quite a slow and imprecise way to interact so as celeste is a precision platformer the default game is unplayable for him with invincibility and slow motion turned on he can play but it still takes a great deal of practice and charlie's

error for him to get past each screen and that success through persistence is exactly the experience that the developers had in mind for their players so those options are actually letting people get closer to the intended experience rather than further away and that's something really important to keep in mind that difficulty is relative the product of someone's capabilities versus the barriers in the game so if you have a specific level of challenge in mind for your players you need to find some kind of a way to accommodate human variants and learn from other people too we're in a luxurious position now of the field being mature enough that there are loads of great examples of good practice that you can copy from other games and a ton of great free resources too um these three are just a few of them when you look through resources like these you'll often find things you're already doing that you didn't realize were useful for accessibility because accessible design and good design are

often just the same thing if you want to spend time on r d and pushing the industry forwards then that is awesome but there is absolutely no shame at all in just copying what other people have done and other developers are always happy to chat with you about their work too accessibility is a field that thrives and seems to encourage openness and collaboration and as john knowles from turn 10 says it's almost as if there's a race among developers to see who can make the most accessible game and i know a little bit about racing it's honestly a race where everybody wins so on that note here are a bunch of indie accessibility superstars to check out i'm not going to list out what they all do but they're all great in their own ways there is a ton of great work out there that you can learn from that link there is just to a text version of the list or grab a screenshot or whatever as well

the last three sections are pretty quick fire so firstly tools by tools i mean third-party and middleware solutions there are some bits of external software that you can use to help you identify things like contrast and cold lined issues and there are a bunch of plugins available to take care of some of the heavy lifting of feature development predominantly for unity but also some for unreal as well they cover things like remapping like i mentioned before and subtitling right through to making interfaces and gameplay accessible to blind gamers so if you scroll down to the bottom of this page there is a handy list there and this kind of middleware help is only going to increase in the future for example unity recently hired a dedicated accessibility team with two goals firstly to improve accessibility of the editor itself for disabled developers and secondly to build tools to help developers make their games more accessible and unity want your input so if you have ideas on either of those two

things please please get in touch with them and player input nothing about us without us this is a very well known saying in the disability community and it is very important it's easy to make incorrect assumptions about what people need or misinterpret guidelines or even just miss niggly little things that actually cancel out your work so working directly with the audience is invaluable and it's easy to do if you have a dedicated user research team with a decent budget behind them right but what if you don't there's still a load of easy ways to get player feedback so things like asking for input through social media call outs beta questionnaires asking on forums on your discord through engaging with fans during early access and crowdfunding even actually asking in-game like the accessibility feedback button candy crush here but make people feel feel like their feedback is wanted and be respectful of their time too so don't expect too much

more than a quick reply for free but also remember that giving people something in exchange for their time doesn't have to mean money so sometimes a copy of a game or inclusion in the credits can count too and make use of prominent advocates don't feel shy about asking somebody who has lots of disabled followers to signal boost for you that's exactly how eagle island ended up with its industry leading low vision considerations so the developer put a call out on twitter for input asked for a signal boost and then ended up with a whole bunch of low vision gamers giving him direct feedback and reach out to experts and specialists for advice too but again be respectful of time don't be too demanding but still us most of us are happy to give some degree of help for free so you've recognized the importance of accessibility you've used techniques tools and player input to ensure as many people as possible can have a good experience but there's still one vitally important thing that can undo all of

your work so let's take a look at two indie puzzlers dots and flow free quite different games but both based on the idea of connecting similarly coloured dots there is a significant barrier here and to see what it is i'd like you to keep your eye on the orange red and green circles on the right this is what the games look like with one of the common forms of color blindness as you can see not playable and the social media response was predictable um this game really discriminates against us colorblind people i won't stand for this hashtag fight for what's right um what these games could have done with was some kind of consideration to cover blindness right and actually both games did dots through palette changes and flow free 3d additional labels but people just didn't know that was an option if the games had been accessible by default that wouldn't be an issue but if you're implementing any kind of a setting you can't just put it in the menu and assume that everyone who needs

it will find it and use it so make sure you tell people about what you've done and this could be part of your trailer like in legacy of the elder star it could be within the game like the loading screen hints here about color bonus or like how the pause screen is used in layer of the clockwork gods or something as simple as cheap simple and cheap as a bullet point in a feature listing in a storefront or in a press kit that's what indie platform puzzler did hugh did and people noticed not just players but reviewers too all of the top scoring reviews on metacritic were reviews that talked about the game's colorblind modes and the quake on the top review you can see there was about the codeline mode and the game made it into green by one point the devs are absolutely certain that without that simple bullet point in their press kit they would not have made

it into green with all the critical and commercial implications that go along with that and one last thought to leave you with and it's an important one don't sweat it there is no fixed bar for you to hit on this instead look at accessibility as an optimization process so as with any kind of optimization it isn't an all-or-nothing thing there's always more that could be done but every little bit you're able to do every low-hanging fruit you're able to reach simply means that more people are able to have the kind of experience that you're hoping for [Music] you