Building an Inclusive Tech Lab: How and Why You Should Too

[Music] welcome thank you mrs. so much for being here I appreciate you being here because as you can see I understand that it's 9:30 in the morning and that's hard for a lot of people myself included so thank you so much from the both of us for for being here today and uh today we're gonna be talking about building an inclusive tech lab how we did it and why should also do it and you know tips tricks and things that we've learned but before we dive into that let's tell you a little bit about who we are so hello I'm Tara I'm currently a mixer program manager and also the head of accessibility for mixer but along with Brandon I am one of the gaming and disability community leads at Microsoft I must of the co-director of the game accessibility conference that happens the Monday before GDC so it just happened and we're looking to expand we're trying to get one in Paris later this year we decided that yesterday less

than 24 hours after I'd done my other conference they were like but what if you did another in Europe I was like you guys have they're worse please just let me calm down but my background before that was in triple-a game development I've been in the industry for 10 years as of Saint Patrick's Day but enough about me what about you Brandon well my name is Brandon's a hand and I'm actually a release manager at 343 industries working on all things Halo but I'm also a gaming and disability community lead at Microsoft I've been in the games industry about 15 years but I've been working with the disability community about 20 I have a background in studying American Sign Language so with that being said what are we going to talk about today well first we're gonna tell you how our lab even came into existence we're gonna give you a virtual tour of the lab then we're gonna talk about the things that we kind of learned along the way as we were making that lab and then things you can do to

make your own inclusive tech lab so enterica actually in asked to switch with you because the glare on the screen is whoo making reading some of these notes hard so gaming for everyone who started in 2015 at Microsoft this movement this affirmation of the fact that we wanted to make gaming fun for everyone regardless of race ability gender identification and the whole the the point behind gaming for everyone was really to build relationships we wanted to build relationships with our customers we wanted to build relationships with our colleagues internally at Microsoft and our partners to figure out how we can better understand what it means to make safe inclusive game experiences Gaming for everyone is about taking ourselves out of our comfort zone it's about looking

at our products and our services through a whole new set of lenses and it was in that spirit which we created the inclusive tech lab now it's easy to forget that between 10 to 15% of the world's population live with some form of disability and that's staggering and those disabilities vary greatly in terms of how they impact people's day-to-day lives including how the game so first and foremost our goal was to bring awareness to disability how it can be a barrier to game play and how being excluded from gaming can have a significant impact on an individual's life now once people understand what it means to be or to be a part of that gaming a disability community to understand why gaming and accessibility is important we then have to educate them on how to design inclusively for that community to that end we realized

after many discussions we needed a space we needed a space dedicated to learning a space dedicated to developers and community advocates that could come together and I ate on ways to make Xbox a place for everyone a space to share best practices and missteps as well as think creatively on how we can make games not just access of all but enjoyable for as many people as possible a space that developers would leave energized educated and ready to go back to their teams to share their knowledge the things they had learned and inspire them to do great things now unfortunately being crammed in a tiny conference room is not really conducive to education and energizing those tend to be more draining and disheartening no I totally love all of the meetings were you're all are sitting at a table around computers totally

engaged within to one another what are you talking about I know right we we wanted to try something a little different than that so what we decided was we were gonna create a space that was comfortable it was gonna facilitate creativity and community and we wanted the room itself the space itself to exemplify inclusive design now we realize that by building out such a dedicated lab we could not only ensure that we met all that criteria of Education empathy building but we could also use it as an embassy for the gaming and disability community a place where they could come in and feel at ease sharing they're open and honest feedback with us and hopefully by building out such a dedicated space we could demonstrate to the world that we were serious about being a leader in inclusive gaming with the hopes that others would see that commitment and choose to join us so with that being said let's show in the lab all right so when we take give a tour of the inclusive tech lab we actually kind of

have it divided into four quadrants and when we go to give us a tour we actually break it up into the four quadrants so I just have pictures of the four quadrants to go with you through today so we're gonna start with our inspiration wall which is the first thing you see when you walk in on the left so we've actually had a version of this inspiration wall since the very beginning before the lab was actually a lab but I'll get into that a little bit later so for us it's really important to have a constant reminder of what we're doing and who we're doing it for so special effect is a charity in the UK they work with a lot of gamers with disability and building custom controllers and custom solutions for them and as you can see here these are all pictures of people that they've actually helped and later if you want to come talk to me I can like share the Twitter so you can get like more in depth of closer visuals of what's happening here but they're doing a lot

of work they're crafting controllers they're wiring things in real weird ways it's pretty amazing but what's really important is there's a huge variety here so for us being able to see the solutions they are coming up with lets us see the challenges that they're going through and then when we can see that challenge we can try to think of new ways to make it easier for these guys because all they want to do is game and we want to help them game so an example kind of this like what problems are they're patient how do we come up with a solution is I mentioned a lot of them are wiring multiple controllers together so what if we made that easier boom copilot so copilot is a way on Xbox where you can take two controller inputs and have them shared as one input so for these guys rather than having to wire two controllers together to operate maybe one with you know the left arm and want the right foot they could use copilot and have the system do essentially the heavy lifting of wiring

together now they don't have to break their controller or wire them or void the warranty so this was just a kind of example of how we can see their challenges and figure out how to make it easier for them directly cross from the inspiration wall is our demo space so we actually have four demos we have space that's for four demos we have three set up right now and for us we know a lot of developers I mean almost all developers are problem solvers and once they understand what the problem is and they understand the challenge then we'll come up with solutions so with these demo spaces we have an opportunity to show everyone who comes in while we're talking about and it can be so much more impactful than just trying to describe the problem so these are three of the demos that we actually have right now and I say right now because we do switch them up and change them from time to time but I'm gonna tell you about the ones we have right now so on the left is the quad stick it's a 3d printed puff and sip kickstarter backed controller and it's fully

operated with your mouth so a lot of the times we have to introduce people to the fact that you know some people aren't using the standard controller and some controllers that these gaming these gamers are using are very different from what we picture as a controller so we have that there so people can see like you need to break your notion of what a controller looks like or feels like so in the middle that's a picture of our eyes-free setup so the black part folds down to cover the monitor and the user is able to experience and understand stuff like how someone may be using the narrator to navigate on the Xbox and then on the far right that's actually our rocket league demo with a custom controller set up and I'll go into a little bit more detail later about how exactly that works but it's another way to show people how to play a game with inputs that they're probably not used to and all of these stations give the lab guess a different way to experience games and think about how their people may engage with the game so the third

area is really our meaning space and like we said earlier we wanted to make it a warm and welcoming space because we don't want people to come in here and get bored so it has plenty of chairs that's actually a surface touchscreen which by the way has like a glitter pen that you can draw with not that I ever derail mate meetings to use the glitter pen but it also has a microphone it has a camera set up so for remote meetings so we can connect with our teams in different locations and by hosting meanings in the space we're literally able to put the attendees in a position where they are completely surrounded by accessibility and accessibility thoughts something else that's actually pretty cool is our third-party hardware test lab is off this room so when we're hosting meetings with these third-party teams we actually do it in here and so they get to see that we're dedicated to accessibility and we really hope that it makes them think about what they're building in new ways and maybe new uses for them because we're we're

putting them in the space to talk about you know their hardware and we also use the space for what all inclusive design Sprint's which I'm really excited about we basically will host a team and subject matter experts about whatever we're talking about and developers from those teams and let them learn from each other and it's very inspiring for our developers because they again they get to see what people are doing to engage with our product how they're engaging with our product and get to hear directly from the consumer the problems they're currently experiencing we actually just did one for a mixer last January and I was incredibly proud of the team all right so Tara was kind enough to let me do this slide because this is one of my favorite parts of the lab and that is the living room experience you know when I came to three for three it kind of hit me I was sitting in front of a computer working on game development and I was eighteen inches away from that monitor but let's think about it how many console gamers are actually playing eighteen inches away from their monitors

not many right I mean the majority of console gamers are sitting in their living rooms or their bedrooms or their caves most of us are six to 10 feet away actually at my house I'm a loving feet away from my TV and we're using stereo speakers we're using surround sound receivers we're not using headphones and so you know obviously when you're sitting farther away from the screen it's gonna be harder to see detail to read text but beyond that there's other environmental factors that can more easily impact a living room setup glare from lighting similar to what I just experienced earlier background noise viewing angle acoustic properties of the room all of those things can make it more difficult to see or hear what's going on in a game for everyone not just somebody with a disability so what we did here was with the lab when we set it up we wanted to be able to try out all sorts of rooms configurations we use adjustable lighting and furniture that

can be easily rearranged that way we're able to ID eight on ways to better or deal with some of these typical environmental issues we also use the space to test out the latest and greatest audio-visual technologies and because those latest and greatest technology often offer us some additional capabilities to explore as it relates to using them for accessibility so in the picture here what you're looking at is a 4k 75 inch o le D TV it's hooked up to a Dolby Atmos 5.1 point for surround sound system and not only do games and movies listen or sound and look amazing on this system but we've been able to discover that there's some things we can take advantage of with those technologies that can make gaming much more inclusive as an example with Dolby Atmos the ability to render audio objects in 3d as

they relate to the specific environment in which you're sitting in is can produce a level of fidelity audio fidelity that can make audio navigation systems audio cue systems for those who are visually impaired or blind incredibly accurate and helpful when dealing with various different types of gaming situations and speaking of latest and greatest AR vr m are they're all incredibly exciting new technologies that you know gaming is taking a part in but strategies and best practices for designing these they there aren't a lot of them out there Ian Hamilton who's a well-known game accessibility expert has written an article that covers some of this stuff but there's still a lot of exploration going on in this space so we dedicated a section of the lab just to VR and to future technologies now the thing that's really important to call out here is that we have lots of products that

aren't made by Microsoft you know of course we have hololens we have some of the AR devices we partnered on but we also have an oculus rift we have a ps4 VR and the reason for that is we don't pretend to know or to say you know we don't pretend that we know all the best ways to tackle all these inclusive design challenges in with these new technologies you know it's important for us to see how our partners and our competitors are tackling those issues we want to understand what the gaming and disability community believes to be the best practices regardless of the platform so how did we get here this is obviously something that didn't happen overnight we didn't just wake up and have an inclusive tech lab although that would have been awesome and I'm sure you know Evelyn and Bryce over here would have been super excited to just wake up and it existed rather than all the hard work and you know leg work they had to do to make it happen but it's actually a really interesting story on how we went from nothing to a dedicated inclusive tech lab so this was not a straight line

or a clear-cut process it had a lot glow growth learning exploration and it definitely evolved over time like there wasn't a roadmap like it was you know the whole way like okay well this seems like a good idea or this seems like a good idea in in learning so for us it really started with inspiration from a popular charity for gamers with disabilities so AbleGamers has something called an expansion pack AbleGamers teamed up with Humble Bundle SteelSeries electronics our Jenks and Corsair components and creative packs that would be donated and installed as permanent fixtures for places like group homes special needs daycare facilities and long-term living centers and these pacts were intended for facilities with multiple special needs patients and these donation bundles included assistive technology specialty controllers and of course great video games and the first expansion pack was installed in a pediatric specialty care

unit in Hopewell Pennsylvania and it had great success so they had quad sticks they had a joint controllers which is a controller where you kind of do all the remapping on the hardware switches and so much more and this really inspired us and was like how do we kind of take their expansion pack idea and and make a space where we can teach developers using it so for us our first tab I thought was actually what we now refer to as an arcade so funny enough although I wasn't a Microsoft employee at the time I was actually there for the first arcade so every year Microsoft has the ability summit which is all about accessibility and so this year in sixteen that was the first year that game accessibility was introduced into the speaking lineup which is actually why I was there so for the arcade we had a range of specialty controllers simulators and information going through the pictures here we had a setup made by warfighter engaged veterans with

disabilities by creating custom controllers we had let's see Brandon wearing motion restricting gloves we had Bryce demonstrating the quad stick he's actually playing fours although you can't see it in that picture and some vision reducing angles and this was part of what we had today there is actually so much more we had there including other stations for like low vision simulation and one thing that's not pictured here was actually the first version of the inspiration wall where we had all of the pictures of special effects so that for us has been there since day one and after the ability summit the team took the set up and kind of did pop-up versions of it in it's called the Commons it's like where there's like studios ABCD that have a lot of Xbox people and then in the middle there's like essentially like a mini mall full of restaurants and they were just doing pop-up versions of it there so while people were going through they would see it so it's a high traffic

area special at lunch and at other opportunities but it was clear that you know this little pop-up station wasn't enough like it wasn't permanent it wasn't as strong as it could be and then like we got lucky what really came next was the opportunity we were craving a permanent home and we just needed a space but where would we get space where would it go lucky for the team there was actually like a workout area that was kind of being underutilized and people were thinking of getting rid of it anyway or moving it and that was our time we're like ooh wait wait we would like a space and because we'd had the arcade and we've been carting it around the whole time we've basically been working to legitimize the idea and the work we were doing and we're like oh but wouldn't it be great if that thing we keep doing had a home and it showed why it was important and why we deserve to have the space but you know beyond the fact that there was a space that was opening up part of it

was being in the right place at the right time not only has accessibility been on the rise in the games industry for the past few years the dramatic increase in both features and awareness there was also a culture shift happening within Microsoft so in 2014 Satya Nadella became CEO for Microsoft and after that Microsoft revised his mission statement to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more but for Satya accessibility is very personal his first son has severe cerebral palsy so I'm just gonna to quote him on Microsoft's accessibility work our work in accessibility has an incredibly deep meaning to me personally our family's experience has required me to continually hit refresh on my emotions and my outlook and it is in this constant quest for renewal that I realize despite the fact we are making progress we still have much to do quickly for so many and so the fact that that was how Microsoft was starting to think about accessibility and we were showing up and being like hey hey hey we'd like a home like we got really

really lucky so kind of what we were doing was fitting in line with Satya schools empowering everyone and it also was right in line with the gaming for everyone commitment but it does take more than just being in line with your company's ideas and messaging right so for us we needed to get executive sponsorship someone you know at the leadership level wanting to back us and we were actually really lucky in that we got that so really for the lab like something like that needs breadth and it needs people who care to do the legwork but having support from the top down it's also incredibly important so for us getting the executive was about three things so first you know showing the need and this is how you guys can get executive sponsorship by the way so shopping the need people who are learning from the arcades but they weren't the arcades weren't always around and we didn't have a space to learn or explore because it was temporary and we needed to show that

there was a goal like there was a craving for learning and we wanted to innovate and the space would help us do that but you it's also really important to know how to measure your success and success in an inclusive tech lab could be so many things maybe it's a map visited the lab or the amount of inclusive design features that that shipped or the number of developers who now know one more thing than before and we kind of had to learn you know what is success for the lab so yeah learning this whole experience has been about learning and it was it's been you know putting together the lab was an incredible journey and the learning all along the way constantly looking back some of those learnings they seem pretty obvious now not some not so much but we want to share with you guys some of those learnings so that you have a head start

if you decide to make your own dedicated inclusive technology lab alright so this is the audience participation portion of the presentation so first off how many of you guys have seen those pregnancy simulators you know the ones with the big bellies that you strap on right all right now quick question can anyone in the room who has had a baby and thinks that those simulators fully and accurately represent being pregnant can you guys just raise your hand you guys with anyone no no not what no didn't think so yeah you see so if they don't why do we have right well they give us a lens by which we can try to better understand you know some of the challenges of pregnancy but look it's not the same as being pregnant right and the same goes for accessibility simulators you know we have goggles in the lab to simulate visual impairment

we have earplugs to simulate audio impairment gloves you saw earlier that simulate fine motor impairment all those things can give us a better sense of ways we might be able to tackle certain challenges but they will never accurately reflect what it's like to have one of those impairments so while we may use them to think creatively about product design its to know that we never use them to validate designs validation needs to be handled by those who understand accessibility challenges firsthand I can't stress this enough we do not and never will roleplay disabilities in our inclusive tech lab to validate products now that wasn't something we necessarily learned when we were building the lab but what we did need to learn was how to relay that message to individuals who were coming into the space that's why we always curate art lab tours and why we have signage like the signage you see

above that clearly explains this very important principle so we've obviously just told you that having simulators wasn't enough so we really did want to show authentic rigs you know so we had the pictures of everything that was happening with special effect and our first thought was just like let's take that and put this here and then let people see it and our first rocket League setup was so much more complex than the one we have now we were really trying to replicate what we were seeing on the wall and we found out it was way too much for people it was way too different so if you haven't been using that stuff and then you go to use it it was incredibly intimidating and people were basically in like shock and what we were trying to say wasn't getting through because they were so focused on this crazy thing they hadn't seen before so we really needed to back it up and make it more approachable so we basically learned less is more and this

was the end result so this is our current rocket League station so in this setup gas is the foot pedal that you can see on the floor the player students left and right using their the two blue and green buttons about knee height and there's the joystick on the arm and that's used for jumping and that's it and this rocket leak is an easy game with simple controls and using a pedal for gas it's already really natural for most people so this demo station was much easier for people to use and experience them what we had set up previously so you just have to show people the chain you don't have to go for the huge crazy rigs like just a little bit to kind of challenge what people are used to is totally enough and something else that we learned while building these crazy rigs is although people find a lot of this stuff cool to look at we actually didn't need to invest the money in it so on the left is the adroit controller and it's made by evil controllers in partnership with AbleGamers i mentioned it previously so that controller is $399

of 500 gig xbox 1s is 280 so that controller to play games on xbox it's literally more expensive than the Xbox itself and I'm not saying to be clear I'm not saying this is not a good product and for some players particularly on PC this is very very important we just found other things that we could use instead and this was to call it out this was really the first controller of its kind that did hardware and remapping like that so that was great and the craftsman shift was great but we just didn't need it we also have the quad stick the Pufnstuf controller and that also costs 399 dollars although there are other ones specifically made for first-person shooters that cost more than this one and that piece of technology also works fine no problems with it but it's not something we have people demo it's mostly there for show like we're not gonna have person after person put their mouth on this thing in the lab we could have had a picture great like I mean germs they're real and then finally we also have the X Keys now

don't get me wrong this box actually does a lot of stuff and if we're gonna buy one of these items buy that one it's also the cheapest at $125 we just found that we haven't really been using it in the lab so like these are three things that are expensive that we purchased that we're not doing much with we could have just done it with this so what we do use in the lab all the time is our modified may flash arcade stick ours has been modified to have additional ports on the bottom the joystick itself is like $80 we paid more than that for ours because we had someone modify it for us but lucky for you while one switch was making ours he actually created a walkthrough on how you could just buy a flash stick and edit yourself so that's the the short link at the bottom so if you want to do it and go DIY that's his walkthrough so arcade stick is actually what powers are rocket League demo we have all the

switches just plugged into that controller so switching gears a little bit one of the reasons that accessibility experts have a love/hate relationship with regulations well I'm gonna give you I'm just gonna show you why so I told you we wanted to build an inclusive accessible space right we wanted to make sure that our lab was entirely ata compliant and that included not just our demo stations not just our tech but like things like the door we wanted to make sure the door was a DAT compliant so when we did we looked at the ad a regulations we set off 32 inches fantastic we're gonna make our door 32 inches wide so we did and immediately after we started inviting community members in we realized we had made a huge mistake you see the problem is that 32 inches while being technically compliant it's not wide enough for certain scenarios for example someone in a large power chair could

still have difficulty navigating through the door or maybe someone in a smaller chair with a service dog or someone who was blind and being assisted by another individual so we'd redid the door it's now 47 inches wide this is the actual this is the after picture so you can see it's 47 inches wide and then we added a separate section that's about two feet wide that we can open as needed now this is the crazy part at Costco the single one time largest cost for us for the lab was that door so it just goes to show that a think about this stuff early on in your designing and be a compliant experience is not necessarily a good experience now not only did we want a good experience we wanted a fantastic experience right and we wanted to pay a lot of attention to details to ensure that we had a truly inclusive space so we thought about

things like furniture you know we knew we'd have to rearrange furniture for demos when we brought in users and power chairs so we picked the couch and chairs in tables that were light and easy to move around but that being said we also made sure that every piece of furniture was sturdy and stable so that you could use it for support if you had problems standing or walking for wheelchair users um we all of our demo desks have adjustable height and they have no obstacles underneath so people can roll right up to the stations now you'll notice that all of our chairs and couches are in bright colors now that wasn't just because we were trying to make it look pretty the fact is is that those different colors contrasting against the dark floor can make it easier for somebody with visual impairments to find a place to sit in addition other things we thought about when it came to visual impairment our information sheets in the lab are

printed in Braille as well we have a soda fridge and in that soda fridge there's dividers that have all the cans lined up and the label for each type of soda is in Braille as well we even thought about putting in things like stands for people to place their canes while they were sitting in in playing games now for those with sensory processing considerations we put an adjustable lighting color temperature brightness it can all be adjusted to best suit individual visitors and those lights are all connected to an automation system that can be controlled with voice so that users who have troubles operating switches can control those more easily now all of this being said we learned a lot we still have a ton more to learn that's why we're regularly bringing the community into our lab we've brought in groups from a

variety of NGO such as cerebral palsy foundation Seattle Children's Hospital and they've helped us not only id8 on ways we can make gaming better for everyone but how the lab can be a more inclusive and more welcoming and more effective space for promoting our message of inclusive game design it's not an exaggeration to say that every single time we've brought in the community into the lab we've learned something new about inclusive gaming and our inclusive tech lab we're also still learning that there have been some unexpected benefits that we didn't think we would get from the lab so for example we never intended to use the lab for recruiting but somehow word got out and recruiters heard about it and we started getting these requests to bring on potential you know recruits through the lab and we were kind of surprised asked why well it turns out that there are a lot of people who are really inspired by Microsoft's new mission of empowering every person

and every organization on the planet to achieve more especially Millennials seem to be really intrigued by that mission and our lab is a tangible representation of that commitment another cool factor that you know we weren't kind of expecting was the fact that the lab would afford us opportunities to get our message out via channels we might not otherwise get access to so for example we've had opportunities to partner with organizations like Game Stop to highlight the space and bring brought awareness to the need for gaming and accessibility this screenshot was a video that was put together for Game Stop TV it features Bryce and Evelyn who were the masterminds behind our lab and this has been featured in over 7,000 retail stores so wow what an amazing way to get our word out that we never thought we would have so now that you've seen our lab and how it came to be and what we learned in the process I know all of you are like oh my god I'm ready to go make

my own lab right now all right well we got you so that being said we know not every budget is created equal and so we kind of have tips and tricks on how you can replicate what we've done based on a you know the different resources you may have available so we're gonna kind of talk about small or non-existent medium and large budget today so look if you don't have a budget for a dedicated space or you're just in a really small space you can do what we initially we did and put together accessibility arcades you know as mentioned their temporary pop-ups of assistive tech and educational materials that can be used to educate folks on the basic concepts of gaming and disability now again they aren't ideal as you won't get all the benefits of the lab especially that that notion of having an embassy to bring the gaming and disability community into to introduce to your development teams but they can be a good place to start if you can't secure a permanent location for your lab so you're going the arcade

route again I want to reiterate what he just said don't worry if you can't make a full lab having just an arcade can be fine and don't worry I have been there so before I was with Microsoft I was working with Gaikai which is the cloud services division of PlayStation and I made an arcade with practically no money and just wrangling it up literally whatever I could find at home or in the office so let's talk about ways you can do that and he's successful so when I worked at Gaikai I didn't have a budget but I had people who were interested in accessibility and a special-occasion global accessibility awareness day and I made this little mini lab based on what I could find in the office so what did i do so PS we had ps4 part of PlayStation so that was pretty simple and a copy of uncharted a hugely popular game so Uncharted has a whole accessibility menu with tons of assistive features and I had a pair of the vision simulating goggles which by

the way you couldn't totally make on your own there are tutorials where you can basically take some welding goggles and some like saran wrap and make them yourselves for cheaper if you don't have the money to buy them so I had a stand that literally had uncharted and it's the assistive features anthem goggles to try to get people going I also just reached out to some other people so I mentioned warfighter engaged earlier I just emailed them and I'm like hey I'm doing this event do you have anything I can show off and they were like yeah sure and they sent me controllers I also had another like specialty game rig set up from another charity called game changer which helps children game during long-term hospital stays I also got a guest speaker so there was a twitch streamer named handy who has no arms or legs but plays first-person shooters and he was local and I was like hey I would love for you while I'm setting this up just come and talk I just tells your story again that was three when he came like I was like I can't pay you but here's like all the swag I can find in the office to give out like and that worked we also set up

a color blind station with two iPads so in that picture is Ezra he's one of our programmers who is actually colorblind and he ran into problems all the time because even our internal tools didn't always have a colorblind mode so we took my iPad and then my husband's iPad on the bottom one we had some puzzle game going and on the top one we had a colorblind filter and so we were basically telling people to play the game looking through the top one and they'd be like well I can't play it I'm like right that's hazards life all the time I get it so we also have two laptops that we're running and basically what we did was we were having people race to tried to get on the company Wi-Fi using the screen reader like that was it it was actually a really popular station because most game devs are gamers and therefore competitive so people wanted to win and then I had all of the information materials I could find anything that was out there I just printed it up and I

left it on the table and so all of this there was like a hundred dollars and something that I just got out of my pocket right other than like the free swag I stole from the office so you know we have this great day where I had a lot of people come up to me and tell me how much they learned and I didn't really spend any money so it can be done you have tons of stuff I am sure in your office that you can repurpose for just a day absolutely and you know what if you don't have something ask for it seriously like we didn't have an unlimited budget when we built our lab and look chances are you're not going to either but we were incredibly fortunate that we have these amazing partners that we work with you know that do peripherals that do televisions that do audio systems and we just reached out to them and said look we're doing this thing and we've got a finite budget and they really do a lot for us if you could help us out and showcase them your equipment here and at the same time we could use it to help demonstrate accessibility features and people said

yes in droves and it's really cool because not only do we get the win of having that you know being able to put our budget somewhere else but then those people get to show off their equipment in a really really cool sort of way I cannot tell you the number of times people have left lab going oh my god I need to have a Dolby Atmos system at home to the demo we do with the Dolby is like amazing I know right I've been trying to convince my wife not no luck so far but it's not just donating equipment it's donating time as well I mean as an example our lab is run by volunteers we handle scheduling of the space we prep for events we manage the tours we give presentations we keep all the demos and documents up to date it is a ton of work I'm not gonna lie but there's five of us small ant earrings so between it we're able to handle it and you know it's also just a great opportunity you know due to you know as

to educate people as well as people volunteer not all of our volunteers started out being accessibility experts but there were people who are curious to learn more and now they've grown their knowledge in their area of expertise by working in the lab so again don't be worried if you don't have money for a dedicated lab manager but maybe you do have some money not all the money some money you need to be smart about we are where you're gonna be spending it then and to be honest we really recommend that you spend it on PC and PC accessories this is where most of this technology is working best currently so if you're going to purchase these items again don't dive into buying the most expensive fancy custom stuff just get something like the may flash do the DIY updates and you know get some simple switches for it and if you're gonna have issues pitching this space as a standalone lab you know think of someone who could be a roomie with it would be

totally reasonable to share the space with like some user researchers sharing is okay that's fine and if you're making an excess space-like think you could then have playtesters when disabilities come in and you're sharing with user research so win-win right and another good thing to invest in is really a nice set of headphones if you're not going to get like the Dolby system you're probably not gonna get that right off the bat but you want to make sure that you can replicate stereo sound experiences as well for those who have low vision or our perhaps blind and finally find some great examples of media on what you want to teach people about we're lucky enough that we have multiple demo stations you may not be and that's okay sometimes finding a video a pamphlet any of that and having it kind of you know shovel ready to show people is all they are going to mean all right but let's say you just got a whole bunch of money I

don't know where it came from you're not asking you've got it let's spend it okay so the first two we kept debating on which we wanted to have first whether it should be make this a meaning space or hire staff for the lab I eventually just gave up debating and left it as is so invest in making this a meeting space as I've said previously being able to bring people in and have them have ideas and a place that they can talk to their people and like I said even bringing in people who maybe aren't there to talk to us about accessibility that we're just like oh well the only meaning room that was open is our inclusive tech lap like that's awesome and that's a win so any money you can dump into getting a camera a great audio setup for you no guy calls or whatever do that other than secondly that like I said the other thing was really important it's like if you could hire even a person to run the lab invest in it like I said so it takes us five volunteers to keep the lab like running

and we're constantly stretched super thin so like Evelyn has a meeting on Monday we're like okay these are the events in the lab that's happening you're like who can do it today and we're all just like I don't know and even just managing the calendar for the the lab is super hard because like we are we're so popular like but it's like it's almost a problem like we're almost too popular for our volunteers to be able to handle and I think if you guys make a space like hopefully you'd have the same problem so literally hiring someone the other thing is like having multiple demo stations is great especially if you have multiple people going through the lab you can have you know people doing different things at the same time and it really keeps people engaged and the next one is making conscious decisions about your space like you know we invested in making our door better you know figuring out like oh well this carpet maybe is

really hard for wheelchairs for some reason like spending the money to make the room a better place and that kind of leads into the idea of like a DA compliance plus plus like we said that you know compliant isn't always a good experience and so if you have the money to go beyond like invest in it it means so much to have a space that everyone can truly be in and be comfortable because that's not always something that happens all the time the next one like if you can manage to get the Dolby like get it we had a slide earlier when Brandon was presenting at the living room space and on the couch was a guy named sightless combat he is a blind gamer who was actually playing killer instinct in that and he was able to play in that room because of our awesome sound system and so you can actually enable a lot of experiences for people with low or no vision by having truly

awesome surround sound so like yeah it is super cool but it's also super useful for the space so invest in it and then the final thing is you know decor like we have a really sexy room like Game Stop filmed in there because it looks awesome we have other media stuff that gets filmed in there which means more people see it because the space looks great so if you have that extra money make it sexy people want to use it and I really can't understate how great the lab has been the inclusive design Sprint's have taught so many teams so much and this is actually a picture from mixers that we did last January and I was so proud of my team but what I saw happening with my team is happening with other teams and it's gonna keep happening with more and more teams and we're building stronger bonds with the community and has really helped us show that we care as Xbox and Microsoft we care about this community and it gives us a place to focus on the feedback that we've been giving and you know what we've made and what we have

coming that originates from or around the slab like I can't wait to see those ideas go live and funny enough we actually have some like what I'm talking about so much has happened like we have some data on that yeah so for those of you who are a bit more data oriented like myself these numbers I think are really helpful in showing the promise of a tech lab in five months okay just five months we've had over 3,400 individuals come and visit our lab to learn about inclusive game design and accessibility now 61% of those were visitors from internal at Microsoft designers producers executives we've even had members from our other core businesses such as Windows and Office come by and take a look our teams are drawn by that unique experience the lab provides and the opportunity to ask really tough design questions in a safe comfortable environment everyone always comes away better educated about our gaming and

disability community how to engage them and the best ways to meet their needs now 39 percent of our visitors visitors that means are external to Microsoft so that's again NGOs advocacy organizations academics business partners even local school groups have come by to tour the lab and to collaborate on ways we can make our gaming more inclusive not just at Microsoft but across the entire industry you know and regardless of whatever we're doing in the lab whether it's a tour a video shoot a design meeting or even just a party our goal is always the same let's educate let's build empathy and grow and support our gaming and disability community so with that being said our one ask come at us okay our lab is public please doesn't matter who you work for doesn't matter if you're with within the industry or you're with an advocacy group we just want you to come visit the

lab check it out we'll share back the best practices let's find ways to partner let's ensure that gaming for everyone is just that gaming for everyone regardless of how you play where you play what platform you play on and what abilities or disabilities you may have so with that let's take some questions we have a micro we have a microphone right here and since we're being recorded if you have an opportunity to ask a question please come up to the mic did we really do that good of a job no one has questions I knew it we we explained everything awesome oh we've got one yeah all right two things actually um in terms of doing it the cheap wake some other things to look at our artists and actually quilting tools for the

grayscale capability so they're tools that they're they're basically clear plastic red green green red filters that when you put them on top of something it causes it to look like colorblindness it's actually used by artists for greyscale to balance artwork digital artists tend to not be aware of it they tend not to use it physical artists do so that's another thing you can go to a quilting store you can go to Joanne's you can go to my favorite place which I'm not wearing today is amazon.com and pick up those kind of tools the other thing yeah so it's it's there 20 bucks something like that so they're they're real cheap and it's and it's real easy to set up in a lab the other thing you can do is also statically use your phone take a picture and then use the grayscale out of the photo app I think that's very similar to when I was showing the what I did at PlayStation like essentially like I had that app running in real time in an iPad with the other one under it doing the same thing

because for me it was really important to like have people try to play the game rather than just seeing a picture like I can show you a picture of me like I'm which one would you move but then the experience of watching people actually trying to play when they couldn't see the colors like it was more impactful than just here's a picture of what this game looks like but yeah I mean you you bring up such fantastic points right like the fact of the matter is you don't need to go invest in some $500 colorblind simulator right they start educating people there's really great tips and tricks that you can do I mean I never even thought about you know getting those filters from jo-ann's my wife goes there all the time I'll be attending her next visit so that's fantastic Oh coolest but I'm a carrier both my kids are colorblind my dad was colorblind so I've had to live with it my whole life the other piece is can you talk about the curb cut effect how is this change the games of the teams that have gone through this and actually resulted in improvements for all players Wow because

that's really where I was gonna say that's really where the payoff is for the broader audience because I struggle with convincing my leadership that we need to go do these things until you can prove to them that's like all players benefit well so I'm gonna let you take this but I one of the the cool stats that actually came out at the game accessibility conference is everyone has this idea that accessibility features are only for gamers with disabilities so it's like well for Assassin's Creed origins they actually showed the data that was something like 63 percent of players for playing with subtitles on I'm not a statistician but I feel like 63% of the people playing that game were not deaf I don't know feels not right but that's just showing that there there are more people using these features but ya know you know we've definitely had my ideas and things we have done in the games that we can show well and Tara can talk about mixer but since that's not technically a game I thought I might talk about it from like my experience

working at you know three for three and and with other games to do so we do these inclusive design sprints and you know one of the funny things about you know game development unfortunately especially triple-a game development is usually if you're working on something it takes a few years to get out the door right so I'm not gonna be able to talk anything about any specifics right now in terms of anything you've seen that's shown up yet because we just put the lab out recently but what I will say is this when we bring people into that lab and we start talking about inclusive design what immediately comes up almost always is oh wow you know there's a tiny change here there's a tweak here that we can make we already have this thing if we just tweak it you know one more degree we can often have this accessible feature we see tons of that right so it's fantastic because I'm seeing game devs who have already thought about features that can have some really inclusive potential some really accessible potential they just need that like one extra step they come in they make those connections and we see them

starting to make those changes so it's great to help it's it's been really valuable in terms of helping people knock out some of those low-hanging fruits of accessibility as everyone can actually ask you because they're recording yeah I don't think you want to talk into Brandon's neck that came in to the lab and they were pitching a particular accessory and once they walked them through the tour of the lab it fundamentally changed how they thought about their product and it changed the pitch for the product to be inclusive forward and they went back to their developers and started thinking more about how that really influences the products that they bring to market yeah thank you so much for your questions appreciate it all right who's

next sorry I had my students bug me oh yeah oh hey yeah so I'm a teacher actually building a lab oh and I was more interested in what sort of findings you've had for your developers because I have a lot of students that have a lot of these same disabilities and I was wondering if you've had any findings from your time bringing teams through through the developers at your studios so I think for us like we we don't want to be like hey this is how you should develop your games right it's the the challenges that the like so in your case like showing people what the students are doing so you know when we were looking at what special effect was doing with the crazy controllers we like okay how do we make that easier I don't think I said so from the other side for your actual developers that are disabled okay yeah I think one of the the fascinating things about the game industry right now is that we're thinking a lot now about accessibility and in games and that's fantastic like I mean I've seen more I've the momentum in

the last few years out does anything I've seen in the previous 13 years of my career but the fact of the matter is is that middleware tools ok game development tools are lagging behind actually right so even I've noticed yeah right so it's absolutely something we talk about when we're talking about game development and it actually it's surprising how often it comes up when people say oh man you know I'm building in this engine and it's just really really difficult to implement that feature in this engine those sorts of conversations are being had internally we also have a lot of our own internal development tools that we use and as you're starting to go through and run these tools through some of the simulations things we have and we're showing people how to build you start to find those those problems really quick so yes we try to not just talk about inclusive game development in terms of the end product for the customer but the tools need to be accessible to to the engines need to be accessible to because

we want a larger group of people who identify as disabled people with disabilities in the industry making the games and the only way that's gonna happen is if we make sure those tools and those engines are accessible to them yeah and we also totally understand that like it is great that we are making tools to make game development our games themselves more accessible you know and the stuff that were putting out on the Xbox we also know we're the end-of-line like hey by the time you've gettin gotten to us like if you hit a problem with the engine you're not making it to us to begin with so we we recognize that it's great we're doing all this stuff but we need to have conversations and partnerships with people who are before us and earlier in the pipeline to solve those problems because you know if you are having the problem trying to you know use a screen reader with unity well you're not gonna make a game so you're never gonna use our text-to-speech API because you literally didn't get to us yeah yeah a couple of things I'll mention about that is you specifically asked about developers we have found that when we brought people that are

within Microsoft and go through the lab it it does two things one we have some existing game developers who have not self-identified as having a disability and they've been inspired by the space and gone back to their team and disclose their disability of the team because not all disabilities are visible obviously and that has further educated their teammates about why it's important to invest in the tools that we use on a daily basis and the methodology that we apply to actually how we do development the other aspect that Brandon and Terry did talk about was the recruiting aspect we have found amazing success unintentionally having young developers coming in from all over the world we've had student groups from all over the world come in Beijing we had folks coming in from Norway and Sweden and young developers were inspired by that and went back to their educators and curriculum creators and recommended that they actually build some more

information into the curriculum specific to accessibility absolutely Thanks next next question hi there thanks so much for the for the session a reminder do you love this session please rate us five stars when you fill out your survey this isn't her first rodeo sorry go on okay so basically I have access to some spacing town so here small space so that means like I fulfill at least like say the first condition of running a lab but aside from that you know it's hidden it's not in Soma it's just like average neighborhood so I'm really interested in knowing the sorts of you know any kind of study cases I could take upon to know you know could you run a lab in a non hip neighborhood you know much smaller skill scale those kind of things yeah well you know we run we run our lab and probably you know we're you know I I don't know if you consider Microsoft hip or hot oh you know we're in a studio like in a small area one often one of our in Studio B but in

terms of spaces that are outside of the you know out of side of a specific studio liking neighbors and whatnot we actually don't have any Studies on that a be a fantastic thing to look into so after this talk why don't we sync up I'd love to chat with you more about like what you're thinking about and there might be some opportunities and we can certainly try to track down some more information but today this is still a pretty new concept from what we've seen and I haven't personally not aware of anything that's been done outside of like a studio or anything like that oh that would be great yeah and it goes for the I mean same for any of the audience here maybe you guys want to any any person here well the collaborate I will be happy fantastic all right stick around then all right hey thank you guys so much we appreciate it and have a good rest of your conference okay