Designing for gamers with disabilities

right so um I am Ian I'm a designer and an accessibility specialist so following on from anan's talk I'm going to talk a bit more about accessibility in games so I'm going to start with a bit of an overview about what it actually is and why it's important then give you a few easy tips that you can apply to your own games as well so I'm going to start with explaining what accessibility is when I say accessibility I'm talking about in the same way as an accessible hotel room or an accessible entrance so I'm talking specifically about disability so first off I'm actually going to explain a little bit about what disability actually is and to do that I have this guy here to help me so I'm sure when uh looking at this picture people in the room will generally be able to make some kind of a guess about what this guy's disability is what it is that's actually making him disabled right so you might be guessing that he

has cereal posy in which case you'd be right he does have cereal posy but cereal posy isn't actually a disability cereal pausy is a medical condition and that's a really really important distinction to make so what is it then he might be thinking about him being in a wheelchair in which case again yes he's in a wheelchair but wheelchair isn't a disability either it's a piece of technology that helps you go about your day so what disability actually is is when a medical condition like CB posy comes up against some kind of a barrier resulting in difficulty going about a day-to-day task so in this picture it's actually the steps up until the point that he tried to go into that bar to meet his friends he's going about his day just fine and these kind of barriers whether it's some steps or a shelf that's too high or using red and green for team colors in the death match these are often things that designers have

actually designed to be that way it's designed like that by another person so that's kind of a bit of a heavy thing to get your head around that as designers as developers we actually cause people to be disabled but there is the flip side to it as well which is that by being aware of the kind of barriers that people come up against we can actually avoid or remove those barriers and prevent these disabling situations from happening there's really important stuff to be thinking about it as well so there's two reasons why it's important firstly is the human reason so what games actually represent is access to Recreation to culture to socializing which is stuff that we all kind of take for granted in life but if for any reason you've got a limited means of accessing those things all of a sudden games become a really really powerful contributor to people's quality of life then there's the other side which is simple money so the numbers involved

are pretty staggering the official UK government statistic is actually 18% of the population who have got some kind of impairment and looking specifically at games pop capap did some research into their own demographics and they actually found 20% disabilities is actually even more prevalent amongst Gamers than the rest of population of course that's only talking about what's generally regarded is coming under that under that Banner it doesn't actually include the really really common things like color blindness which affects 8% of males or difficulty reading which actually affects 14% of adults in the UK so real real big sves of audience we're talking about and if you think about accessibility early enough in the development process there's a lot that you can do really really easily and cheaply so there's a big business case to answer so that's a bit about accessibility and why it's important um I'm just going to give you a couple of quick examples now of the kind of things that are involved so there's only really four different are barers to think about

an accessibility it's barriers that relate to your ability to see to hear to understand and to operate a controller so the first one of those I'm going to talk about is Vision so um antoan already mentioned a bit about screen readers which is really cool technology you get on uh mobile so basically any Android or iPhone you just flick a switch it changes how all the gestures work so if you're blind you can just run your finger over the surface of the phone phone it will actually speak out all the labels so blind people can actually see the interface so that's not actually what I here to talk about though um if you want to learn more about that just speak to me afterwards there's some really really cool stuff that you can do with blindness um I'm actually going to talk about Vision impairment in general so most people who've got some difficulty seeing is just that difficulty seeing people aren't blind at stuff like um shortsightedness long-sightedness astigmatism Cataract all these kind of things where you can see but it's just a bit more difficult then of course

there's situational things as well it's not actually a physical impairment but you might for example be playing in direct sunlight or on a device that's got a particularly small screen so for all of these different um impairments these different situations it all comes down to just two things really which is size and contrast so to illustrate this I've got a game here called epic Eric so the uh the veler is actually in the room I'm sure he's going to be overjoyed to hear me say that this is a perfect example of what not to do so you can see here once this is scaled down to a Mobile screen all the stuff on the screen is actually going to be really small and it's also not very a good contrast either it's quite difficult to distinguish what you're actually meant to be pressing on this was just an early mockup as the game development progressed it changed and this is how it ended up oh sorry actually this is an example first of even a minor Vision impairment you can see see it gets even more difficult

again so this is how it ended up as you can see the difference everything is much bigger much clearer in particular it's really really easy to see which bits you meant to be interacting with versus the background so this is the kind of thing that you want to be aiming towards and the developer actually took it a step further again so this next feature took 1 hour of development time so you can see the slider at the top there basically all there is is there is a layer inserted between the foreground and the backgrounds you can tint all the way to Black all the way to White and customize the contrast so this is really kind of the Pinnacle this you don't see this in very many games but even if you just take care of the basics make sure you got decent size decent contrast then hugely more number of players will be able to have an enjoyable experience with your game so next up hearing so obviously hearing loss um the the area of hearing exibility that I'm going to talk about

is subtitles and subtitles are something that are used by huge huge numbers of Gamers not just people with hearing loss but all kinds of other reasons too so you get people who playing on mutes because they don't to wake up the baby sleeping and particularly on mobiles as well you got people who are on public transport without their headphones um all kinds of reasons why people use subtitles or if you got a cheap 50 Quid tablet with t speakers all kinds of reasons so with all these reasons it's not really surprising to see data like this so subtitles are hugely hugely important used by so many players which is why it's such a shame that they are done so badly it is so so rare to see a game that has actually done subtitles as well so that's obviously quite a bold claim I'll give you a bit of evidence to back it up I'm going to show you a few quotes from a thread that went up on neoaf just last week now these quotes are just from page one of that thread

so you can get the Gem just right Gamers aren't very happy about the state of subtitles and games now the kind of things that people have problems with sometimes it's about the pacing sometimes it's about the choice of font there's two things above all else that people complain about it's not being able to see the font against the background and it's also the size of the font that he used so this is an example of what you should be aiming for this is in good practice a game called Birch and Fiddle and they actually had a developer with um impair Vision on the team which is why they've done such a good job of it you can see they got a simple clear easy to read font um you can see the black behind it really clearly separated from the background this is what to aim for on top of these Basics though there are other things you can do as well so you can add additional subtitles in to communicate important background sounds or who's currently speaking um something

else that's worth considering if you really want to take it at the next level is some options so looking at this there's actually a couple of different use cases for why people use subtitles some people don't have sound and they relying on understanding every single word other people only glance at them occasionally so they want their subtitles to be quite unad truve when they using them so actually each one of these there are Gamers who would actually prefer each individual one of those so if you get offer some kind of a setting even just the basic one so if you look at the top and the second one that black box around is called letter boxing we just offer the toggle to turn letter boxing on off that would make so so many people happy and actually if you're doing this on mobile both IOS and Android have actually got device-wide preferences for this if you go into your accessibility settings on your phone they also have apis so as a developer you can read what that person's preferences are whether or not they want subtitles how they want them presented and actually put that straight into your game

so last of all I'm going to talk about um motor accessibility so this is your ability to operate a controller and this is what really separates mobile from other platforms is the exclusive use of a touchcreen that's really really easy as a developer to fall into the traper thinking that if somebody has got a mobile they must be able to do all the mobile kind of things you know they can do multitouch gestures they can use the gyroscope they can um change it for and landscp to Portrait actually that's not the case so this is a really common setup people who've got a tablet mounted in a fixed position on the wheelchair so see this guy he can use a touchcreen fine he can't use the gcap you can't change the orientation or a step further again so this guy with his head pointer he's not going to be pressing many buttons simultaneously you might think you know are these people really going to be playing games actually it's the other way around if you got these kind of

conditions you're actually more likely to want to play games and then of course again you got the situational things so classic we're in London being crammed up on the Underground with your facing someone's armpit one hand on the handrail playing one-handed so what you can do about this kind of stuff the first thing is about avoiding unnecessary complexity so I mean comparing it to consoles you know if you got a controller with 18 buttons on you don't have to use every single one same thing in games I mean a key is the word unnecessary if a game really does require five fingers to be on the screen at once that's fine it's always worth thinking about whether or not that is actually necessary could it be simplified and the other side of it is offering players some kind of flexibility and how they control the game and that could equate to a few different things so it might mean something like this which is zonia where players can go into the settings and actually move around the onc screen interface particularly important for a game like Zenonia where it's a role playing gamepl for a long time hitting things frequently

it might mean something like need for speeds so you can see on here players have got the entire left hand side of the screen to do their steering on press anywhere that's fine and actually spoke to someone a couple of weeks ago who um has got very very limited range of motion um the only games you can play are tablet games the only way he can hold a tablet is to line on his back propped it on his stomach holding it at the top so games I need for speed are actually the only games he can play because they allow him to have it to control it along the top instead of the bottom or it could mean something else again so this is this is a a game that I really like this is a nice it's called into the dead I don't know if anyone's played this before it's basically a 3D endless Runner into the screen with guns and with zombies so what they did was offer a few different control schemes now actually for most of development only that first one only the Tilt controls were present that's how the game was intended to be played they only actually added in the extra ones at

the end for the reasons of accessibility but of course you know they played it a lot they knew that the Tilt was the most fun that everyone would want to play that they weren't really expecting anyone would use those other ones but they actually tracked the data that's something I encourage everyone to do track data on this kind of stuff and share it other people find it really valuable they track the data and actually they found that almost exactly 25% of players used each one of those options they're expecting like 90% to use tilt actually 25% press all them so what they managed to achieve is through offering these other options not just opening it up to people who can't use tilt they actually made the game a more enjoyable experience for the 75% of players who actually prefer the other methods so that's just a real Whistle Stop tour of a couple of the kind of things you consider um I'd really recommend checking out this um website it's got lots of other nice examples of there things like color blindness and dislexia um but I just want to finish up with a quick show of hands

so quick question um how many of the people in this room are planning on giving up playing games by the time they reach the age of 65 no I was hoping there was going to put their hands up so actually when you hit 65 that is the age of which you cross the 50% point of likelihood having some kind of impairment so if you think about this stuff not only are you going to increase your bottom line not only you going to improve people's quality of life you're actually putting design principles in place now that will allow you yourself to play games in years to come thank you thank you and I think your point I think about the the nature of this uh kind of approach not just ex helping people get access to games that they couldn't otherwise play but also helping people who can access it enjoy it more in more depth I think it's incredibly important and it's to me is another aspect to it which is that if you prevent effectively by in action prevent

people playing and have a disability you're not just preventing them you're preventing the resonant effect that happens when an audience happens to play so you're now basically cutting off people from the potential of playing and in this era where it's so difficult find of discovery that for me seems like a very stupid thing to do yeah Discovery absolutely that's one in particular if you are doing this kind of stuff talk about it talk about in feature listings free SEO ju all kinds of good stuff cool thank you very much thank you