From Checklists to Playability: A Systematic Mapping of Player Reviews to the Game Accessibility Guidelines

This study maps 479 player accessibility reviews from the "Can I Play That?" community site (2019–2025) onto the 120 Game Accessibility Guidelines, and pairs this corpus analysis with a guideline-based heuristic evaluation of Minecraft Education. Its central argument is that formal accessibility frameworks and lived player discourse capture different dimensions of access, and that accessibility is fundamentally a question of whose play is considered valid. The authors situate their work within disability studies and player-community scholarship, and they note that prior research on Minecraft Education's classroom use has seldom assessed disability through established frameworks.

Across the review corpus, 66.5% of tagged features were reported positively, but this figure masks a strong concentration of attention. Hearing and motor provisions dominate discussion, and basic features such as subtitles, control remapping, and adjustable text are both frequently mentioned and often satisfied. Advanced items, including macros, input cool-downs, and VR-specific guidance, are rarely addressed by reviewers or present in the games themselves, suggesting that community discourse and formal guidance diverge most sharply at the complex end of the spectrum.

The heuristic evaluation finds Minecraft Education offers broad but uneven accessibility. Its control remapping and basic cognitive supports are strong, yet it lacks discrete camera turning, a comprehensive photosensitivity mode, general sound captioning at the level of Bedrock Edition, and subtitles for sound events in the Education Edition. Notably, many of its accessibility tools are teacher-facing, such as suppressing hostile mobs or pausing the world, which the authors argue shifts accessibility labour onto educators rather than empowering learners directly. Classroom accessibility, they conclude, depends heavily on educator configuration and social context, not solely on game settings.

The authors propose an open, living "guidelines × games" matrix built from player texts and heuristic inspection, which preserves the situated nature of experience while enabling systematic comparison. Future work is outlined on temporal trends, impairment-specific perspectives, and a shared, openly maintained coding resource.