Accessible Player Experiences: A New Approach to Data Informed Design for Accessible Games

[Music] alright I'll get started while we wait for Chris to pop in here real quick before we start anything I just want to show you this picture last year we opened up a Center at the New Orleans Children's Hospital the rehabilitation hospital New Orleans Children's Hospital and we had a game day and this is the one of my favorite pictures that came out of that game day because this young man had not been gaming for really ever because of his disability and we had the Microsoft Xbox adaptive controller and a couple of switches and he was gaming for the first time and I really just love this picture because I'm just so happy and the kid is so happy and I'm also wearing the exact same shirt as I am in this picture I don't say that after that splendid introduction i'm chris power i am the vice president of AbleGamers this way I'm supposed to walk this way I will walk this way they told us we can't go

from that chair to that chair but neither of us wanted to sit down that's right so I Lee the game's use the research side of AbleGamers I joined the organization about three years ago I have about 15 years of experience and user experience and inclusive design and I work with the team specifically greg haynes and team at the university of york where i have a day job as an associate professor and my name is mark barley I'm the founder of AbleGamers this is my sixth GDC that I've done I've also been privileged to present at the White House under the Obama administration in more places than I can even count I will say because my friend Linda's here when I started AbleGamers a 15 years ago this year I actually converted in EverQuest to fansite to the very first AbleGamers site none of this would really be possible without this great team so we have Jen beeston who's a research fellow with AbleGamers and a PhD student at the University of York Paul Cairns who's our scholar in residence and a colleague of mine a

reader at the University of York Greg Haynes is our lead user researcher who has contributed to the apx material you're going to see today as well as Craig Kaufman and Steve spawn and Jesse and also who were members of our team at our headquarters in West Virginia but we asked them for pictures and they forgot to send them so when we talk about players with disabilities playing games we often think about putting information into the game and getting information out we often talk about flexible presentation and flexible controls and we will talk about that today but when we boil accessibility down to something like that it's often the case that it oversimplifies it because games aren't like other interactive technologies when we talk about accessibility in other areas there's always a task that we're trying to complete something like I'm going to get my money from a bank machine or I'm gonna pay my taxes on a website games aren't like that games are a lot more than just putting information in and getting them out that are about playing a game and what does that really mean what it largely means is that players

are going out seeking an experience we know that with game designers and with anyone who works with players that they're always talking about the player experience as being the core thing that we're worried about the fact that someone can move a character doesn't mean that they're playing the game just because I can explore the universe as writer walking around in Andromeda for example it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm having fun or that I'm experiencing the game the way that I want to when we talk about experiences with players with disabilities we've taken to describing them as accessible player experiences by which we mean a player's having the experience that they want to have in a game free from barriers that are as a result of their disability I will slow down so when we start talking about potential players with disabilities what are we talking about in terms of an audience because people often ask us well how many players are we really talking about when we look at different statistics around the world we found

various data from about 2011 the most recent data that we were able to find was in the US census where it talked about approximately 13% of the population in the u.s. having a disability now that is a particular classification that's been used for quite a long time in the census when you look at new data the newest data that we have is the Canadian disability survey not because it's my home nation but simply because wait really hey there we go so in the Canadian disability survey there's a much broader definition of what a disability is and there you find definitions related to things like dexterity or flexibility or things related to age-related disabilities but also things around mental health for example which are now reaching into the broader classification and things that we'll talk about today as part of our user research result the estimate that we put is social what that means this is

my part no no I was just gonna give the final percentage somewhere between 13 and 22 percent so what that really means is that if you look at the information from the ESA so the ESA says about 64 percent of people have access to gaming equipment in their home right now that means that there are 27 to 45 million people with disabilities in the US that have the equipment that they need to play are they playing well it turns out that actually a large numbers of players with disabilities in the game now this doesn't mean that every player with disabilities of course is out there playing but it's certainly much larger than people typically think we've been reaching out to the global population to try to build out a player panel a group of players who can participate in game testing and user research we have a large number of players from North America from Europe and across the world who want to participate in your game research we offer this as a service

through AbleGamers free of charge where we can pair you with individuals who meet various characteristics either in terms of who they are or what they play we currently have somewhere between 400 and 450 people that are active in the panel and the data that I'm gonna talk about today is just about 400 the groups of people with disabilities we ask them to complete a demographic questionnaire and when we look at that demographic questionnaire we find that we have about 50% of people who have some sort of physical disability and either their upper limb or their lower limbs we also have a large number of people with sensory disabilities which are the traditional sensory disabilities that we think about in terms of hearing and see and people with color vision deficiency so people who have alternate ways of seeing color and we also have a large number of people who process information differently where we have people with mental health difficulties for example people with learning disabilities people with cognitive disabilities or broader neuro diversity so people with autism or people with high-functioning autism the

really interesting thing is we often classify people and accessibility circles by their disability when you look at a lot of the materials online we often talk about people in silos or in categories people are either blind or they have low vision what we found was largely across our disability population most people did not identify as having a single disability now this has important implications for our design because one of the most common things we hear from designers is I don't want to choose I don't want to have to choose between one group of players and another and what we've been working towards is a broader understanding of what options people use and in particular the surprising result that people overlap and the types of things that they want and need so as part of player panels we ask a large demographic survey which includes information about the technology that they use to access games we have about 46% of players at the moment who use key remapping now the numbers I'm giving you

they've actually remained really stable so we've been collecting data for about two years now and after the initial tranche of players joined we ended up finding that our numbers have settled down so we believe that these are fairly representative of the current population of players who are playing games now we had about 10% of those players who do not have physical disabilities who are using key remapping so it gives you an idea that some people are co-opting these things in order to play games in a different way it becomes even more stark when we look at subtitles and captioning where we only have about 14% of players in the panels who have either low hearing or sign language using deaf people over 40% of our players use subtitling this shows that this is a key piece of technology that's allowing people to customize their experience either related to their disability or simply because they want to tune their game yeah the data literally said that you know for example people with cognitive disabilities people that are learning

English as a second language women turn on subtitling more than men and so when you hear that statement while subtitling or for people who can't hear our data showed that that's not true that subtitling is for people that need subtitling we also find this in things like recoloring where people want to distinguish one piece of information from another we often link this to people with color vision deficiencies so people who are color blind or have alternate ways of seeing color however we only have about 4% of people in the panels who actually identify as having that and 20% of people are turning on recoloring options when I mentioned this at another conference when I presented that number someone came up to me and said I know why they're doing that and I got really excited because I thought they were gonna tell me and they did they're like it's because in fortnight you can see enemy's better oh and I went oh it's absolutely true that's really cool and actually when we talk to people people are co-opting these things for broader aspects of gameplay so when you think about accessibility options is

actually not just about disability it's about a broader part of your designing games microsoft's own research actually says that 80% of people who use windows and office suites use an accessibility feature a feature that they specifically put in for accessibility in order to make their work better 80% so we asked people a bit of information about their flexibility of control how do they modify different pieces of input into the game and there we found a wide variety of different types of controllers being used people typically talked about when they used a customized controller something like a customized Mouse or a custom controller that's been built for them and also things like alternate controllers like the quad stick where you have a sip-and-puff interface however tied to that you'll also see that key remapping becomes an important part of game play whenever we use one of these things it's important these types of alternative inputs key remapping recurs again and again with it as something that's necessary to be able

to change the controls from that standard control controller over to the new one that's coming in we also talked to people about how they flexibly changed the presentation in their games we had of course many people talking about captions but we also found people talking about text enlargement changing the contrast of different aspects including text we had people talk about the importance of alternative alerts so vibrations for example or having sound alerts that go along with visual or in some cases having visual Earths that tell you about events that are happening in the environment when the sound is off one of the most famous ones that we'll talk about later is the sound ring in fortnight that's typically used on mobile but now has been transferred over to desktop and a console as an important part of the design that was for people who necessarily didn't have the sound on either because they were on a train or because they were playing late at night or because they were my kids trying to hide the fact that they were playing games so more importantly though we had

the opportunity to talk to our players about how they value gaming there's very little information in the gaming space about why players with disabilities play games and if we think about things it might be that we make some very basis um shion's about why people play games and me as a user researcher the most important thing for me is to talk to players and see if there is a difference so we went and talked to 122 people we put out a survey where we asked people that exact question why is gaming important to you we also asked in person at PAX East a set of attendees who did not identify as people with disabilities and as a result we were able to compare the information that was provided by our disabled players as well as by people who did not necessarily identify upfront as being players with disabilities when we did that analysis we found that there was a number of themes that emerged over time and we found that people did gaming for largely the same sorts of reasons they did it to connect with others they

did it to benefit from games playing that is an interesting one because sometimes it was about skills and sometimes it was about the opportunity to potentially learn something new we also found that people bet wanted to divert themselves in different ways they wanted to escape into a world that others had created now I want to emphasize that that's not necessarily about escaping disability because we heard this across our groups it was about escaping into something that someone else had created about being able to leave the real world behind and become immersed for a period of time perhaps one of the nicest things that came out of it was the fact that was a piece of shared culture people saw games as art there was something that they compared to things like literature and movies and going to museums places where often people with disabilities are excluded due to the types of things that are used in communicating information games didn't have those they were able to share culture with their peers in a way that often they were not allowed to

otherwise so like for example even in this room let me ask you guys a question who here plays games so let me ask though so who here plays more than one game and who here looks for a friend and then goes and plays the game that that friend is playing what if it's even not your favorite game you still do it right because you're connecting with friends you're wanting to be with that person the game is just the bar you went to but the reality is you made that choice to be with that person and that's the same for a player with disabilities there's no difference they're just connecting with their friends the bar is the game that's right and one of the things that echoed throughout the data was that it was about an enablement it was about enabling people into his space the thing that people with disabilities identified differently than our non-disabled players from PAX East was that they felt that games enabled them to play with their friends on a level playing field

where they may not be able to do that in the real world in games they were able to and this came through really clearly in our data and it was a really positive thing to hear and something that we communicate to you now as designers that your technology is not just about playing and fun and games but it really is a massive enabling technology for people to do things that they may not be able to do otherwise the mechanics of the game tell you what you can do I can jump no higher in the game than my completely wheelchair enabled friend because the doesn't allow us so that's the beauty of games you know I'm looking at Linda for this because you know I started AbleGamers as from an EverQuest and you know EverQuest and MMOs are really special to me because they are these lives that you can kind of jump into but we're all bound by the game and we're not necessarily identified by our disability and when we look at multiplayer play we found that players were playing not only with their online friends or real

friends in real life but they were jumping on with strangers to play because it's something that they do just to get some social activity and they also are part of large clans and Guilds so we find that these players are largely the same playing the same types of multiplayer games that others do and as a result the myth starts to fall away that disabled players are playing single-player games in their homes that are self-paced our players are playing large-scale commercial triple-a titles that are multiplayer games they sell millions of copies and they're being sold to players with disabilities now when those options are available and indeed when we talk to players with disabilities they identified as gamers so we distinguish between gamers and players gamers we see as a broader identity and some of our players with disabilities actually said no I'm not a gamer and I don't want to identify that way I'm not part of that culture it is simply something I do but I still play games but we did find that for over half

of our players it was their primary hobby it was the key thing that they did 60 percent nearly identified as gamers and they even distinguish between whether they were hardcore gamers or casual gamers and we had a better third each we then had a typical play session of over two hours with nearly a quarter of our players playing for over five hours in a typical play session our players are people who love gaming and they do it either as part of their lives and part of a broader set of hobbies or as a key part of their lives so so how did we create the accessible player experience so most of you should have a deck of cards in your hands I've actually seen some of you thumb through it so it's really exciting want to kind of take you on the journey of how we got here so the current accessible practices and look I wrote include if ocation I'm part of this is that they're heavily based on checklists checklists are really great at the end

of your of your pipeline to make sure you've potentially done everything right but they don't actually tell you what you need to do checklists and the way we're doing it right now it focuses on not creating experiences it says hey you need to have closed captioning but if you make the text a6 sure you checked the box that you had closed captioning but no one can read it it stifles innovation some of the most creative people in the world are in this room mainly because you chose to come here and you guys are creating great things all the time the way we currently do it it says this is what you must do it prescribes a solution but you may actually have a better way and fascinatingly accessibility is one of the only places in the world that we still use rules for design where we tell you what you can and cannot do most designers have moved on from that and focus on a more Design Thinking process where they try to build empathy and

understand their players and then move into design then test and iterate yet in accessibility we still largely focus on meet this checklist and you'll be okay and what we're challenging in this presentation is that that paradigm needs to change and it really doesn't have player data built in so when we did a px when we did this we we came in and we said you know traditionally there's these silos and as you alluded to we don't fall into those silos we also started finding that different groups of people needed the same thing and so we said we can simplify this idea and bring it all together so what we did was we felt that we needed to build a stronger database about what people use and to try to build out from what is happening right now in the industry and what we asked players building on the successes of the last 15 years of beginning the journey of accessibility in gaming is to talk to players about what were the

five accessibility options that they looked for in games and when they came back they came back with 510 answers in any other piece of technology that I've worked in I get three words in this I got 510 people or 555 people providing 510 different answers and some of them wrote tomes tomes I mean most the time these in any sort of survey that you do you usually expect to have sort of open answer questions mostly skipped this we literally had paragraphs of text that we were having to sort through I felt bad for Jin because she had to kind of go through and parse out what the person was actually saying so that she could put the put it in the right things like I guess that's what it means to be a PhD student right that's right so so what did they come up with so they came up with this idea we found of this access and challenge so I want to talk about access and what this means they were looking for controller personalization the vast majority of them were looking for changing the way

they input into the game they wanted alternate channels they wanted different ways they're always turning on or looking for features to get the information out in a different way they wanted alternate inputs they needed to plug or wanted to plug something in that wasn't standard clear text this is that thing about checkbox I have closed captioning but it's six point font at the bottom recoloring options as we alluded to they were looking for visual clear visual channels is there a spelling error so we'll get to that we'll get to that in just a few minutes but just to preempt the question so alternative channels we're talking about different modalities so providing information through a different sense in some way either enhancing it or replacing it clear visual channels the ability to know what's important on the screen and potentially get rid of the things that

aren't important mmo's were always great for this because you could turn down the render rate and get rid of all the waving grass so you could see the quest object clear audio channels and games do this pretty well I don't want the music it bothers me let me turn that up let me turn that down and lastly the ability to change the HUD itself let me figure out how to get things and so the access loop this is what you guys are always as game developers working on is this to create this loop this flow in it and right now we're gonna build this out a little bit so you guys understand it so a player action and understanding the state of the game so access really is about the ball of the game that's not the world or story that you've created the ability to make that next decision the ability to take in what just happened and so this is really where we traditionally think of accessibility is sitting because we often think in terms of either motor disabilities or perceptual disabilities of different

kinds sensory disabilities and this does tie into that because we found that largely without these sorts of options you couldn't move on in the game you couldn't take those actions that you need to do but it turns out that it's a lot more than that so after there after everyone's able to kind of get in information in and out of the game we started getting to we sort of seeing these challenge options so the challenge options you want me to jump on this horse you want me to do this jump puzzle you want me to solve this thing and so these were performance options they were looking for ways to potentially slow it down or an assist for something these are our traditional twitch options that we talked about things that make the game tuned to the person's skills a skip option giving me the ability to just not do this I hate jump puzzles in the first part of your game it is a jump puzzle I'm done I put it down you could tell the greatest story there

could be a million dollars on the other side of the jump puzzle and I'm just leaving it there one of the things we often look at now is being able to skip QuickTime options so QuickTime events which became very popular around 2014 and then everyone started asking in 2015 why the heck are we doing this now we're starting to see that those have become skip options and games as well and especially for many people who aren't able to press a key really really quickly over and over again they're really essential and we see that for example in Spider Man this year where you could replace the QuickTime options with the movie play of the ideal path through it so you could still get the story training options so I play every once in a while when I have a few minutes to be able to play games I play overwatch and training options are important because I don't want to debut my diva because I have no idea what I'm doing but they have this beautiful world where I can go and play and over and over again and get good before Craig tells me to not log in anymore because I'm terrible at it and when you tie into

that that many players with disabilities will have different configurations when they go into games either of their controllers or of the types of settings that they need they need those opportunities to practice and that's what we were hearing that they wanted to learn their controls or learn their settings that they've changed before they enter into the game as an example and lastly progression options I did finally do the jump puzzle to get the million dollars give me the opportunity to save that so I never have to do it again so they were really looking for ways to make sure that all of their hard-earned progress was saved and for people with cognitive disabilities it was largely about trying to capture that progress that has happened that they necessary they need to understand but haven't necessarily retained so things like journaling or quest pointers provide information to the player so they can review what they need to do next so now we have this complete loop this is what all of you guys are doing which is the player takes an action the state of the game changes understanding

that new state making the decision taking the decision loop and so you see that there's blue ring which is your access ring always turning and then there's this orange little side ring which is where your challenge stuff comes in so as we start talking and we start talking about the patterns and we start talking about the deck of cards understanding where you are in this loop gives you a real good clue of what set of cards you should really be focusing on and when we look at the type of information that people were giving us we asked them alongside the priority question where were there situations that worked really well for them and where were there situations where they had games that they couldn't play when we talked to them about the types of games they couldn't play almost always it was an access option that was missing while we found the complete range of options we've just presented to you in games where they were able to play well as things that they valued and made it a good game for them when we looked at

those situations where they couldn't play it was almost always due to an access option and so this gave us the cue that really access has to come first they have to be able to get around that player loop and then once they can we can start tuning that experience and we represent this with the apx pyramid that's now on the screen or on the bottom layer you have to have your access options in place and then a set of challenge options that modify the obstacles either the performance the cognitive or the emotional challenge that happens in the game and then once you resolve those items for the individual they can have the accessible player experience that they want to have so as part of this what we've done is we've built out a pattern language we wanted something that took this data that we've discovered over the last year or so and build it something that's as visible and as useful as guidelines can be but do it in a way that pushes designed to the left something that allows generative design where you're able to take advantage of

your design knowledge and innovate new accessibility so what we've done is we've set for example or to start with a set of 12 access options and they look at in particular that player loop and how do we provide that flexible control and presentation now each pattern such as second channel oh I'm sorry you can make a point yeah so hey you know I've been doing AbleGamers for 15 years and to the point where you made about moving it to the left and why important so many times I've had game companies big game companies come to me six weeks before release and say hey yeah so we want to make something accessible and there's that whole like bug curve that we all know which is like if you think about it way to the left it's just accessibility or the bug is real cheap to fix but six weeks before you release a title it's really expensive so when we took this on the

idea was to try to give you guys language that let you move these thought processes before you've even made a single line of code and now accessibility is cheap to include versus a Blizzard title six weeks before release reaching out to me and I'm going like oh yeah good luck so what we've tried to do is we've tried to encapsulate these in design patterns now each pattern comes with a design problem that design problem captures what players in general will encounter in your game that may be a problem so for example second channel which taps into the alternative channels we were talking about earlier is the design problem is that players are either unable or we're unreliably able to take in information through a particular modality so they can't see or hear some information reliably we link that to a set of drivers this is where the disability side of things comes in where we link it for example to players who are blind or

who have low vision who cannot necessarily see the information on the screen but also people who have hearing disabilities or sign language using deaf people who maybe need either a replacement in the form of captions or an enhancement of some kind to some auditory content where we need to provide either a visual or haptic enhancement and finally players who are possibly in a noisy environment where we try to push out to a broader player base where they need either visual or audio information in an alternative way so when we move on and we look at how do we try to encapsulate this for all of you it's important that we also provide a set of examples in a design solution and that design solution first of all comes in a general form players can select additional channels of information via different modalities I am not telling you to put captions in it may be that in some cases you don't need those particular captions because it's not

speech content but you still need some audio enhancement happening in your game and as a result this is a very broad set of design options and you need help thinking and innovating and I da ting around them and the beauty of design patterns is we can find the best examples in the industry and provide them for you four ways to inspire in your game and I'll pass to mark for the second channel examples so let's talk about some second channels one of the ones that's really great as Madden 2018 so Madden uses haptic to help you make the perfect kick it'll do vibrations when it needs to when you're in those sweet spots so that you get an indication not only visually on the screen but you're getting that second channel that tells you this is the time to do it another great one Street Fighter 2 there are blind competitive players of Street Fighter because every single move and Street Fighter has a sound associated with it that is unique to that move so they can competitively

play this game because they memorize the soundscape and they know if I hear oh I need exactly right one of the ones you alluded to for tonight this is one of the breakout amazing second channels so they did this because mobile and you I guess you play fortnight on a bus and at school when you're supposed to be doing your math homework and so you see this for that you see the sound ring the sound ring around it gives you a visual indication of the sound around you so you can see footsteps and you can see flames and while I've never played for at night I think those are important you have kids so one of the really nice things about this example is the fact that this was largely invented through good design it was thinking about what the players needed and what was the design problem that was being solved which is where we've tried to position the patterns and that's one of the reasons that this and the modern example early are really nice examples because they are really about creating really interesting and

innovative designs even though they're fulfilling an accessibility aspect of the game and then what we think of is potentially a second channel which is this has a voiceover associated with it and it's just a simple stylized closed captioning is what I like to call it when they do it like this another great example this is one of my favorites left 4 dead 2 they have sounds that are really important for the gameplay and there's the option to turn on and I know they're really small what I like to call the brackets which gives you a text indication that something is about to happen so you have things like environmental sounds like the fact that there's a groan and something is moving towards you or the fact that gunfire happens around you and these sorts of indicators allow someone who can't hear to be able to identify that soundscape that's very important within the game it also has the traditional types of

capturing that we expect for speech but they're enhanced in different ways and this is one of the best examples of captioning it's happening in the industry right now it's also an example of Clear Channel because you can turn parts of it on and off if you don't need certain parts that's right it's a real learning as you go through your as you go through your stuff but now because we've been doing this every time we see a game or we hear people talk about a game it's been happening all GDC so far we whisper to each other same controls but different we're very odd it's ok so speaking of same controls the debeaking of same controls but different you see what I did there one of the other aspects so we've just talked about something that's about that flexible presentation and we wanted to highlight probably one of the most important ones for flexible controls and that is the idea of having same controls but different someone needs it set of controls so we need a way to provide them away to do exactly the same thing as players using standard

controllers so in this case it's about the players cannot effectively use a set of controls in the standard set up and this covers a wide variety of different physical disability design aspects where it can be either a full remapping which of course is the most ideal but also some specifics like the fact that you can either toggle or hold a control which might be quite important so having auto run as opposed to being able to having to hold a particular control thank you very much number on key for every memo exactly every num lock key you can imagine but also my personal favorite shadow of war where I ended up with basically a hand that couldn't open after running around as tallien for too long we also have things like the fact that a player may need a simpler control scheme for some reason and as a result we might provide that and we see that in things like NHL for quite a long time now having a the 1994 set of controls as an alternative for people who don't want all of the detail in H is that what I

said is that hockey it's hockey not a thing it's a thing Canadians your design so in the design solution of course it's the ability to remap some of the controls now this might be just one control or a full set of controls but again we're not telling you this is the way you have to do it because each game is quite different a nice example where we had some problems with control this year was spider-man where there was a lot that had to be done with the two sticks and a lot of that had to be done with multiple triggers and they weren't able to be remapped which made it very difficult for people who weren't able to use the full range of motion in both of their hands or didn't have the strength and as a result being able to remap those would have been very important so let's see some examples of this now you have the standard stuff like in injustice 2 where I can I want to just change everything around and I can you have in near automaton this game does this really

well camera as well as horizontal camera and everything there are options that we're not sure why they're there or really sure there's a reason I like the fact that you can instead of just the vertical camera remap the horizontal from left to right and you can remap also all the zoom settings as well which is really nice then you have splatoon - you know motion control is oftentimes very hard for a player with disabilities splatoon - allows you to choose between Mershon control or using your controllers and then they let you remap it from there we talked about the toggle versus hold when you go into Mass Effect Andromeda you can choose I want to click on and click off or I want to click lick lick lick lick hold to get something done in overcook this is one of the ones that's most creative to me it lets you map the left side and the right side of the controller but it also lets you throw another controller in and remap it as well so you can actually use two controllers and it'll see it as one

and so that might be something that you would have for example in Coplay where you have someone playing beside you which taps into one of the challenge patterns that we're gonna move into now we're not helping hand so we have the apx challenge design patterns which are really about modifying the different types of challenges in your games and it's either performance challenge so things like twitch being able to do very precise movements or very fast movements to relate to different events the emotional challenges that someone might encounter either because of things like jump scares or surprise or being able to manage different aspects of very strong emotions and characters or problem solving challenges so our traditional puzzles when we start looking at this set of patterns we have things like bypass and we talked about that as being a really important thing to a lot of our players the skip options that were in there and essentially providing ways to skip different parts of content that people don't want to engage with because

they cannot successfully engage with it for some reason now this covers a wide variety of different design drivers and some of them are physical some of them are cognitive where people cannot necessarily react as quickly as they want to in performance or twitch type of challenge where they might want hints for example to be able to skip a particular challenge or to be able to for example when dealing with a particular strong emotion be able to skip over a cutscene that might cause difficulty one of the really famous things that I tell people about this particular one and I'm not bashing the makers of heavy rain but I really struggled with the game heavy rain and only played about 20 min minutes into it when something fairly traumatic happens now because of who I am and because of my mental health I really struggled with that game when I presented these patterns to a young designer he said well I'm gonna challenge you right now and tell you you shouldn't be playing that game and I said okay why is that he

said well you know that's an important part of the story and you should have to experience that to enjoy the game to which I said okay but that means you're not selling that copy to me and indeed even though I'm sure they're great games I haven't bought a single title from the people who made heavy rain and when I see it I go no that's probably not a game for me to which his response was well what are we supposed to do about it I said well we have a pattern called moderation in all things which is a different one than this where you might change the way I engage with it well what am I gonna do what am I gonna do have you skip it well maybe that's one thing well what am I supposed to do flash up something that says look away now and I went well why not and he said wait what and I said well you've probably been trained that accessibility is about rules but in fact you're the designer it's your game if you want to put a bypass in you can if it's not acceptable for you to do that we have another set of patterns to think

around the problem to find alternatives that reach that balance and it changes the discussion of accessibility from a positional argument where it's the player versus the developer to a negotiation of the designer trying to find ways to make it so that players can engage with their story and have an experience in them which as an added advantage probably means some more people will buy your game what selling games is important quiet you so let's look at some examples of a bypass pattern one of them is Ratchet and Clank so at the beginning of Ratchet and Clank it will I believe actually ask you a question on what you want to do with these things and you can say I just want to play them as movies and it plays them as movies you can easily evenly skip them this is really important especially in the cognitive disability world where they might not be able to take in the information it might just be too much they just want to play the game I'm playing this stupid little Family Guy iPad game and they have all these

little cutscenes in it and I could care less I'm just like skip skip skip skip skip just let me match the shapes together that's all I really want but for a player with cognitive disabilities it may be essential that they not engage with that simply because it may overwhelm them in different ways spider-man QuickTime events again you alluded to this they let you just skip them and they make them as movies or cut little cutscenes so my son loves those I hate them because I'm really bad at them this game is really really great I can never say them in Fernie I'm infernum they let you turn off everything the creator made a really good story they made a really awesome game and none of these things were really important so you can turn off for example the enemies if you don't want to have any particular combat and remove those performance challenges this is something that we're often told by developers they can't do and the question is okay that's fine that's your choice but if you want someone to hear your story if that's the important part of it is that a way that you could have someone engaged with it

by removing some of those and we're actually seeing more games come on the market that have this as an option where you can simply explore the world there was one we were told about on Monday at the at another conference and it was a ghost mode that you could enter into and you could explore the entire level in ghost mode before you actually did the level so you could like there's no like no surprises I know what's going to happen I will say before we move from bypass if you do put bypasses in your game please do not make them like something like this yo I see you're having trouble want to skip it because that's really offensive one of my favorites where you can do that is when the Riddler is insulting you with Batman because he actually teases Batman but you end up with the to skip forward through the Riddler puzzles and actually it ends up doing it in quite a respectful way but I did see a game that said like it looks like you're having trouble yeah cuz you designed it bad thanks Clippy right so one of the other

ones that we're going to talk about is one that people often don't think about and that's those training options that we were talking about and these are places that people can practice and fail they're places where people have the opportunity to either practice their skills and develop them up or the ability to test out different settings which is really important for people with different controllers from the drivers we have not only physical disabilities but people who have cognitive disabilities or people like me who are just not very good at some games and need to practice again and again before they can get the moves down Thank You Street Fighter which I'm still really bad at but it's so diva don't worry okay very good it does give people the solution though is to provide people either tutorials or sandbox levels or a variety of different things that you are far more creative at coming up with than me in order to allow people to have those areas to practice so for example you have an assassin's creed where you can do some different types of things which is very different from having an open sandbox level some

other really great examples or rocket League I don't know who here's played rocket League it is the most fun weird little game ever it has some beautiful sandbox and actually able gamers uses rocket League to train new players on how to use the controllers that we give we have a progression path when you use a quad stick which is a sip-and-puff it's a very complicated controller designed for people who are quadriplegic and you use only your mouth and your breath rocket League is the first game that we master because it teaches you how to use the controller and it has such great training spaces another really good one is mankind divided they have tutorials for the stealth they have tutorials for cover and you can bring them up anytime you have to do something again so you can go oh this is real stealthy I need to remember to do that and you can rerun the tutorial right there so when we look at

these different patterns the idea is that they link together they're not a checklist of 22 things that you should run through instead they're a way to start thinking about your design in a holistic way there's something that take accessibility away from the approach of telling you what to do and what not to do and instead providing an inter length language where you can start having discussions with your teams we've seen these used in studios where people bring them in and begin talking about different aspects of their game using them for ideation one of the most exciting things as a UX designer is to see people putting post-its all over them which made me really really excited but I did send him a picture and he literally like made a giddy girl so it was just like yay and it was really really fun because not only were they doing that but they were using as a way to evaluate their own ideas where they would see okay we think that this solution covers off all of these different patterns that we see maybe that's not a bad solution because it covers a lot of different design problems that we may run into we've seen

we saw a developer who walked up to a friend and said you know that thing that we're working on we have a second channel problem because when the thing does that whatchamacallit we're only using sound for that and so we talked about the language and things like that by just saying and we went over second Channel and by saying hey we have a second channel problem you didn't have to understand the nuances of the disabilities that cover them you know what the design pattern talks about and why what you need to do as a solution by just saying hey we have a second channel problem and you know what we really need we need a way to put a helping hand on that as well in that one simple sentence I've told him volumes about whatever it is we're designing simply because you've now have a tool set in your hands all of you that gives you a vocabulary in a language to share these ideas and while it's driven by data from players with disabilities which is something we're really proud of we've tried to frame it

in terms of your language of design and one of the things that accessibility lacks across many technology industries but most importantly in games is we lack that Gen language that we can take into design sessions and start talking about it so that first of all the sets of options that I've discussed here today with Mark and also the patterns that we just had presented with all of the examples provide you with that language to begin having that discussion with your own teams so we gave you free stuff so I hope that we can bribe you for some good reviews but more importantly I hope you take them to your studios if you need more I highly recommend you come spend some money on AbleGamers org know that everything that we bring in goes right back to our mission so you are really supporting a great cause our cost on them is four dollars and twenty-five cents because we had a printed in the US because Chinese New Year fell in a really bad time really awkward to get them here I do have one more announcement because this is really

exciting so we we know we know that we're on to something really great here and we're announcing and we have little flyers or anyone who wants one that we're doing a certified apx practitioner course so in the fall we are doing a two-day certification or we do a really deep dive into how to use a px how to bring it into your pipeline in your workflow and how to so the learning objectives are really important which is how to spot accessibility issues during design how to suggest solutions and most importantly how to win arguments with producers who don't want to spend the money to do that I feel like the third objective is less and less every day because the industry is really seeming to wake up but I know I still want to arm you with that so that you can win every time so one of the things that we've talked about quite a lot today is bringing them into your team's if it's training that you want for your team's we will come to you so if you want to have a chat about your Studios engaging

with training around the apx system by all means come and talk to us afterwards and we have some flyers for you so that's my that's my Corgi you can follow her on instagram at Lily beam Corgi but any questions and thank you guys thank you 50 right on here perfect though we wanted to be done ten minutes before and it was literally fifty in 17 seconds all right so yeah lots of time for me to ask questions one really short one will your AP X course be online so at the moment the way it's gonna be designed it's gonna be an in-person two-day course we'll hope to iterate it to be online okay but we just can't figure out a little bit right now sorry where where is it online what no no you said it's gonna be in person okay so we're working on that all right now we're in the process of designing course we're hoping next GDC on Monday and Tuesday we actually hold an AP X at a hotel nearby but we're also will be holding it at various events and if we start seeing

clusters we'll go ahead and start getting rooms and stuff like that we're still working that out we're a tiny charity we're doing our best so most importantly the studios at the moment we've had a great deal of interest of people wanting to train their teams because they want to be we're seeing a major shift in the industry and maybe you're all seeing it as well of people wanting accessibility buying across a team so while accessibility specialists no doubt will still continue to be important in the industry we want everyone having a buy-in and so we're seeing a lot more people coming to us and that's probably where we're going to be delivering in the autumn is in studios okay so the second one is a bit longer I find that the dev teams that I work with because I work in community the dev teams I've worked with they're actually pretty open to accessibility and they've made changes mid-stride god bless them where I'm seeing some of the challenges is amongst the players themselves why should people have an easy way this is supposed to be a challenge why do I have to do it the hard way and other people can just skip to the end now I know how I handle it

but I'd really like for you to share how you guys would would this is just how I suspect you and I handle it the same way I use rude words well then we do we absolutely do do it exactly and so I don't ban people because I don't have that power you never gave it to me so the reality is look I bought the game and I'm playing the game if you want to play it really hard you be you I don't care and if we find that argument is happening within design teams the reasons that we talk about challenge as part of this because it's about tuning experience for an individual and they can tune their own experience and have the experience that they want to have because it's not about making it easy it's about making it often challenging for themselves but not impossible so we often talk about the challenge patterns and the challenge pieces of design about moving the impossible to being possible and challenge like what's hard what's what's a challenge for you could be completely

different than what's a challenge for me or a challenge for you so the reality is I tell those players to just do what my grandma set is mind your own damn business and move on because look we're never gonna solve that that that problem of like you know I got every achievement great you have no friends I get it move on other questions before I get snarky er you promised you wouldn't actually I make games for four kids and I was wondering when you guys were developing this what kind of age ranges were you working with and I particularly work with preschool kids which is all so most of our players are over 16 so that's the line that we draw most are over 18 we actually have a range and the majority of the players and the player panels fit between 18 and 35 but we do have players ranging from 16 up to over 65 we have a

handful of people who the reason for that is paperwork part of its paperwork parvis about holding information regarding young people that we don't want to do as a charity and in fact by a US law we're not allowed to hold data for children under 14 under 13 under 13 but to that point like the the solutions and the things are still applied to the work that you're doing your challenges are just very different compared to mainstream high that you brought up at one point that you had different information for how women might use this or that this is for America or Canada do you have more intersectional information about how this affects different diverse groups or different countries so we we've done some analyses around that we primarily focused around disability and accessible assistive technology use and that's where we've tried to detect whether there's any real patterns within the data I've done a variety of different cluster analyses and it's really messy people are really complex so while we can make some broad

statements such as we did in this regarding the numbers of people that use them trying to say there's this type of person that uses these sorts of options is not something we can do really cleanly and I really am reluctant to do so as well in all truth because it pulls away from this type of approach and pushes us back into different types of buckets potentially which we wanted to try to avoid people who can afford accessibility that is potentially an issue and that's one of the reasons that our charity gives our primary mission is getting people into the game and we provide grants to players with disabilities to be able to buy the equipment they need because those are serious issues especially around purchasing equipment so please donate table gamers that would be fantastic but we don't we also don't collect any information around things like income or employment or things like that we primarily focus around gameplay any other questions anyone awesome we did it

we did it I'm thank you guys so much we appreciate it