AMA: Accessibility Q&A with Karen Stevens

[Music] good morning my name is brian francis i'm a community manager with gdc and a contributing editor at gamasutro.com if you need to refer to me in the third person my pronouns are he him i am joined today by ea sports accessibility lead karen stevens who spent the last few years giving a number of great gdc talks about accessibility karen would you please introduce yourself hi i'm karen stevens it's kind of awkward because you just introduced me but i am the ea sports accessibility lead i've been doing this for several years i've been at ea for seven and a half years i was at microsoft for eight years before that did some accessibility there as well and before that i was actually in the medical industry um i my pronouns are she her but i'm not super picky and pronounced so as long as i know you're referring to me it does not really strongly matter to me um so yeah rolling right in

just waiting for that we can keep it going karen how's your how are you doing how's your gdc been um unfortunately i've been having trouble with captions and sessions so i haven't actually gone to any sessions yet i saw part of cherry session because it was recorded after the fact but i haven't had a chance to like see anything else so i'm really hoping i'm able to participate any more fully in the future i am deaf so um i am purely lip reading you and we'll probably have to use typed in questions too of course yeah um okay looks like everyone can hear us so we're gonna go ahead and get started um though that's interesting because we just talked about accessibility and now the folks who can hear us will be okay but everyone else will be um having some issues but we're gonna get started with some extra buffer time to get questions in okay um i'm going to get started with a little monologue um we're here to ask questions for karen so please go ahead and start typing

those in chat please use the questions feature in swap card uh because what you do if you do that is that then everyone can upvote the questions and then from there we need everyone to pick the questions they'd like to see answered by upvoting them i'll be pulling from that section and occasionally glancing into chat to make sure nothing we didn't miss anything if you need some inspiration uh i'd like to point out that a big thing at gdc summer has been the topic of accessibility in video games karen just mentioned cherry's session from earlier in the week uh the gdc live podcast had uh greg from ablegamers on we've seen developers like naughty dogs build incredible tools uh to help players with different uh disabilities play their game and the work karen karen has been here at multiple gdc's just kicking butt showing off what can be done um and it's been mind-blowing to see how the ea sports titles have done all this work to be more and more accessible to players um accessibility can take different forms though um earlier this month obsidian entertainment built a feature to help players of the arachnophobia

play their game grounded if you have any questions about building these features for karen we can get started on answering those because i see them coming in chat um i'm gonna go ahead and uh i'm sharing the first question we have with karen um this comes from uh this comes from jade summers uh what guidelines do you test against microsoft xags accessibility guidelines etc so we use a combination of guides that come in from all first party publishers because they all have pretty much all have something and they're all different so which means that if you combine those all together you have a relatively good cross section we also have our own so if you look and see our font guidelines i've had in some of our my different presentations those are actually in ea as well that we use those for certain critical path type things to make try to push things forward now you may notice a lot of things still aren't there a lot of policies we have is every year

must be better than last and you should never move backwards and if you keep doing that eventually you will reach those guidelines but we do have our own guidelines that are internal certification does manage them and the accessibility team because we do actually have a team um goes in and works with those people and we try to come up with guidelines that we all follow so that's roughly what they come against right on um i just dropped our next question for karen so i'm going to read it for the audience which is uh jason doss would like to know at ea sports have the dev teams on nhl nfl and fifa shared their accessibility suite of features i assume they mean with each other yes um and yes it depends on which game as to what's shared fifa and madden for example share quite a bit they both are using flight for their menu narration for example um all games at ea sports are all using the same libraries for text-to-speech speech to text which under the hood is about using ibm watson

and my talk i gave a couple days ago at gdc covers all of that so if you want more information and links as to how you can use those features then that's a good example um in terms of code bases the code basis of the game like fifa and madden have some commonality some games have more commonality than others so how much we use depends the colorblind module for madden is being used in a wide variety of games even outside of sports so same thing with the text-to-speech speech to text it goes outside of sports it's not just sports so a lot of things may incubate one team and they get spread across the entire company uh typing our next question in chat uh so i'll read it for the audience next question for christopher gomez how do you play test accessibility features really we play test them like we do anything else um honestly we really need to do more in general um we do ask types of questions with the usability in mind because really usability and accessibility are related if usability is simply accessibility is

usability that's considering a wider audience more or less so we do cover things like that um we do have like my teammate for example it acts as a filter because due to various legal like hipaa type laws it's not possible for us to currently ask um our employees to give feedback along those lines but it is legal to ask my team and i'm deaf i have a co-worker that's totally blind multiple civil mobility issues and so between my actual team we just so happen to be a good cross cut and since our job is accessibility it's okay to ask us so my team acts as a filter and guide for all that um but really we need to do more in this area karen i'm going to ask a follow-up question i'm typing in chat for you um uh let's see um i'm sorry for the brief silence i just need to type this myself uh and i can't copy and paste it

okay so the question i just asked karen uh for the audience is how should developers prep for the legal requirements around building accessibility features given that karen just brought up the good point of uh employers often can't legally ask certain people about that in certain ways talk to a lawyer seriously um i'm i am not a lawyer i cannot give legal advice i can't speak the answer you know relative things that they have happened that i've noticed that there are legal issues to degree but um i literally cannot give legal advice and i have to ask you to speak to your local legal counsel and i recommend doing that immediately honestly because um it blessed very on region and depends on where you are shipping things what you can or can't ask also varies by region so what i said is very specific to certain regions so please ask your local legal counsel for the regions of which you're working in because it does wildly

vary that is a great point and i think just as valid an answer um uh we are still waiting for more questions i would like to advise folks in chat that if you are still getting the spinning multi-colored inconsistently colored wheel um uh please go ahead and refresh the page uh that will bring the video back online um from there i am going to pull from questions that i prepared uh for karen however i was ill i was overconfident and did not move them to my other machine this morning so i'm going to type them in right here okay and for the audience what i just asked karen is what does your process for designing in-game communication look like at the start of development um okay so i will say we should ask more

generalized questions and um as opposed to these questions i will answer this however um so forget about in-game communication what does process for designing accessibility look like um so um it really needs to start from the requirements level and go all the way through you should be looking at this when you're first designing your game even before you've actually made any menus and things and um that's in general good for all features it doesn't really matter what the feature is the later you do accessibility the more expensive it will be because you'll be finding out that oh wait you don't need phone requirements oh look you didn't think about uh menu narration like it's really really important to try to think about this as early as possible and design this in as early as possible because then you're not going back and having to fix things and that's more expensive than doing it in the first place the question uh that i uh the question that i prepared was that

lots of games have been implementing ping systems to allow for non-verbal communication are these ways are there ways that these people okay never mind uh that question has been mixed so to go over that um just in general when you're working at a paying system please make sure you're considering all your audiences including blind gamers because they're often missed and they are just as important as everybody else um also make sure you're considering your deaf gamers so you're not making a pink system that's audio based because that's a problem so largely just try to consider a full audience when working on any system right um we're gonna pull ryan lippert's uh question ryan lippert would like to know i'm a law student in california they anticipate grant graduating december and they're interested in this topic what if anything would you recommend they do between now and then and then to get some experience in this field and reading recommendations and for what it's worth they have adhd and they would like to know how the industry is when it comes to employees to adhd

sorry for repost my first attempt accident oh okay yeah that's not part of the question all right i i'm i'm reading the question right now um actually i have add i've been diagnosed with apd um so i i i feel for you um it can be it really you need to what helps me is figuring out what my own accommodations are and for me i like i try to streamline things as much as i can i have my own database that i use for tasking that's called currently jail or jazz and i actually have an internal email address that when i email it creates tasks for me which is really helpful because people outside of my team can um give me these tasks and we can um go from there so like uh i can use that to just populate database but i also use that for my own needs so every time somebody asks me something even when i'm in a meeting i can fare off a one-line email to this thing even as soon as somebody asks and it immediately gets sent off

another thing i use is there's literally a white board right behind me and the other side is completely covered with scribbles and um if somebody asks me something i literally always have a pile of whiteboard markers on my desk and i literally just write it immediately behind so i don't lose track um so that's just my own ways of handling this since like i said i do have add um and um yeah it's it's takes it takes figuring out what works for you because every single person is different and even if we're all diagnosed it's similar ish type things somewhere add and adhd are slightly different um that um it's figuring out what works for us and it's i will say that this sometimes things can be more challenging in a closed environment but honestly i like working from home and the fact that um that's all you know current work from home everybody doing thing because it's quiet and that really really helps me so um a plus i'm deaf so actually when i'm sitting in my off my desk at work i'm not wearing my hearing aids so i can just turn it off now the opposite would be wearing noise

canceling headset if you're not deaf um for me i just basically put my hearing aids in instead of taking a headset off um but like that sort of just trying to stay closed helps when i am in an office environment i have used really really tall boards for example like foam boards even though i'm at a cube and i actually had made extra walls around me so i can't see anything and that's helped me too so it's a matter of figuring out ways to help yourself focus because i've had these mic these challenges myself our next question is coming up did that go through yes it did um next question from christopher gomez how would you teach accessibility to game designers um workshops can help having um i have a confluence site that has information internally for this type of thing so i can um if someone asks me a question i can feed them to a link to the answer that if i assuming it's something i've already answered if it's not that i make

a new web page that covers it um and i had to have um like an eight-hour master class i've done before that i've used i've drawn information from and it's important to work with all game teams individually so like for ea a good chunk of our teams have accessibility like um liaison type people so we have people who have been appointed or have volunteered to be the accessibility contact so i can give information to them to be passed along and that helps too i will also say that uxr is really important so um if you have a uxr group having uxr people work with your designers can help too and then have them be the ones to evangelize um different accessibility practices so and also just sending them to things like gdc and having them cover that sort of things really helps our next question comes from daniel repair they work for the wounded warrior project daniel thank you for joining us

um uh and thank you for your service um some of our veterans have tbis lost limbs etc what is a good resource for adaptable controllers um xbox's accessibility controller would be my first recommendation it works on most platforms at this point and it allows attaching many many different types of devices to it which gives you a wide variety of options also on the xbox there is a concept of copilot so you can have multiple input devices work at the same time this can help you if you can use if you want to use a regular controller and also have like your feet use some buttons you can set it up so you can use the accessibility controller for some inputs and then your the regular controller for others that works well too so um those are all options i i highly recommend and there is if you go to microsoft's website there is a large amount of information available for all the different types of inputs that you can use with an accessibility

controller oh sweet i just want to thank chat real quick for bringing in more and more questions they're coming in really quickly um and they're up voting really quickly thank you from jason doss with ea doing accessibility features built into games do you also access test accessibility features in regards to hardware specifically do you test your game features for say xbox adaptive controller or any third-party accessibility hardware thank you we do to some degree not as much as standard controllers i will say that a lot of our play testing labs now are actually gaining xbox accessibility controllers and with a wide variety of adaptions so people are actually using those in our play testing sessions and things and we also are um i have several controllers that especially prefkovid people would be continuously borrowing from different teams so they can use those with all the different attachments like i have a gooseneck attachment i have one-handed controller pieces i have joysticks i have all sorts of things buttons and switches and toggles so um they are being tested they are not

being as regularly tested as standard controllers and i can see that being an improvement for the future i am sending our next question along from olivia tandowski uh how do you address accessibility for mental health concerns so this would be more of a general thing than game specific at this point in time um one thing i have had come up because i've had i do i do um spend a lot of time speaking to people with various types of issues and getting information from first-hand experience and i will say that i've noticed um quite a few people at ptsd for various reasons have mentioned especially veterans with ptsd i've mentioned things like it's important to have audio tracks that will be specifically for things that could be contentious for example a gunfire could be an issue um a medic someone shouting out for a medic or yelling on bleeding out can be an issue now the actual concept of gun warfare may not be the problem in itself it could just be very specific things like that so um

let's go back to like things like gears of war they had a option for flower blood that was pretty awesome that was a great way of handling it um or you know option no blood no gore no core is a great option too um so things like that makes a lot of sense um and i highly recommend that if you can think about the different types of audiences and things people may be afraid of i know a game recently came out with the arachnophobia mode i can't remember the name of the game off the top rounded from obsidian thank you um things like that really help um now it could also be that maybe it's stressful and that causes issues like for various things it's super timing so lack of hairline timing could be a good thing i mean different difficulty levels can help too there's a lot of ways to address different types of mental health issues in games uh well before the next question goes up i will just say wow i never thought that um some of the specific triggers might not be uh um you know the the

violent the gunfire of the violence itself but specific realistic um uh cues like someone shouting medic um from dom harris i'm making a fast-paced top-down shooter and would love to make it as accessible as possible i've got sliders to control game re speed for people with slower reaction speeds i've got made sure is all color blindness friendly and works with a screen reader that sort of thing is there anything else for uh this type of game a top-down shooter that you can suggest wow that's a difficult question cause it sounds like you covered a lot already um those are really good starts um make sure that when you're doing colorblind friendliness that you're picking something that will work with most people because human eyes vary a lot so if you're using filters for example it may not cover everybody that's true almost anything you pick so having brightness and contrast can help too contrast in particular high contrast is great for people with low vision a low contrast is great for people with

photosensitivity so both matter that's one thing to keep in mind i do like the fact you have game speed in particular alternate controls and reduce button modes can be helpful too real quick i'm just going to go ahead and catch up with chad for a second while we prep our next question uh thank you all again for participating um i will grab uh this question one second um eric arzola would like to ask uh what has been your worst experience while testing a game i'm just going to answer this is which experience playing a game something without captions and if it's something without captions or any indication of what things are going what's going on or what my goal is without only audio i am deaf and lip reading and i can't lip read a video game so if a game has like audio only and it's telling me what to do and it's very specific as to what i need to do i am probably not going to be able to play the game

and there are several games i can think of that i'm not going to names i don't want to call anybody out that have been problems for me our next question comes from jade summers jade would like to ask what is the hardest thing to try and implement at the last minute when making a game um really hard to answer because games vary so very much um it could be that menu narration could be an issue for you because maybe you don't have enough disk space depending on how you choose to do it or it's you you're against the wall with performance and that could be a problem it could be font size is too small and there's literally not enough room on the screen to fit everything at a font size is legible and really varies it so it really it depends on your situation it's just important to try to consider it at the beginning um because pretty much anything can be expensive if added in too late while we're waiting i will also say that custom controls can be difficult to cover last minute as well so please keep

also keep that in mind roger that i hope that's a good point um yeah i'll read the question i just sent to karen uh what is a topic you didn't have time to cover in your talk that you would like developers to hear um so for my talk one thing i would like to overemphasize is that when you're doing um different when you're considering what api to use to make a synthetic voice keep in mind that most platforms have them already so um like apple has voice over windows has a narrator it is possible to use that in your games like i was the tech lead for all the games that came with windows 7 back from microsoft and all those games had the ability to be menu narrated even though they were all directx based and it is possible to do that and it's not as hard as you think so keep that in mind that you can actually like make conceptual overlays um keep in mind that when you're working with blind accessibility that the way people navigate things can be different than when

you don't have the feature turned on you'll notice that windows narrator itself makes windows behave differently because it's assuming keyboard-based navigation not mouse-based navigation and i really really strongly recommend turning on narration on your own local platforms that you're implementing on especially if it's windows or a phone or a tablet to see how it's navigated and how it works because i'll give you a lot more information right there as to how to use your game or how to implement that in your game our next question comes by way of both uh pat demondahl and uh with some clarification from nicholas george thank you both for asking this i just want to make sure i asked it in the uh as best as i could um uh how do you get people whether it's developers or gamers to buy in on accessibility mattering um i will point out that there's such a thing as a vocal minority so keep that in mind when you're working

on feedback because the vocal minority tends to drown out the majority sometimes so it may not be as negative as you may think um generally speaking especially each following generation is more than more inclusive than the last and gen z in particular just wants to know why can't i play with my friends so keep that in mind that it does often come from the right place and it's not as contentious as you may think now when it comes to development but i will point out the fact that this is using us census numbers um one in five people are disabled when it comes to 18 plus it's one in four by the time you get to mid 70s it's one in two and statistically speaking most people will be permanently disabled before they die so it affects a very very large number of people and gamers are aging yes we have new gamers coming in all the time but people generally speaking don't stop gaming so that's just things to keep in mind when doing this and that it is a large audience and

those numbers don't even count the 1 in 12 men who are colorblind so they're when you're talking about these features using the statistics can really help explaining how it helps people can do and i'd like i know that like over half a million madden users are colorblind so when you come with those numbers and it's like yeah you know half a million people can't play your game adequately you may not know that some of the ui is there it becomes a lot easier to try to um push things through so um i used a game jam to get started and that's how i put in these features into madden and then i showed um the pod like i got a lot of positive feedback and pressing things and the things i did do and i use that positive feedback to say look people actually like this it matters people care and that helped me be able to do more so that all keeps in mind you use feedback from other games is if you go out there and do search on accessibility into like news articles you'll find a ton use that information to try to help make pitches to put features into your game that really does

work um uh uh a follow-up from pat demondahl what negotiation techniques can help convince stakeholders that accessibility is needed so yeah like i said again um showing that other game companies are doing things can help so that's why the news articles and feedback and all that really do matter statistics also helps with that pitches especially like executive level pitches can be really helpful you might have to work up your chain for that so at that point start with your producer level and executive producer and work your way up depending on how big your company is um but yeah it's it's it's challenging like and um be aware that small steps matter so like when i originally put the features into madden i did almost everything within a month alone so it doesn't have to take a lot doesn't have to take a lot of people to start and if you can show benefit with a little bit you started with that'll give you more attraction to do more so baby steps do matter and same thing with

like how we're handling increasing font size and games and things if you if you can get one pixel larger than the previous year that's still an improvement and if you do that every year you will get there so it's important to try to do little steps and work incrementally um big steps would be awesome but little steps matter too uh we are going to do a last call here we are we have a couple extra minutes uh to uh account after our tech issues from the uh top of the hour um uh so if you'd like to get your question in get it in right now and we'll grab it uh while we're here i will ask folks to please fill out the session evaluation which in this uh case will come by way of a rating that either pops up in your notifications or will be visible in the session after it's done um uh and uh you know feel free to fill out your session evaluation your feedback for the end of gdc that will come in your email that feedback will help us make the show better next year whether it's virtual or in person our next question from jason doss after

uh could you please explain how much planning goes into directional control patterns they've played ufc in the la in the past and there are so many movement patterns on the analog sticks some movements can put stress on the thumb without needing to press a button sorry i will say this varies incredibly from game to game and the most important thing you can do is if you do run into issues just to make sure you give us feedback i have a twitter account of ea underscore accessible i recommend tweeting this sort of thing there is also a forum of ea.com able able and this is super important to give feedback on so we know that these are issues that need to be worked on because all games are wildly different and we are going to miss things so um yes feedback matters make sure you say things make sure if you say you like something too i know somebody who's using eye gaze technology to play the sims with their eyes and it's really important to tell us that that's that's currently being used

and appreciated to make sure we don't accidentally break it um because we may not realize that something is super important to somebody and accidentally turn it off and then cause problems and not mean to so it's important to say what you like and what you don't like so we can work towards a more accessible future uh real quick i need to uh um own up to a mistake from a couple of seconds ago uh pat who asked a couple great questions uh their last name is dima ondahl not the way i phrased it before um our final question will come from chris miglio uh don't most text to speech solutions need to be connected to the internet what if you want the text-to-speech voice to be on the device without having to be connected to the internet so for both madden and fifa you do not need to be connected to the internet for text-to-speech to work for menu narration in particular you still need to be connected to the internet to do multi-player because it's multi-player you have to be connected to the internet to take multiplayer um but um for just menu narration we're using a tool called flight i have a link to it in my gdc

presentation that was presented on tuesday so i recommend going there and looking at the last slides and getting that link and basically it does menu narration on the fly so we just pass in text and it gives audio and it that works relatively well nhl actually has pre-recorded menu narration so we use voice actors to do the recordings and so that is also on disk um menu narration in general i don't i think most of our games support it without the internet roger that uh this is it uh thank you all so much for asking your questions they've been wonderful thank you for folks who are participating from different parts of the game and game development community um we appreciate you joining us today karen if they have more questions for you where can they ask them i recommend twitter is probably the best place so ea underscore accessible um i am happy to answer any questions you have roger that uh thank you all so much for joining us today and uh i hope you have a wonderful final

day of gdc summer have a good day everyone thanks bye [Music] [Applause]