Evolve: An Adventure in Accessibility Retrofitting

[Music] all right uh first off I want to thank all of you for coming uh it is the first session of the day and if you're like me you are super tired uh so I appreciate that you took the time to be here because uh if if it weren't my talk it'd be hard pressed to get me somewhere at 9:30 in the morning um so uh hello everyone uh I am Tara and today we're going to be talking about evolve and adventure in accessibility retrofitting uh so basically I always say and I tell people this over and over you should always consider accessibility from the very beginning of a project uh but what happens when you don't um and that's what this session is about so uh if you want you can also follow me uh on the Twitter it's right down there at the bottom in case you have a question we don't get to uh and you want to ask me later uh but fair warning my Twitter account is mostly pictures of cats and beer

all right uh so about me uh I've worked on some stuff um I always think these slides are kind of silly because it's like why you should listen to me on this subject um but basically I've been in the video game industry for about nine years um mostly working at AAA Studios on stuff like Saints R 2 evolve obviously uh BioShock Infinite Red Faction gorilla um but I've also been in game accessibility for eight years starting with able Gamers later becoming the chairperson of the IGA game accessibility Sig um where I championed some cool stuff and then uh just last Monday there was the first ever uh game accessibility conference uh # GAC comp and I was the co-chair or co-director whatever you want to call it uh of that conference so that's that's you know I guess I've done work in this field just trust me I promise I'm not lying to you so uh in this presentation what are we going to be talking about today uh so step one was how did we evaluate our access ability after the fact uh what

did we eventually do to make our game more accessible what did we learn during this process and how can you just take what we did use that knowledge to make your projects better and not make the same mistakes we did so obviously the first question was how well did we do and something interesting about asking that question is you have to have a benchmark to grade yourself against and we didn't actually have one so although there are plenty of guidelines out there on how you should develop an accessible game there isn't really like a scorecard to check your game against so that's where we started we made one so we took the guidelines that were published at game accessibility guidelines. comom uh the includ ification uh guidelines by able Gamers the special effect wish list and then all of the recommendations by the igda game accessibility Sig and we combin them into a giant feature list um of course moving duplicates because there were some and kind of starting off

that in the end we had about 150 unique accessibility action items that we could check against to see if we had done it or not so once we basically had this giant list of features we we know not all features are created equal so we evaluated each feature for a few different things so number one was its reach or the number of people it would benefit the next one was the impact so the difference it would make to the people it reached and then the cost now we considered the cost we did that in the amount of effort that would have been needed if we had done it originally not what the cost of retrofitting it was but if we had planned for it from the beginning how hard would this to have uh been implemented and it was really convenient to get this list sort of together and organized in that fashion because most of the list particularly the game accessibility guidelines and includ ification are kind of already uh bucketed in the same way and based on this information we placed each of the

different features into a tier and we assigned a point value so something basic would be like subtitles just having subtitles really basic feature really easy to do three points but having uh subtitles that have uh optional letter boxing multiple size value repositioning options a lot more work but make the subtitles a lot better 10 points so it's kind of how much work did you put in for this so we went through item by item and we awarded points for fully met goals uh partial goals for part partial implementation or subpar implementations like technically we meet this requirement but it's not a good user experience uh zero points for just not having anything or marking it as not applicable if it didn't work for us so for example if there was a guideline and how to do voice activation we didn't have that so we weren't going to ding us for not having something related to that so what was our overall score

uh we ended up having like 64% uh so that's a d not exactly a great score uh some would say it's near failing actually uh so obviously we had a lot of room for improvement so we needed to figure out where to start and so we started going through the report card and looking for those basic items first um to see where to start and what could be an easy win um and the key points we looking to see like I said if there were any of those basic features that were missed and then we went through and started collecting player feedback so one of the areas we really looked for was in our forums and seeing what players were already saying that they wanted and kind of crosschecking those two things to see if there was something that oh this would be easy and it's already something that players are requesting a lot uh so once we identified the Leist list of features uh we started scoping out the work and set our plan into motion so so what was the first thing we

did um actually one of the most requested features uh for game accessibility was amazingly simple and it had next to no cost Gamers with disabilities often do not know if they can play a game until they buy it and bring it home open it and this is due to lack of information about the accessibility features contained within the title this information normally isn't made public so again it puts these Gamers with disabilities in the situation that they've bought something that now they're stuck with because they can't return it I guess you could trade it into GameStop for like $5 but that's not exactly a great value proposition uh so all of the references every list we looked at just asked for this um so we grabbed the game accessibility icon of this little controller whe wheelchair guy um which is available from one switch for uh just you know Creative Commons use as long as you're denoting game accessibility information and we made a simple online post and we also posted this in our forums that was just a factual list we

State what features we had um the options associated with those features and we were honest about what our title didn't have so pretty early on we decided that we would rather be open about our games features and if we didn't have some something uh be honest about it and hope that in the future we could be better and maybe even deter someone from buying our title in some cases rather than having them buy it and go through that experience where they just spent their money on something they can't use um I was talking to one of the co-founders Phil um and kind of you know advocating on why we should do this he was like yeah no we need to put that information out there not doing it would just be shitty so it was very nice uh to get that kind of Buy in because I don't know if you guys have ever been at a studio like that where you don't say you don't say anything that could stop someone from buying your title so it was very refreshing to be someplace that that was honest and didn't want to have a gamer buy something they couldn't use so uh the next feature we actually got

as like one of the number one requested things out of the forums and it also fell into the basic category on our list was being color bind friendly so one of the things we quickly realized was we had a lot of UI elements that were using uh color only to identify the state of things um so one example was our pink system which used uh Ren or green circles based on what you were pinging or marking and the fix with this was really simple and and actually inspired us to make the P ping system much more useful so we ended up using a series of symbols to denote uh what Wildlife was what so you can see on the example on the left the monster instead of a red circle now has a pprint icon this plant that's going to eat you now has an exclamation mark um I don't know I don't remember what I was pinging on the far right but that was something friendly so it just has the the less scary paw print icon so we were able to make things more recognizable and give people more information and all of a sudden you know

this section was now color bind friendly uh so something else that we noticed was in our game if you were looking at player names uh that was how you could identify what class someone was in if you just didn't know the characters and we realized that the names were just colors so if you can't tell the difference between the colors you don't know what class that person is in unless you're super knowledgeable about the game so with that one we ended up doing something really simple we ended up just placing all of the icons with the uh above the names so that if you had color blind mode turned on these icons would appear and you could tell the difference but we actually had some larger problems now I know the screenshot is probably a little blurry but I liked it because it um showed one of our larger problems we had several in-game visual effects that um would either display the state on color which was one problem but it was compounded with this problem and it was some visual

effects we're just getting lost in game completely so here for someone who has red green color blind this red icon in the green swamp would just get lost so we knew early on that adding a color filter was not the right answer so color blind issues number one um only applied to certain visual effects not everything not the entire game and furthermore adding a color blind filter could fix the problem but it would also make the game really really ugly and it could potentially shift other colors that weren't a problem into a problem state so we knew that was not going to be what we wanted to do but we still had to deal with this in some way this was obviously still a problem so what we ended up doing was making an additional three version of that visual effects uh that the player would select before loading into the game and yeah I mean yeah so let let that sink in that's right for the features we found causing issues with color blindness we ended up with four

separate versions of that effect the one we shipped with and then three additional ones from the most com common types of color blindness so obviously the cost of retrofitting color blind mode for us was extraordinarily High it literally quadrupled the work of some of the visual effects uh but we knew this was something uh that we needed to be aware of going forward and we kind of made it our internal goal to not introduce uh anything new because we were still releasing Hunters monsters we didn't want to in introduce a new character that would need to be hooked up into the system uh so in my screenshot here I really like the screenshot because you can see um that like I said when we turned on color blind mode it's not changing everything in game it's only changing these problem visual effects so the only thing that's different are the footprints on the left and the targeting reticule in the middle so this is really

important there are people who do color blind mode wrong all the time so I really like just let this soak in absorb it if you learned something about color blind mode today it's that please don't do a filter just address the problem areas now like I said we ended up being smart and basically starting at the concept phase we would tell if a visual effect was going to be a problem in color blind mode so if a gun had two different states like charging and ready to fire but the concept art looked like the picture on the left we knew that wasn't going to fly and we just send that straight back uh but if it had a other visual difference something other than color a second way of displaying that information like the one on the right we knew that uh that was going to work that was good we could use that one and then we'd actually go about building the visual effect so in the end we did have several additional updates to colorline mode after the initial patch

that contained it uh we updated even more UI elements and we caught things such as in-game outlines uh to make them also part of the system and the class icon fix that I me mentioned previously that ended up being so popular we had nonc colorblind players using color blind mode so that they could see that icon so in the end we actually pulled that out of colorblind mode made it its own toggle that was on by default so you know that just goes to show accessibility features will be used beyond your core player base and makes games better for everyone so the next one we decided to tackle was remappable controls so although we had uh remappable keyboard controls on PC we didn't have anything for the controller meaning that console players were left completely without the ability to remap uh this was a highly requested feature and Incredibly helpful for gamers with uh various impairments or if they were using a specialty controller that didn't work with our

outof the-box control schemes so what was interesting for me personally while I was digging into this feature I me kind of pushing it to get made was I learned at one time this feature had actually been in development but it ended up being cut although uh there was a couple people who had championed it previously they had kind of attempted to Simply duplicate the system that was on PC onto console it led to a kind of buggy design and and the result was a system that really wasn't worth the effort and so it got cut now once we decided that no we're going back we're going to do this right is something we need to tackle uh we actually took inspiration straight from a previous GDC talk of mine which I'm sure you all saw uh no more excuses you're guide to accessible design and we implemented the button swap method now although I'm sure you all saw it uh let me go ahead and refresh your memory on what that was uh so we offered the player um different preset control schemes so evolve actually shipped with five different

control schemes for hunters and four for monsters that the player could choose from so the next part of this process is making sure the control schemes group different actions together so if you look at this one you can see that action reload is grouped together on the left and then on the right action Ed cover is grouped together and that's what I'm talking about when grouping things together differently so this mixture of actions not just rearranging the buttons uh allows for the play more customization when they're trying to remap their controls so once a player decides on what control scheme they want the player is simply just given the option to switch what's mapped between two buttons so everything that's with that button goes with it so it's not like oh I I want use cover to move with action but reload stay there no you'd have to find another control scheme that offered that pairing um I know a lot of people get like Tera I but my button y does like

six things just have everything that goes with Y move in this method so for getting this in and getting this tested on evolve um it was actually really easy we avoided a lot of the pitfalls of Rema controls because we already had a remapping system on PC so our UI was already set up to be able to update we already had the UI elements for all of these icons already available um we had like one small thing where like a monster scheme and Hunter scheme had something that was shared on controller but we just had to split that and that was pretty much all we had to do the largest loss of work was the first time someone tried to do it and it actually got cut now so this is a system for us that had very little overhead in terms of getting it implemented but as I was saying previously if we didn't already have a PC remapping available and we didn't already have all that uh art ready with UI this could have been something that would been way more expensive to add in after the

fact so these two features were the first accessibility patch that we actually got launched sorry excuse me and we decided uh that we were just going to roll out the accessibility features in chunks as they were ready rather than waiting for like the game to be 100% accessible cuz that'll never happen anyway so in our weekly live stream we took time to educate our audience on on number one the idea of what game accessibility is and why it was important and not why just it was important to us as developers but to us as Gamers and we showed off all the features and told players how they could provide additional feedback requests and we really opened the door for accessibility conversations with our players we wanted it to be a dialogue so the accessibility portion of our live stream lasted over 30 minutes of evolv's weekly live stream on the twitch Channel which has over

23,000 followers and it was also hosted by the Turtle Rock twitch channel uh so I got to be on there I was really excited uh it I didn't you know there aren't many live streams that highlight accessibility so for me personally it was a a big day but obviously we didn't just stop at two separate uh features um around this time we were actually getting ready for the launch of evolve stage 2 which was the free-to-play relaunch of the game and we wanted to make the game uh even more accessible so we ended up having a big update on our visual effects one of the things that became very apparent was there was a lot like a literal [ __ ] ton of things happening in our game um there were you know four different guns that could be fired there were area attacks monster attacks there were wildlife and some of it was very very obtrusive and often happening uh simultane ly and so

to be honest a lot of these visual effects were not only making it difficult for players with visual impairments it was just hard for players in general um so we took this Approach at overhauling the visual effects and we updated almost half of them with the goal of clarity less noise and defined borders so if you look at this example this is Hyde uh firing his flamethrower in a toxic grenade cloud and the before and after is drastic in the left like you don't even know what he's firing at so obviously like these were big changes but you know these changes were across the board so if you look at this screenshot you can see the before and after of kraken's aftershot uh Aftershock before it was a completely fuzzy Vortex but after the redesign it had a well-defined and high contrast Edge that allowed players to know where the end of this was what was the hit Zone and this actually helped relieve a

major problem that we had been experiencing uh so only players who played against Kraken all the time who were really experienced knew how far you had to dodge to avoid getting hit you just had to know uh before these changes went in so now that it had a defined Border in a clear outline that was easy to see uh all players even new players knew where they needed to go to get out of the way uh you know and as I mentioned previously we often had multiple complex visual effects happening simultaneously and you know sometimes they would stack and stick so another thing we did was help uh to help this was develop a unified language for all of our visual effects to make them similar so you had a better idea of what was happening where it was going to happen so we didn't have too much happening in one place and much like with the concept art in dealing with color blindness we had a very uh similar approach on making sure we weren't doing things that were going to be too busy or might cause new conflicts um and become become a problem

going forward uh so one thing that also became clear to us was Although our tutorials allowed for a safe space for the player to learn the controls without dying it wasn't a good representation of seeing if the player actually understood the game the cues around them or even just how to play so originally we only offered Goliath and marov tutorials and later we expanded them to include these hunt tutorials which were basically Advanced tutorials um each one catered to a specific character in that class who we determined was sort of the best starter character for that group the one that was normally the easiest to use and these tutorials allowed for everyone to get a better grasp of the basics before moving on and it was a space that the player could take their time and adjust to any class without pressure and helpful guidance so in our original tutorials let's say we had a gamer with a specialty controller who was trying to see if they could you know use their

controller to play they couldn't learn that from our original tutorials cuz it wasn't really playing it was you are here press a to Jetpack there not a very good representation so with these Advanced tutorials it was much better at for someone trying to understand if they could play or trying to learn to play now these tutorials were actually one of the most complex things we ended up retrofitting uh it was a great experience for us as Dev so so not only number one did we have to see if we actually understood how to play our game uh we had to teach how to play it to others uh we ended up actually having to develop a new audio queuing system to ensure the most important VI which was the voice over from ABE and Kyra who were leading you through this tutorial uh make sure they were heard above other noises we also had to develop a priority system for the subtitles because we also didn't want them to get stomped out by less important systemic lines like Kyo was telling you something important

about how to fight this monster we didn't want Hank sang reloading to push her subtitle off screen so and this also was uh you know heavily scripted and just required a lot of band work to get done so this was something that doing an after the fact and trying to teach players you know how to do this afterwards was pretty high uh so another one of our largest efforts was actually updating our in-game UI and having it match the existing visual effects uh so basically there could be a disparity a UI element could be a blue bar on a heal thing but a Green Cross in the world so you may not realize that was telling you the same information twice and we also found out that we had a ton of in-game occurrences that were either sound based uh and sometimes so subtle that players even without hearing impairments uh just didn't know that they existed or the UI was so subtle or lacking contrast that um they were overlooked and frequently

just unus so we took efforts to double down on communicating a lot of this information and this included being poisoned healing um the defense Matrix is shown here so previously like if someone was being shielded they would have a little bar uh on top of the their health bar but here as you can see the visual effects boom it's right on top of the character it's a lot easier to see and also if you had a defense Matrix on you um I should have got a better screenshot now I think of it but on the left you can see you have that same icon showing up for you so it looks the same the visuals are the same they're Bolder they're a lot easier to see um and we also did this for you know shielding fire damage uh but beyond this we also took steps uh to make a lot of other things visually clear so visual tells like you know dead carcasses so if a monster killed a wildlife and went on his way you know that carcass would be there to let you know that the monster gone this way but if you couldn't notice

the carcass obviously that's not helpful so we ended up putting um outlines on them so you could see them more clearly uh we also did the same thing for elite Wildlife they had like a tower of light because they offered you Buffs if you kill them so you want to kill them but if you can't find them doesn't do you any good um and then we also added new UI for major gameplay events such as teammates dying being revived that kind of thing so of course you can't add UI elements for for everything uh that would be terrible uh so we also decided to put an in-game announcer uh who was capturing a lot of these events so if something was there visually but maybe not strong wasn't something we thought should have a UI element you know the vo of the announcer could help reinforce that and display that information in a second way and like I said we just kind of went crazy like we got all sorts of new new UI things so we had the Ping that changed you know now all of a sudden if you're harpooned you know you get an

icon for that you know stuff that again we had a lot of things that we just kind of expected players to figure out like at one point we updated how Behemoth armor worked and no one knew what was happening so we ended up adding information for that you know we're telling you when your drop ship's coming um really it was just there was a lot of information we realized that if you just didn't know it then you're there's you're not going to get it from in game anywhere so that was a lot of what we were doing but one of the other things we realize and I think that kind of goes in tandem is evolve had a difficulty problem we found that our gameplay was frequently inaccessible and you know if one player were underperforming as it were it could ruin the experience for the entire team and put them in a situation where they couldn't recover it was creating this extraordinarily toxic uh get good uh kind of community which obviously wasn't what we wanted so one of the things we did was change

our gameplay to more evenly distribute these gameplay tasks make it so that more people could take a chance at doing some of this stuff so uh it meant that if there's a struggle for a a certain player with a particular class the team could balance it out and still have a chance at winning we wanted to create gameplay that was inclusive where a whole team could work together rather than punish new or inexperienced players or a player who was struggling because they weren't good at a particular class and we ended up changing a lot uh we or reworked uh three of the major class abilities which are kind of like you know Staples in the game so for uh me the best example of this is the mobile Arena or as players just called it the Dome so it originally could only be thrown by the Trapper and the Trapper would have to throw it to where they thought the monster was going to be uh so for some players such as myself um

being a Trapper was legitimately stressful so I personally lacked both the skill and reflexes to capture the monster um I was known for throwing domes and catching absolutely nothing in them and it had a significant recharge time so once I threw that Dome missed the monster well we all have to hang out for another two minutes till I get to try again at which point I'd probably still miss the monster so we changed it for stage two uh so that all classes could throw the Dome and even better when you went to throw the Dome it came down automatically over the monster so now anyone could throw it and you were guaranteed to to capture the monster we had to make some changes to how the Dome worked once you capture the Monster uh because of that but it was still so much better so for myself and a lot of other people the class went from something we literally dreaded um to something that was new and exciting to explore and some of the characters even got more than one class change so with Behemoth we actually took time to not only uh redo

his abilities uh we fixed tons of long-standing bugs he basically got a full refactor um but we did some other stuff like tinkering with how our aim assist worked uh changing our con controls on uh our what's the right word like the sensitivities on our controller to make it better I mean we just went like ham uh I've never worked on another project that basically took so many core tenants of gameplay and were like [ __ ] it doing it live again patching every week we're crazy people um but it was all better and it made a lot of improvements now as I mentioned earlier in many cases Gamers with disabilities don't know if they can play a game until after they buy it and that at which point they'll find out it doesn't work and that's why it was so so important for us to publish that list of Game accessibility features that we had but in game after we went free to playay we had a similar problem so now anyone

could download the game anyone could play for free but you could still spend either real money or in-game currency to unlock new characters unlock new perks and again we really had no way for any particular player to know if they liked that character or if they could even use that character or that perk without that initial investment so again we we wanted to give the players this information so for us weig the best way to do this was just remove the problem by Implement a try before you buy system for all characters and perks so the player is actually able to go into single player and play anything uh any of the characters any of the perks as much as they wanted for no cost to them they could go in see if they liked it before they spent their money and obviously playing in single player isn't quite the same as playing in multiplayer so we also offered free characters on rotation every week so that players could try these new characters that they didn't

own uh in multiplayer as well as single player so something also was really fun um was for Global accessibility awareness day which is in May every year uh we saw uh Uncharted 4's awesome video that they released about their game accessibility features uh as part of global accessibility awareness day and basically I got super jealous because I was like we've done accessibility work this isn't fair why does why does naughty dog get an awesome video um so I like we should do something we should do something right now uh so literally right right then we're like what what we can do we can do a stream and so we didn't even like go to our we have a uh like a streaming area with like a proper green screen and all that stuff we didn't even do that we like rocked a whiteboard up behind my desk and erased it put a camera on my desk we're like we're doing it here we're doing it right now um so so yeah we just did a global accessibility Awareness Day stream about

evolved just straight from my desk in the office uh so on the stream we talked about some of the changes that were due to be released in our next big update which were some of the things that I've kind of talked about up to this point and I we talked about some other changes that were going to be uh coming up as well and what was really great was the amount of people who showed up to the stream and very few of them are actually Gamers with um impairments they were just Gamers who are exced to learn um the stream was also a great opportunity for us our again lowbudget at my desk stream with a whiteboard as a background got picked up by a few blogs that were rounding up the news for the day for Global accessibility awareness day uh and so we got exposure through accessibility that we wouldn't have otherwise gotten um and we also announced two other features that at the time didn't have a cemented ship date that were still in the works now one of these features were close captions uh this was a feature we actually started developing way back at

the same time as remappable controls and color blind mode but it didn't get done in time for the first patch and uh although hooking up the system to give the options of sub titer of close captions was done really quickly without uh many issues the major stumbling block was actually what sounds should be triggering a queue you know what sounds do we have in game that are actually really important to gameplay so along with the ER who built the system uh I took a stab at making a first draft of list of what sounds I thought were important and should be triggered with the system so once I had the list I brought it over to our balance group so our balance group was comprised mostly of QA that we had hired out of the competitive community that uh would make sure that when we made changes we weren't breaking our game at a super high level and they knew how to properly utilize you know every queue in game so I brought it to them and and here's a uh an accurate rendition of how

our conversation went hey guys look I have this list of awesome game accessibility things that that should trigger sound can you give it a once over I'm sure it's perfect uh Tara you left spotters off the list I have no idea what you're talking about terara don't you know spotters make a noise when they hear the monster no I I did I didn't know that so um although I will admit I don't have the best hearing uh I had no idea that that sound was even in game and that was just one of the many sounds I learned in game that meant something that I had no clue about so this kind of coupled with UI changes I mentioned earlier were just another way we had information that wasn't getting to not just our core players um but especially those who had impairments uh what ended up happening with this was uh at the same time we were trying to identify the sounds we

had started making a lot of these crazy gameplay adjustments so we ended up holding off till after the adjustments were made and seeing what new UI were're adding before we went to put sounds on the close caption system uh so we could kind of wrap our head around you know what wasn't being reinforced in some way um unfortunately this was a feature that never shipped it was still in progress when toal Rock's contract ended with 2K for evolve but uh it was something that I I was personally really excited about so I was pretty bummed when it didn't get out so the other one was the Comm wheel so one of the things that had become very very apparent was if you weren't using a mic or couldn't use a mic our game was nearly impossible to play communicating with your teammates and other players was key so sure on PC you had in-game text chat but number one that wasn't always fast enough if you're in the middle of a a fight like you know

hitting enter type stuff like not very efficient and there wasn't actually any way to do that on Console at all so if you're on Console there was no way for you to talk to your other players if you didn't have a mic so we started developing a Comm wheel uh so this is the original concept art unfortunately I wasn't able to get um an in-game screenshot of what it ended up looking like uh but was fairly True to this basically our goal was um identify the most important things you need to tell your teammates um you know I'm down we should group up you know you know that kind of stuff like heal me blah blah blah um and once you triggered it it would have some sort of in-game visual effect so for example if you wanted to say group up here you know a little visual effect popped up in the world to show you where you wanted to group up um honestly the largest problem we encountered was uh trying to have a Comm

wheel that nicely integrated with both Platforms in terms of controlling it um since we use so much real estate on the controller particularly already for everything that you could do and we were um we had play tested it we're still kind of tweaking it to like make it a a truly great usable experience and also around that time was when our contract ended with evolve so this was was another thing that was in progress that didn't get to ship um but we were pretty excited about it so what should you learn about Toto Rock and involves adventure and accessibility retrofitting so some of the things we implemented weren't that much work to add them in after the fact but some things that should have been stupid simple like color blind mode ended up being huge Endeavors but none of the stuff would have been that difficult or hard if we had just thought about it early in development if one person had mentioned it or kept

track of it maybe we wouldn't have made so many mistakes to begin with so I know this doesn't sound like an actual lesson but apparently it is worth repeating pre-production is the time to think about accessibility doing accessibility from the beginning is not expensive retrofitting accessibility can be incredibly costly please don't do it the other thing we learned is you know your game you know how your game works but to really understand how players engage your game you need play tests with people who do not work on your project at minimum they should be on a different project friends or family people from outside your studio who don't know your game like you do get some user research up in there up in that business so we knew how to play our game but we needed to see if other people did um one of the thing that I was also really jealous of I mean this talk should be subtitled Tera jealous of naughty dog um we didn't have the resources to do it but one of the things

that naughty dog did when they were putting in their game accessibility features was they actually had Gamers with different physical impairments come in and test it that was something that I would have loved for us to have the time and resources to do so if you get that chance do it um another thing was a lot of the changes that were massively beneficial to Gamers with disabilities weren't always even proposed for accessibility reasons they just happen to have a huge impact for these Gamers while improving the experience of the core audience most accessibility features fell into this category we didn't Implement a single accessibility feature that hurt the core audience that that's something that I have to fight all the time I get told oh but no one will use this this only the core Gamers won't like it it's that's just absolutely not true so don't think that that's bad uh and lastly uh our accessibility

efforts wouldn't have been nearly as successful if we hadn't told people about them and got buyin from our community so we shared this information on our live streams our Forum our social media accounts and we created a dialogue with our players and we created an Avenue to get feedback from them we became more connected with our player base and really the coolest thing about this was uh and we created our own little army of accessibility Advocates out of our players so users in our Forum they were helping other players find what they need uh The Forum members were tagging Dev and being like hey did you see so and so request I think this falls under accessibility or in some cases they would want a feature and ask us hey I was interested in this would this also help someone with an impairment and that's awesome they were getting empathy for these other Gamers I mean even today they still uh tweet at me cool

accessibility stories or if they see it in the news and they share it with me and they're excited about um helping more Gamers game and like I actually have something to to back this up so one of the coolest things that happened uh was Shera which is uh Shane and Tara uh really official um sponsoring # GAC comp or the game accessibility conference that happened for the first time last Monday so at tot Rock the uh now Community marketing manager and I Shane we would just stream uh us playing video games and making mix drinks after work on Tuesdays um and you know collectively we became known as sherah and Shane and I were both working at the game accessibility conference and at the time we were still doing fundraising for the conference and we decided it would be awesome to try and raise money to become a bronze level sponsor on our goofy ass Tuesday twitch stream so we brought it up one day and within an hour we had

raised the funds so these names on the right uh they are just twitched users uh with the exception of mommy opare who is my mom uh who decided that they loved games and they want everyone to be able to play games and they put their money towards the cause and so by talking about accessibility with your community they'll grow as people they'll get empathy and they like it comes down to Gamers want to play games Gamers want other people to be able to play games and for us like like I said they literally put their money behind us to help us teach other game developers how to become more accessible and help [Music] everyone so all right you may be interested at this point on doing your own accessibility Adventure so I was going to go ahead and go over in a little bit more detail what we use to make our report card so the first one is includ

ification which is done by a really popular charity for disabled Gamers here in the US called able Gamers and they have you can download it as a PDF or they just have their website uh for me what's really nice about this is um it gives you uh empathetic stories so they'll be like hey here's a feature but then they'll also either give you a real life scenario of like oh I see that you are trying to ban this type of you know third party feature in your game well let me tell you a story of how because of another Studio doing that um you know this girl with Sarah Bazi was no longer able to play her game because it was flagged as cheating software so it gives you lots of um like heartfelt examples on why some of these features matter it also has some great letters from the community um and other game developers to to really like if you need like emotional validation on why the work

you're doing is good um this is a great list so the other one we used was the game accessibility guidelines this is actually the one I prefer because I just I don't need that stuff I just want a straight list of do you have this who did it best who did it wrong let me learn uh so this is like it's just game accessibility guidelines. comom it was put together by tons of different accessibility Advocates um that you know like I said they work together it is a living document they updated it fairly regularly with either new examples new cases uh new best case examples um and like I said this is this is one that I reference all the [Music] time uh so the other one was the igda game accessibility special interest group they have a set of guidelines um this one is a little bit more the other ones have been more

recently updated but it's still really good um what's really awesome about the igda game accessibility website is they have a awesome Resource page that links out to tons of places to get additional information but you can also just email um any like they have an email list and if you have a question I want to do this I'm not sure how you will within 2 days get like 10 responses from other accessibility people who will either point you in the right path give you the resources you need tell you how to do it um you know it's it's a great tool to find people who can help you now the other thing I did is if you go to this terrible long URL sorry this just uh what Google did when you I published the document um you can actually go and download the scorecard that we used if you want to have your own scorecard uh so it's pretty easy on the left we have of um the item if I could link easily to one

page I did um the available points uh what type of implementation you had and then the awarded points you know it does some formulas and spits out a number at the end so uh I'll leave this up for another second so you can take a screenshot because that URL is terrible and um you know that that that's really it uh so I'm going to take some questions uh I'm also going to remind you right now to please fill out your surveys and tell everyone how great I was and um so yeah there is a microphone right here so if anyone has questions you can come up and ask it and uh yeah so let's let's take some questions what do we got come on all right here we go I guess so uh what feature did you most want to put in that for whatever reason at a time budget whatever you just couldn't uh I think for me personally it really

was the closed captions um especially since with the uh you know Turtle Rock did the original Left 4 Dead and it had close captions and it was one of the first games that was kind of recognized by the accessibility Community um as having close captions so that was one that I was always really said didn't go out because you know T roac had kind of set this Benchmark of hey we have close captions and then unfortunately you know evolve didn't so that was it was both needed and I had like an emotional investment of wanting to get it out so I was sad that it didn't hi uh first time caller longtime fan um what can platforms be doing and what can middle beware be doing to help make this process of um adding accessibility to your titles easier so I was actually just talking with some of my friends at Ria Dawn at the Oculus party last night and they came off to me and they were like Terra I really really love that

there's the backup of platform level remapping but they want an easy way so if a a player does want to remap their controls they would love to have a way to basically read I don't know maybe some sort of API or something that's like this this player wants their controls remap to be like this and the game to just be able to look at that file and load it up um and do it that way so I think there is a a craving for a hey if they're using these accessibility features on the console level let me as a game look at that stuff or look at that stuff more easily so that I can mirror those those same choices they're making at a platform level in my game yes what do we got um so in terms of convincing your studio to make good choices about accessibility did you have like a really compelling source of stats or anything about player accessibility needs or uh disabilities uh yeah so uh I did and it was actually really funny so with toal rock um when I went to convince them that we should be doing it I did I had a whole presentation together um so 22% of

Americans have an impairment um that could affect the way they game and I I did I had all these stats right I was like yeah and you know a lowballing estimate is you know 9% of colors are or players are color blind and I did I put together like a 20page deck and I was like we got this and I was on like slide two um and you know Chris and Phil were like we just want to be good people and have people play our game and I was just like no but I worked really hard like I got I've got transitions like can we just go through it like I have this star wipe in here I'm really proud of use the star wipe that um you're you're so lucky I've got to say like because you know sometimes you need to like convince them basically yeah well every um other time that I'd gone to have that battle um I mean I think the fact that I called it a battle shows you know how it how it went and which was why I prepped this whole talk before I even went to talk to them because I I assumed I would have to go in like here's the business case here's why it makes sense here's how we can reach a broader audience and improve our core players experience uh and total

Rock just like no we're we're good people let's not be shitty what yeah that's great um any source that you would use if they were harder to convince like where would you go to to find good player disabilities that's from now on platform uh Ian Hamilton's Twitter account hey I've been looking for him actually we used work together yeah we work together oh doing stuff yeah no just asking in um I'm too intimidated by him uh so all right cool thanks every yeah but I think uh you can also get a lot of that information in the guidelines that I mentioned earlier they're kind of peppered throughout um the igda website uh does have some of that basis information or like I said uh Ian Hamilton on Twitter he just posts relevant articles all the time so there you go follow Ian on Twitter hi um I was wondering how did you balance making uh like you have all these UI elements for accessibility but how do you balance having an intimidating UI versus an accessible one yeah that was something that it was

hard for us um because it wasn't so much intimidating for us as uh cluttered because we had a lot of things happening um for us it was the big question really became does this need to be UI or is there another way that we can reinforce this so like sometimes instead of a UI element it became a visual effect sometimes you know it became um something we would add a sound for but ensure that it was captured in subtitles so we we did kind of go about the process of identifying key things that were being missed and then adding them first and then sort of stuff more on the periphery we we really look to see does this need to be UI or can we give this information in a different way um and just you know play testing like is this too much is this too intrusive do players understand it that kind of thing thank

you hi did you make any changes based on players with epilepsy by chance uh we did actually we cut the intro trailer um so uh we found out after we had shipped and this was only for evolve stage 2 since it didn't get brought over to consoles we actually got contacted by um I am blanking on her name but a a woman uh in the UK who I don't know how it happened but she had had run parts of evolve through um the oh I just forget the name of the the the test that he shows if you have patterns like a trigger epilepsy and we found out in the very beginning sequence that marov with his lightning gun um it actually hit that pattern and so we just cut it which worked out great anyway because we were like oh we need a lower install and so like great yeah let's get rid of this video anyway you K cost teachers um and after that it was

definitely something that we were more aware of like I'm going to be honest even as an accessibility person I frequently forget to consider epilepsy um but yeah that that was the main change that we made um for some reason the in-game version wasn't hitting it it was like something about this pre-rendered cut scene specifically that could cause problems with epilepsy thank you thanks for that talk um so my question is beyond subtitles and U are were there any other common feature requests from De Gamers uh the Comm wheel was the the the other big one um the fact that there wasn't a way to communicate with other players if you couldn't hear them on Console like I said on PC it wasn't so bad because you know there was the text chat but you know in the event of like quick action um you know it it's not like oh my God there's a monster let me hit enter and start start typing that's uh not as good which was why we wanted to get the Comm wheel out so bad that so we could allow

for quick communication uh for people who couldn't hear um it or you know even talk with other players so really the Comm wheel okay so there wasn't much feedback in terms of flashes or uh bass sounds uh no but I think it was mostly because like I said there was so much information that even core Gamers didn't realize were being transmitted by sound that people didn't know people didn't know that they didn't have the information um so obviously like de Gamers weren't hearing about things they didn't know because the core Gamers didn't know uh which is a problem in and of itself I think if more players had realized how much more information we'd been given by Audio alone I think there would have been an increase like you know oh the like you could hear the monster sniff like if the you know Monster was looking for the hunters and you were Hunter you could hear that and it was so quiet that like that was

another thing and I was like oh that that's an audio queue we have in game I had no idea so I like I said I think if more core Gamers had knew the kinds of sounds that gave information I think the deaf Gamers would have been more aware that they were also missing it but we were so bad at just letting people know to begin with that there wasn't a lot of requests all right great cheers hi thanks for your talk um I'm interested in the the kind of the conflict between between engaging your high skill cap players and the introduction of accessibility features which could potentially be called dumbing down the game um how do you resolve that um a good example that you spoke about would be the mobile Arena how how does that balance come into play and how do you resolve those that desire to provide a hill High skill cap for certain players yeah so what we ended up doing um so I worked a lot with the balance team directly and we we started thinking about how uh the range of our skill players um and basically we our goal was to like so

if you think about like this is your range of skill available to players for step one was bringing up this bottom level uh so you can still play up here if you want you still have to know or be faster you know that kind of stuff than these players down here um but you know we wanted the base level to to be a little bit higher up so that was really when we started thinking was like how can we bring this bottom level up while keeping you know people with super fast reactions or super good planning um allowing them to climb up to the top um so for example when we changed the mobile Arena so that anyone could capture the monster like that was when we were like okay well now we have like a different meta game that's happening within the Dome and like we needed to provide an opportunity for the monster to be able to get out of it now because he would would always get domed were before he Dodge so like if you were a

good fighter you could get out of the Dome quickly um you know just kind of like like I said like it really for us was about bringing up the bottom players while letting the top players stay up there without taking away uh if we took something away from them that would boost them up higher giving them something to replace it essentially okay thanks just just kind of follow up cuz no one's waiting um is there like a communication aspect to that to out to your community like did you re when you made those changes did you receive any negative feedback from people who perceived this as a negative change and how did you address that H we ruined our game exactly we we hate a we hate Gamers we hate our game we're ruining it we know nothing about our game we know nothing at a play uh no we it was really interesting so there were like two camps there was like the first camp that was like oh my God this is great like now I can play with this other set of friends and you know all this other stuff and then there were people there still people today who are like I'm loading up the Evolve beta branch cuz classic

evolve is better like that uh there are always going to be people like that but for us we worked um really hard to communicate the changes and why we were doing them and we were able to win over um a lot of people by just having a dialogue I think um if we had just been silent be like we're making these changes we're not talking to about it uh it would have gone over super super poorly um especially because a lot of the times we would try to explain things to them before they actually saw it so like we would warn them we were like hey guys we're going to make this change that's why we going to make this change oh my God I hate you stop ruining evolve we're like no we swear it's making it better um and then we would do stuff to like back that up like we were public with our Telemetry so we were like hey guys so we're changing this monster because this monster uh it's just not very good right now that monster is the best monster that monster always win okay well looking at the Telemetry that monster only wins 16% of the time so

maybe you're just really bad um and like just putting that information out there that so that they could see it and um like I said explaining why we were doing things and most of the time we got by in of course there were some grumpy gusses but you know they're always going to be vocal anyway okay thank you very much hi uh what were you doing about uh accessibility for players that don't really have like a disability but uh like are really bad with observation and awareness um so I think a lot of the changes we were making like so for example the uh announcer was something like that so I I know I got really self- involved when I would play as bucket um and I would frequently not pay attention to like if my teammates were dying cuz I was too busy having fun shooting Rockets um so you know being able to like have the announcer there that's like your teammate has died and you're like a [ __ ] I should have been paying attention um

you know we also um like I said we increased uh different uh cues and more prominent UI elements to like really put the stuff that you should pay attention to in your face um cuz we found like oh trying to put it like subtly over here on the right like oh hey some someone's down there's a little arrow over here that's like pointing that someone's down no none of one no one saw that like a giant thing in the middle of the screen it's like someone so died it's like oh okay can't I can't miss that cuz it's right here so for us it was really identifying like what should people not miss what do they have to know okay yeah just put it just put it in their face they have to see it thank you so I think I have time for like one more question if there are any more questions all right just a simple one so you mentioned that there was a color blind mode uh where did you like put that in terms of selecting it and why did you put it there um I think we ended up putting it under

visuals uh I don't think uh so apparently number one I don't remember and I don't think we thought that hard about it uh sorry that's not a good answer um but if I had to go back uh I would love for evolve just to have had a accessibility menu again this talk should be subtitled Tera jealous of Uncharted um they uh so for example the the latest Uncharted just has an accessibility menu where all of these accessibility features are in there so you can go and look and find them in one place because you frequently do need to use them together so if you're low vision um and you need to you know up contrast you're probably also going to want to have your aim assist cranked up a little bit so putting those all in one menu would make it really easy to get to in like your One-Stop shop so if I had to go back uh I would love for an accessibility menu so uh that's it I am out of time um I will be drinking a tea for like 10 minutes over in the wrapup

area if you have any questions you were dying to ask me um and otherwise you can follow me on Twitter and please please please fill out your speaker surveys and let everyone know that I was awesome thank you