I Can't Hear You: Considering Deaf Gamers

[Music] i am karen stevens and i am the accessibility lead for ea sports now the talk is called i can't hear you because i literally can't hear you i am actually deaf i lost my hearing in my 20s which is why i still can speak so clearly and i lip read so during q a i'll have someone stand next to me and repeat the questions to me so i can lip read them easily so don't hesitate to ask questions there's two microphones here i'll direct you when we get to that point it's simply a procedural issue so statistics disabilities are really common there is actually over a billion people in the world with disabilities these numbers are from the american center of disease control that one in five have at least one disability by the time they're 18 plus and considered an adult it's one in four and by mid 70s is one and two and after that

point the odds are in favor of you being disabled so based on current life expectancy the majority of people in this room will have at least one permanent life-limiting disability before they die so right now according to wired magazine this amounts to over 30 million u.s gamers also there are over 40 million people in the us that have some degree of hearing loss that was life limiting and not only that but many people prefer to have subtitles on especially if they're in a noisy environment or they have to be an environment where they must be quiet like their sleeping children it's very common for people to want things like that and one other thing to keep in mind is that deafness is a spectrum um i have some residual hearing i don't i i can hear something i'm not going to say it's clear and it's very quiet that's why i wear hearing aids and hearing aids are not a fix-all so what i hear is mechanical sounding and is kind

of garbled and there are certain tones that i just can't hear so in fact that's how i figured out our hat hearing loss is that i was writing a program that had a tone from low to high and it was supposed to be one tone and i heard two and i spent hours trying to figure out why on earth does my code have two tones and i finally an exasperation asked somebody who was walking by how many tones do you hear one oh okay it's me that that's that's good to know and that was in grad school so um it's a progressive issue but you know i've gotten by and actually it's given me a lot of insight as to um how somebody would design a game that would be more deaf friendly so audio channels are a really important aspect of this an audio channel would be something like crowd volume in madden for example you've got cheering crowds that make lots of noise well i don't need that cheering crowd so i would turn it off

because that means other sounds that might be more relevant i can hear anytime somebody gives me audio channels i tend to turn off all background music so i can be able to somewhat distinguish voices if there are subtitles and things i will definitely be turning them on so speaking of subtitles let's talk about subtitles and captions there is more to designing games for people with hearing issues than this but this is one of the more common ones so let's cover that first font best practices font is the biggest issue right now when it comes to different types of difficulties in trying to read subtitles they need to be big bigger is better also the type of font you pick matters sans serif fonts is a really good idea because there's less embellishments so those with issues like dyslexia have a better chance of being able to read it that's also why italics is bad idea it's better to use bold or enlarged text

if you have to use underlines that's okay but that's not as good as bold or enlarged because underlying can actually cause some confusion for some people but any of those is better than italics for example for in terms of fonts with ariel helviga and brendana verdana is actually what this presentation is written in because i try to follow these type of guidelines whenever i can so another thing to keep in mind is color 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are color blind uh it's on the x chromosome that's why women are less likely to be colorblind so there is a grain of truth to saying that women can see color better than men um but just keep that in mind that you using color as a distinguishing factor can cause issues now it doesn't necessarily mean that your default font has to do all this it's recommended but let's say you decide to use something that's that's relatively small maybe kind of thin in all caps because it fits your world

okay i understand that but at the same point in time it's great when your game has options so then you can use mixed caps bold something easier to see and it's an option so you still get your original feel but people can have a chance to see it if they can't use that original option now bigger than this is even better but this is still a major difference between these two and i recommend this some people have an easier time reading all caps some people have an easier time reading mixed case and it it's best to support both if you can so font best practices um i recommend approximately three percent of the screen height um for 1080p that's technically 32 pixels tall four pixels wide and that matches the 16 bit era more or less that's about the size of 16 bit fonts were now the absolute minimum i will ever recommend is 28 pixels tall three pixels wide that three pixels wide is super

important because it means you probably have at least one pixel that is totally the color you want without any sort of dithering and that's important um i recommend bigger than that so three percent is a good ballpark now if you're thinking that's huge the tv industry recommends eight percent which in the case of a 1080p screen is 86 pixels tall so really 32 isn't that much um we're still well under the tv industry if you can get up to the 86 plus pixels tall that's even better that means you'll have a larger audience people who can see and when it comes to things like mobile consider using this font size for the system the system font size is you can actually find out what that is and you can match that it matters less if the text is is paginated in a smooth matter as you intend it matters more people can see it if people can't see it the text might as well not be there

and that's the situation we have in a lot of games right now both in ui and in subtitles so resizable text i love this option it's useful because the people who may not want the super large text can then make it smaller and have it take up less room but those who need it can make it bigger and that's great i usually make it as big as i possibly can because it's easier on my eyes i don't have perfect vision obviously because i'm wearing glasses uh but so it's easier for me to have larger images versus smaller and i love when it gives me the option also backgrounds backgrounds are super helpful no matter what your text needs contrast i recommend either a few pixel thick border not counting those three to four pixels for the actual text this is an addition so you have an outline around the words so if you have like white text on a white background you can see something

because i cannot tell you how many games where i know there's supposed to be a subtitle there but most of it i can't see so this prevents that also what's really useful is when you have a block of solid block behind the image and i actually prefer that whenever possible it's even better when that block is translucent and i can configure how dark or light it is i usually personally prefer around 70 but that's my own personal preference some people will like it super dark some people will like it super light it's wonderful when you have that option so direct versus background speech um what i mean by this and why i put these in words is that a lot of times when you have npcs in the world and you walk by them you can't hear what they're saying or when i say here i mean see because they're not subtitled and that's a problem so when i'm playing a game i may not know what's going on um that is you need some way to indicate that

someone is talking so here's an example from lego marvel superheroes where i'm literally playing as a star-lord flying around the world and i i see that there's uh some frozen guy in a cave literally up until this point i didn't know he was there and i found him and i would not have found him very easily or maybe even looked for it if i had actually seen not seen that text and that's how important it is now here is this literally the guy who i saved and he's the one with the speech bubble above his head and that's wonderful because i know he's the one who's talking because he's the one with the speech bubble and that's important because he doesn't have a name many times npcs don't have names and that's okay as long as you know who's talking now i would prefer that the words are not above his head because that can make it harder to read but having a little speech bubble above his head so i know that the words are coming from him is wonderful i love this it's even better when the character's

named when you have a speech bubble and you see their name so here's an example where um stanley is is lost every every single one level in this game has stanley somewhere in it um so here i can see that he where he is because i see his little speak bubble and i know he's the one talking layout um avoid placing text on top of things that are important um also in voice avoid placing things that are important on top of the text both matter um i want to be able to read everything on the screen um if you hide either or it's a problem so keep in mind when you're placing your subtitles where everything else is on the screen and make sure that's communicated among your team because it's relatively common where one person is placing things on the screen the other person's doing the subtitles and then later they get together and integrate their their stuff and realize that they're on top of each other so communication is really important because usually when this happens it is an accident

it's important to try to keep the text in the same location it can be confusing when it keeps moving around an exception to this is when you're doing things like cinema scenes and the area that you don't want to cover changes in that case yes move it um it's better to not cover up things that are important than to not move it like not covering up things is like the most important thing um keep things within a safe area this is the same issue you have with ui and anything else five percent margins are industry standard i recommend to at least do that content matching so each subtitle should be a single sentence whenever possible everything has exceptions like literally everything so if um if your text would become too fast timing or the sentence is super long go ahead and split it up as needed i recommend matching subtitles to see nonsense don't put the subtitles in

early unless you absolutely have to um there's always exceptions to everything so these are guidelines if the people's lips are still moving keep the subtitle up there's no reason to remove it and gets confusing if you do because then people are thinking am i missing a new phrase because people who who cannot hear will not know and avoid giving away reveals too early so this is an example of when to break things up so if it's a punch line of a joke don't give the punchline before everyone else uh can can hear it let me put it this way when i'm in movie theaters i tend to be laughing when other people aren't because i've already seen what the punchline is and everyone's like why are you randomly laughing because i know what's going to happen in the next scene so yes try to avoid that so speedy timing lime count again these are all ballparks um 160 to 180 words a minute is recommended um it's a recommendation so you can kind of

use that to figure out what your your number of lines should be two is ideal but you can vary as needed um four and more i really don't recommend because at that point you literally have a wall of text but one to three lines is okay two is ideal to texture match your verbal words whenever possible sometimes that won't be possible sometimes you'll have somebody who's speaking super super fast with really long complicated words and you may have to paraphrase a little bit try to avoid that but it is understandable and in the television industry they do do that um so it's okay it's just something to avoid now you're probably wondering okay so i have all this stuff going on and i have all these different texts and you know i may have multiple people talking at once maybe i have multiple places where sound is coming from how am i supposed to do that all i recommend channels so similar to audio channels you can have subtitle channels so if you have

like a different type like maybe you've got a um speaker over there like literal speaker um that has audio coming out of it maybe that's one channel maybe your crowd cheering is one channel maybe the main character talking is one channel so you can turn on and off as you need it which may also help change the words per minute so it may be does say you're scrolling you have scrolling text to the bottom if you have too many inputs coming in it might go too fast but some people may want that because they want to hear everything that's going on however other people may have trouble keeping up and if you give them channels to be able to turn things off it can really really help one game that does this already is we happy few and here at the very bottom of the screen it's kind of faint um is the audio that's coming from the speaker that's in the center of the camera and the one you the text you see above that point is the audio that's coming from the person talking to himself

so here you can turn on and off either of those two sources and they actually have different spots on the screen where they get those sources and that's great there's also different levels of audio you can have for the talking to themselves that's great too because then if it's too fast and it's hard to follow you can turn off some of the subtitling but not all of it and that's wonderful so there's a difference between captions and subtitles they're often used interchangeably but they aren't exactly the same essentially subtitles cover speech and captions cover sound including speech portal still alive is an example of a game that supports both and it's really important um to realize how important captions are so like when you're watching a movie and you're saying you have subtitles that means that you just have the words people are saying if you actually have captioning i know like what type of tone

of voice people use or if there's like some other important sound going on in the background and that's extremely valuable information so sound effect captioning best practices um there should always be an indication that this is specifically uh a sound and not words brackets are ideal and brackets are the standard used in the television and movie industry um i again avoid not relying on color it's okay to use different color but due to colorblind issues and whatnot i recommend not relying on it also if you do use color i recommend making a configurable so people can pick what colors work for them there are many different types of color blindness out there it's a spectrum much like hearing loss and every other type of issue almost every issue people can have as a spectrum so um i recommend making it configurable

describe sounds not actions you do not want to describe i threw something at the wall and you hear a sound as it bounces off that is way too many words and it's not very helpful to follow if you simply say ball bounces and you know there's a bounce sound um that's great short subject verb format is super important so here's an example of literally uh energy ball lounge energy ball bounce it tells me what type of ball launched and bounced and it's in brackets so i know for sure that it is a caption of a sound and honestly i probably could not play this game very well if i didn't know about this because i'd be walking through the world going what am i supposed to do and i see the text energy ball bounces i'm like there's an energy ball where is it if i did not know that a lot of times they're not in easy sight you have to rely on audio to know they're there i probably would not have been able to play this game but i could because captioning was loud

music you can use captioning for music too um i can tell you that things like the tv series monk has brackets that say upbeat tempo when you start watching that series and captions turned on that's great it lets you set the tone and mood and you have some idea what's going on and that's the most important thing if there are words they should be subtitled um it's important to try to give as much information to somebody who needs it as possible so an example is this um and we happy few when you turn on captioning for things you can see that this person is whistling a tune and it tells you the name of the tune now i may not know what that tune is but i can go online and look it up because it's a song that exists in the world and then i can find out exactly what that tune is if i really want to um it's more information than just whistles so it's really great when they tell me

what the whistling is now if they said whistling upbeat tempo that actually would probably be a little bit better um i would prefer it to know upbeat tempo and then maybe the name of the song but even then i could probably figure it out if i wanted to go online and really research the song which honestly believe it or not sometimes i do so going from there cues there is more to designing games for people with audio audio issues than just subtitles and captions they are super important but it's not the end all example having visual imagery for audio events is super super helpful for we happy few if you're in sneak mode you can see everybody's footsteps they make sound too but honestly i would have no idea how to tell where somebody was without this any game that has like let's say you step on a creaky floor if you see it makes a

sound if you make a little like poof of dust or something it lets me know that something occurred it gives me a visual indication the more important the event the sound event is the more important it is to have a visual indication if you're expecting somebody to be able to play your game where you're using sound cues visual indication is super super important when you're also when you're doing this keep in mind that playing with your game with the volume turned off may not be enough because you know what those cues are supposed to be so i recommend if you can having people with different types of hearing issues play your game or if you can't do that have people play test your game who've never seen it before who have only played it with the game muted it's not perfect but it means they're at least not biased in terms of they know what the sound already is directional indicators um this is super

super helpful having some sort of indication on the screen that says there's a sound in this direction or you're being shot from that direction or things like that um it's really common in games but it is super super helpful for people who can't hear because a lot of times they have some sort of stereo audio let you know if it's left or right or whatever i have no ability to do that i only can hear really out of my left ear and that ear is pretty bad this hair is almost completely gone i have no directional sound so when a game is relying on directional sound i am lost and the way i get around that is if you have something like this on the screen that tells me what direction the sound is coming from now in the same vein um you can have something like a radar that tells you where things are so in this list i made this full screen so you have some chance of seeing cause the radar is pretty small but i can tell there's an enemy in front of me and there's an ally behind me and it helps me know where my team is it

helps me know where i am helps everybody but without that i would have no idea i can't hear people behind me so when i'm playing a game with other people like i play i play games with other people who know that i can't hear very well but they're like didn't you hear that guy sneaking up behind you i'm like uh no so this helps me even the playing ground so everyone can have an enjoyable experience another thing that's helpful is environmental sounds so this is marvel uh lego marvel superheroes when an undead creature is creeping up on you and getting close it sucks all the color out of the world or the majority of the color out of the world to give it a creepy vibe that's awesome it gives me a whole sense of immersion even though i can't really tell that that audio is there so that's really cool i wish more games did this and keep in mind cues may not just be audio they can be controller vibrations too so for diablo 3 for example um if i'm

playing especially single player there is this creature called a nemesis that can spawn in that's like super powerful compared to standard creatures and there is a vibration pattern to the controller that warns you it's coming but there's also supposedly and i say supposedly because i've literally never heard it a horn that um happens at the same time people are like oh can't you hear that horn no but i can feel the controller another important thing to realize is that i actually play all games completely muted which may seem counterintuitive however i'm trying to listen to party chat and if i have any sort of background noise if i'm playing a multi-player game with party chat i am not going to know what's going on what people are saying so i have to mute the games if i want to be in an xbox party and have a prayer of understanding people so yeah those are all super important things um last thing really important thing settings if you can't i cannot find those

settings they might as well not be there it's important to make all accessibility settings accessible you should be able to find them uh where you've been in like an easy location it's okay if they're in multiple menus so let's take madden for example madden has an accessibility menu that has things like volume control channels in it or menu narration things like that or long shot subtitles i can tell you that a good chunk of the controls on the screen or on other screens like volume control has its own menu but they're also here so people who are looking for that sort of thing can find it easily and they're in multiple locations it's absolutely fine to have it in multiple locations it's a problem if people can't find it they should also be available when you're entering the game so if you see the little person standing there in the bottom corner that's accessibility settings and if you were to move your cursor over it it actually shows what it is it's also important that they're in pause menu so you can get to it easily

and you don't have to back out the entire game so thank you for your time and i hope you got some use out of that and if you have any questions please ask i'm available on email twitter and also i encourage if you have bugs and ea games that are accessibility related go to ea.com able there's a bug form there it's also a shortcut of slash able slash bugs um it's if you put things in there i actually have a team that i'm working with that are going through and helping disperse that information among teams and we're trying to give accessibility a higher priority because we know that that means that people can't play the game and we want to make games people can play so and that's also um why i have the twitter account and the email is trying to get all the information we can just so we can make games people can play because nobody is sitting around going oh i want to make games that no one can use or like we could just

exclude whole sections no it's accidental so awareness is key and um i i really hope that you can bring that information back for resources in general i recommend 4.5 to 1 contrast ratio or higher between text and backgrounds you can find that information on contrast ratio dot com and actually test colors and in general gameaccessibilityguidelines.com is really helpful for just any type of issue now i'd like to take questions and i'll need somebody to come next to me to do that i'd be happy to actually answer questions on any issue because my job is as accessibility lead actually covers all types of disabilities i prefer focusing on audio but if you want to meet me in the wrap-up room in 204 after i'm happy to talk about any issue thanks if you can come up to the microphones on either side if you live question that would be helpful

hi um my question is uh is there like a a standard or preferable position for subtitle or caption text okay i think i got that um the question was is there a standard for subtitles and text right like the position like whether it's the top of the screen or the bottom television industry yes game industry no um you can find information if you like search for bbc has um subtitles like they have like 200 and some odd pages uh guide on how to do subtitles and captioning um so if you want extremely extensive information look for the bbc subtitle and captioning guide online you'll find hundreds of pages of information okay cool thank you hi uh thank you for the talk uh i was wondering have you ever seen a good

example of a sound puzzle in a game that works for deaf people okay i heard uh have you heard of a great example for subtitle what a sound puzzle a sound puzzle game um no i have actually not seen a sound puzzle game that's really good at giving information i generally can't play those um games like that are like music games though like um rock band for example and all that i can play because it gives me enough feedback where i can sort of match what's going on i'm not going to say i'm the best singer in the world thank god i can't hear myself but um you know i can still play those games but anything that requires me to actually hear what the exact note is and match it i can't do yep hi um do you know of any external resources to send builds to to rate for accessibility or provide guidelines okay i think the question was do i know of any place where you can uh

have external people test your thing based on the game accessibility guidelines um i believe if you go to um ablegamers actually as i think it's yeah search online for able gamers they have a group of people they've gotten together that does just that so yeah search for ablegamers charity they have um the ability you can hire people through them thank you hi uh one of the challenges my accessibility team has is drawing a fine line between not spoiling gameplay or narrative content while also providing tells for things that may be time dependent or a boss attack that is needing to be telegraphed in that way give any advice on you know good decision making practices where we try to find that line you have to repeat that they're using audio tells or boss attacks do you have any suggestions on how to do that

audio tells you or what telegraphing the boss is about to attack ah the the bot that yeah okay so you're asking how to basically avoid punch lines more or less in terms of like it could be an action like a boss attack correct without spoiling content without spoiling the content um that that's when you do we'll work with timing that's what i was explaining earlier that like if you're doing a joke you don't want to give away the punch line so if you could do the boss attack sound like you definitely want to say you hear this sound like the boss attack sound so people can actually hear it it's okay to make a visual representation of it or maybe when the mainly you have the boss roaring there's actually a visual like distortion on the screen or something because it's just such intense or it makes the controller vibrate that's an option too it doesn't have to actually be words excellent thank you uh my accessibility team has also done a lot of user research on we happy few which we helped publish so um on behalf of them thank you uh for the for the kind words uh that that means a lot to them now i

didn't fully catch that so i'll ask him a minute but i love the fact you have an accessibility team i got it okay so we are out of time this is fine i will be next door in 204 you're welcome to ask me whatever you like about any type of issue thank you [Applause]