Raising the Bar: 2016's Accessibility Advancements

[Music] well hello right I'll get started um my name is Ian and I am an accessibility specialist so I work with various areas of the industry to try and raise awareness and raise the bar for inclusion and people with disabilities in game development so for me at the moment it's a very exciting time in the development of the industry every year the pace of change accelerates more more and more really nice stuff happens in the field of accessibility that's I'm going to share with you today a few of the interesting things that have been happening and doing this talk actually puts me in an interesting position because this time last year I did a similar kind of talk about the highlights of what happened in 2015 and it was a pretty simple process I looked at what happened I put it into a talk I gave it this year I can't do that because there's way too much to physically be able to fit into presentation which is a pretty nice situation to be in

so I'm just going to talk about um four kind of common themes that have have been in the development of the industry this year but first of all because I'm sure there'll be a range of um levels of expertise and knowledge about accessibility I'm just going to assume nothing and start from the start with an explanation about what accessibility is and why it's important as I said when I talk about accessibility I'm talking about relating to disability so sorry someone say something I asse not cool okay right so I'm going to start with an explanation about what disability is and for that I have this gentleman here to help me now this image was taken as part of an investigation that he was doing for a newspaper back in the UK and I'm sure when looking at this picture most of the people in this room would be able to have some kind of a guess of what this guy's disability is

what it is that's making him disabled so you might be thinking that perhaps he has cble pory in which case he kind of halfway there he does have cereal posy but cerebal posy is not actually a disability it's a medical condition and that's a really important distinction to make so what else could it be then you might also be thinking about the fact that he is in a wheelchair but again a wheelchair is not a disability it's like a pair of glasses it's a piece of assistive technology that actually helps him go about his day and he was going about his day fine until he went to meet his friends in this bar and encountered the steps so in the context of meeting his friends in this bar he has being disabled by the steps and that's what disability actually is it's when someone's medical condition

encounters some kind of barrier resulting in difficulty performing a day-to-day task so it's a mismatch between the person and their environment and the barriers that people face whether it is steps in front of a bar whether it is a shelf that's too high whether it is red and green teams in the Deathmatch these barriers are often put there by another person so we're designed to be like that which is kind of a heavy thing to get your head around that as designers as developers as content producers we are actually contributing to people's disability but there is also the flip side to that which is by being aware of the kind of barriers that people can encounter we can figure out which of those barriers are unnecessary and avoid them and remove them and prevent disabling situations like these from occurring and it's that process that's known as accessibility and accessibility is

important it's important for many many reasons but one of those reasons is that people with disabilities are a market and not an insignificant Market either the latest US Government data is 22% of the adult population of the USA now not everyone in that 22% is going to encounter barriers with games but that's more than balanced out by the other conditions that aren't included in that 22% there's also color blindness which affects 8% of males simulation sickness estimates of that range anything from 10% upwards difficulty reading now this is the one that surprises people because you don't hear about it because there's such a stigma difficulty reading affects 14% of adults and this is just talking about permanent conditions there's also temporary impairments like having a broken arm like RSI there's also situational impairments like having to play a game on mute cuz the baby's asleep playing in direct sunlight so

there all kind of situations where these kind of barriers occur large large numbers of people and also these large numbers equate into large amounts of business money to be made money to be lost through these kind of decisions and the other really really important reason for considering accessibility is something that's a bit less mercenary it's the human benefit of accessibility because what games actually represent is access to Recreation to culture to socializing which are things that so many of us just take for granted but if for any reason in your day-to-day life your means of accessing those things is restricted games can then provide them and become a really important contributor to someone's quality of life or to explain all that in a much more concise way than I have one of my favorite quotes

so because accessibility is so important it's been really really nice to see the field advancing more and more progress being made every year increasing exponentially every year you see more and more and more faster and faster and the last year is no exception but going back a little bit further the big advance of 2015 was the introduction of accessibility functionality on consoles on both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One and this includes stuff like text to speech so that people who are blind can navigate the system interface high contrast mode Zoom remapping the controls at a system level all this stuff was added in and that's continued on into 2016 you know so neither company's been resting on their Laurels they've continued to add in more functionality like control over Tech speed improve Tech size options um this is another nice example this is the addition of um clubs onto Xbox One and

you can see here it's being used by De Gamers to find other people to play with who aren't going to kick them out of a game because they can't use a microphone and it hasn't just been the consoles either it's now starting to spread further so this is uh Steam Big Picture Mode which now allows Again full button remapping and also steam have open sourced the lighthouse technology which opens the door to custom input devices for VR but this button remapping stuff um remapping at platform level both in Steam and on the consoles is really good as a safety net but it's not as good as remapping in a game if you have actual in-game remapping that opens up things like being able to have separate maps for walking and for driving or like in OverWatch being able to have separate mappings for each character class it also allows you to do things like have your game tutorials and prompts update

to reflect what the current mapping is but there is a barrier to that which is the cost to implement it which is in the process of being broken down so I think it was around April 2016 Unity announced that they were working on a new input model which it hasn't H hit general public release yet but they're developing it collaborative with developers so you can actually already go on the site and download it and have a play around with it the basic principle is it just abstracts out inputs and actions by default so an input being for example the a button an action being jump they're separate and to create a control scheme a developer just creates relationships creates links between those things which means the functionality is already there for players to do the same thing and basically because um Unity want to support um input devices that haven't even been invented yet you know the scale the p case at which things be invented for VR and stuff like that they

wanted to make sure that all different types of input work together which means that it can do things like for example remap a controller based control scheme to a keyboard or a mouse you can remap and log to digital so you can move a command between like the B button and pushing forward on analog stick so this is all quite difficult stuff for developers to do and it's all just going to be handled for you at engine level and there's also been some nice platform level um advances outside the dedicated gaming space so what you're looking at here is an iPad on the right and the iPad is being operated solely by the yellow button and that yellow button is something that's known as an accessibility switch and it's called a switch because it's a simple onoff interaction and those kind of input devices they can take lots of different forms it could be a button like that a common setup is a button mounted on a wheelchair headrest it could be a chi be

blow into it could be an infrared link detector it's the same kind of kit that Steven Hawking uses to operate technology and iOS is compatible with this like at an operating system level you can operate the whole of an iPhone of an iPad just using a simple single input and it has a couple of different modes one of them is basically it works like um sheeting in a basketball game so you have a line that moves across the screen sorry wrong one so you have a line that moves left and right across the screen when it reaches the coordinate you want you make your input it stops then the line moves up and down you choose the coordinate you want once you've chosen a coordinate on the screen it pops up a little menu and asks you what you would like to do at that point whether you want to tap whether you want to swipe whether you want to zoom which already makes a lot of games accessible so you can imagine a basic

interface type game like football manager something like that you can operate using this technology so like this guy's doing Christopher he's using a single button on his a wheelchair headrest not so good if you're playing something like Flappy Birds for example so flappy birds in theory it is just a single input it should work with this kind of Technology but using the scanning from side to side system you can imagine you move across move down hit the start button starts moving across and that's happened that has now changed this has been really really exciting to see in the past year um Apple in response to requests has actually done two specific Updates this functionality specific to games so the first one being in iOS 9 they added the ability to choose a point on the screen and then tap repeatedly at that point which means that games like cannibal games like Flappy Birds now just work with that kind of

Technology iOS 10 they upgraded it again allowing you to hold down at a point repeatedly which means games like Alto adventure games like Badlands just work with this kind of technology which is a really really amazing example of the power of operating systems to facilit facilitate this kind of stuff because it just means thousands of games overnight now just work with his kind of Technology without any effort from developers at all there's also been advances in games themselves now in the games media this year there's been two things above all else that have really really dominated the media the first one being Pokémon go and Pokémon go is actually accessible with this kind of switch technology I'm talking about so what you can see on the screen here is after you've chosen the coordinate it gives you the little menu the pallette of actions you can choose so so you can see here is choosing a

flick to flick the Pokéball but despite this Pokémon in general is not a very accessible game now some of that is due to the physicality of the game the fact that you have to be you know climbing up hills and stuff to play it but a lot of it is actually just due to simple uh interface decisions so things like these complex gestures that it has small low contrast text which is obviously not great for a game you're supposed to play outdoors in the sunlight also the map screen there are elements on the map screen that distinguished by color alone not so great if you're color blind so this obviously isn't an advance it certainly doesn't make Pokémon go unique what does make Pokemon unique go unique is stuff like this the huge huge amount of discussion that there's been about it so blog posts social media right even like mainstream media articles about it from Gamers from Developers from advocacy groups people

like American foundation for the blind groups that are not normally involved in gaming who are now talking about the accessibility potentials of Pokémon go lots of people with loads of really good ideas about how to improve the accessibility and this is important for a couple of reasons firstly it's important because it's a rear wheel sign of the growing awareness of accessibility and also people's changing expectations about accessibility as well you know Gamers have got different ideas now compared to a couple of years ago about what gamees should be about what game should be doing and this also really significant because it's a big sign of the cultural significance of games because there's a really really strong undercurrent to all this commentary of people who you know they could see this cultural phenomenon happening around them and they didn't want to be excluded from it they wanted to experience the same thing that other friends were experiencing now the other thing that's been dominating obviously the games press and also the mainstream press over the last year has been

VR and VR can be quite an exclusionary platform so the requirements to be able to walk around a room the requirements to be able to use two hand controlled motion tracking controllers even just the simple function of putting a large bulky object onto your head all these things can be exclusionary and some of these some of the barriers that VR um throws up are kind of inherent into the platform there's not much you can do about them but a lot of them can actually be addressed through just good accessible design which people are realizing there's a lot of developers who are really really passionate about accessibility in VR and they're doing some really really nice things really nice creative approaches to accessibility in VR and this is really really exciting for me to see because we haven't had this before with a new platform we didn't have this when motion controls came out before that we didn't have this

when touch controls came out so it's really really exciting to see just this kind of level of understanding and appreciation of accessibility at such an early stage of v and we also had to launch a PlayStation VR where the vast majority of launch games had an option like this we have a choice between a standard controller a motion controllers which is obviously handy if you don't happen to own move controllers also really really handy if you don't happen to have a full set of working arms and working fingers so hopefully because this is also PlayStation VR was obviously quite a high-profile launch a lot of high-profile games hopefully this will be the kind of thing that can help set a precedent show other the develop is what's possible another nice really source of accessibility in games over the past year in particular has been through game jams I just having a chat with someone just before I came in about

this now I'm sure most of the people in the room are pretty familiar with game jams but just in case there are some uninitiated it's basically like a game based hackathorn event you turn up on day one get given some kind of a challenge team up and then have a very very short amount of time to build a game and one of the biggest ones is an event called Global game Jam this is a photo of just one single venue of global game Jam there's venues like this all over the world loads of different countries like 10,000 participant tens of thousands of participants and Global game Jam is an organization that cares a lot about accessibility they have a um in addition to the main theme they also have a set of optional challenges you know for in case building a game in 48 hours wasn't enough of a challenge already and every year a number of those optional challenges are accessibility ones so for example in 2016 they had challenges like make a game that you can can play using one hand making a game

that has high contrast visuals and those challenges were taken up in the region of 3,000 times based on the average team sizes in global game Jam that's something in the region of 10,000 developers who were experimenting with accessibility over the course of this weekend and Global game J don't have a monopoly on this either in the past year there's been more accessibility Gams than there ever has been before Gams that are either dedicated solely to accessibility like this one in Japan jams that have an accessibility element like Global game Jam there's been as well as this Japan Global game Jam there's been ones in Poland UK Canada Global ones and it's really really nice to see because game jams are such a powerful tool for erasing awareness because there's a really common misconception that accessibility is going to be difficult it's going to be

hard it's going to be expensive but if developers can come to an event like this and see that actually even in the context of building a game in 48 hours you can make a real difference that's a really really powerful lesson that people can take back to their day jobs we've also seen some nice progress on individual features one of these is subtitling Now subtitling is really really important for lots of reasons I mean the obvious one being if you're deaf it's also important if like I said earlier if you have to play a mute because the baby's asleep it's also important if you're playing in a noisy room people have it turned on because audio mixes and games are unpredictable there might be an explosion going off just in an important bit of exposition so because of all these reasons it's not really surprising to see data like this I have to give a little bit of a disclaimer cuz this isn't you know a scientific study this is a straw pole on a website but still it starts to tell a

bit of a story so because subtitles are so important for so many people they're obviously worth doing a good job of but nobody does subtitles and games are terrible and I do mean in all of your games and this isn't coming from me so this is just coming from a single thread on neog so you can get the gist right so in general gamers are really not happy about the state of subtitles and games and it's really really simple things you know you can see a lot of things people are talking about here just the subtitles are too small I can't see them against the background this really isn't rocket science to solve there also problems that have already been sold by other Industries you know like TV film they've been looking at this stuff for 50 years they figured it out you can just copy the lessons they' already learned and games finally are starting

to do that so A few examples this is from a game called Virginia which doesn't actually have any dialogue in it at all but it's still has captions for important background sounds the latest Tomb Raider game so you can see here it's using Color to distinguish her speaking it's also using name tags distinguish who speaking it's also using letter boxing which is the name for that rectangle behind the text to increase the contrast there are games that have done this before but what makes tomb ra unique is that it's optional so there are some people who really really rely on this kind of stuff other people who find it distracting just give them the option turn it on and off we've also started to see games giving this option the option to configure the size of the

subtitles and again this comes down to the different kind of use cases for subtitles because you know some people if someone's deaf and needs to understand every single word that's in the subtitles they need it to be as clear as possible somebody else like the person I mentioned who just glances at them occasionally when an explosion goes off they want them to be subtle so again just give people the choice some else who's done this recently this is um the latest Hitman game two nice things here first of all it's giving you a preview of what the subtitle is going to look like secondly subtitle size 46 which is an important number so that's 46 pixels at 1080p that's the size that your subtitle should be if you only have one size for your subtitles make them at least 46 pixels if you don't want them to be that by default at least provide an option for people to be able to change them up to that size

last example this is from Life of strange so you can see they also have a size option on here underneath they have an option for the letter boxing that black rectangle behind it you can turn it on and off you can change the opacity what you're also looking at is a list of all the games that have ever implemented this so this is standard functionality on other platforms you look at YouTube you look at Netflix they've got these kind of options this is the only game to it and it's such a simple thing to do so if you want to really be at the Pinnacle of innovation in the games industry let people turn that black box on off you make a lot of people happy so this is just kind of the start as I mentioned there's there's all kinds of other things you can do lessons you can learn from these other platforms these other Industries so if you take a note at this link here this tells you all these kind of things you can do

so on to another feature that we've seen a lot of progress in um is color blindness that's continuing its march on towards being a standard consideration in the past year there's been a lot of progress in the number of games considering it also progress in the type of games that considering it so this is a game called Hue which is a color-based platform Puzzler so you see there's a ring around the character when you choose a color from that ring it changes the background to that color so if you had to choose purple the background will change to purple those purple blocks will no longer be visible against the backgrounds and you can walk past them so entirely color based game this is the kind of game that you know a year or two ago would have been written off as being fundamentally about color how can someone's color blind Possibly play that they've added symbols really simple elegant solution and it works for all the different types of color blindness and they've had really really good reception from the community for it then next again with going to show you is a similar kind of thing it's a similar color based um color based

puzzle game this one's first person one but it's based on color mixing so in the next game if you wanted to choose orange like this you would actually have to choose yellow and red and mix them together again this is the kind of thing that a couple years ago been written off as impossible it's inherently color based right so they've just done this so again there's a similar kind of solution to what was used in Hue they're just using symbols so if you want to make something orange you just combine the symbols for yellow and the symbols for red and that gives you orange really nice elegant solution and again something's gone down really really well with the community as well as these features there's been all kinds of nice examples of individual games doing other nice things way too many to be able to go through today but I'll just give you a few quick examples this this one is Madden 17 which has a whole Suite of options for

impaired vision and there's actually a talk about this on tomorrow afternoon if you want to find out more about this this is warlock firetop mountain and this has a lot of options for configuring the typography and this is designed specifically for that 14% of people who have difficulty reading which is so rarely considered and a lot of really quick easy fixes you can do OverWatch now OverWatch is a bit of a mixed bag there's some things OverWatch doesn't do so well but some things it does really really well and this is one of them so this is what I was talking about earlier with being able to um remap all the individual classes individually that makes this kind of stuff possible it makes a real difference and this is the really really important example of a game for the last year so you might have seen some of the press about this this is Uncharted 4 Uncharted 4 has um put in some effort

into accessibility for motor impairment so it has features to allow you to play one-handed it moves the camera around automatically for you it has functionality like Grand Theft Auto to automatically lock on your own has an option here the one that's highlighted for repeated button presses so if you can't physically mash the buttons you can just hold it down instead these options are really popular this is something you quite often find in accessibility is because what you doing is just removing a barrier you aren't addressing a small Niche you're making the game better for everybody cuz what's a complete Game stopping barrier for one person it's probably still a bit of annoyance for everybody else so they actually found that the um camera assist for playing one-handed that's actually used by a third of their players they also had some really nice accidental accessibility as well so if you play thech you probably know they have um a whole bunch of modes you can unlock which which are just intended as a bit of fun that includes a

slow motion mode and a slow motion aiming mode which is really really helpful but people got impair motability it also includes this which is something called Thief Vision which you can see what it's doing with the contrast with the edge detection this is actually unintentionally making the game accessible to people who are legally blind so that means people who aren't completely blind but have a low enough Vision that has a significant impact on the on their lives they can still play Just based on this accidental feature all this stuff is really nice but it isn't the real reason why Uncharted is important the reason why the accessibility in Uncharted is important is because it's in Uncharted so going back to what I was saying earlier about misconceptions another common misconception is that thinking about accessibility is going to make your game less fun it's going to dilute down your ideas to suit a lowest common denomination lat it doesn't take very long looking at

Uncharted critical reception it's Metacritic it sales figures to see that that is completely false and the other reason it's really important is because being such a high-profile game it makes other developers sit up and take notice and there's historical precedent for that as well because you know I saying color blindness I'm sure you're all aware color blindness is a pretty common thing to consider now in 2014 it wasn't it was really really rare there wasn't until three games in 2014 which is Borderlands 2 Sim City and Black Ops 2 they implemented color blowing modes it was big big news like front page news and the soon as that happened people knew about color blindness other people started implementing it and we're already seeing this with Uncharted everything from onean Indies to the big Publishers are actually taking notice and thinking a lot more about accessibility as a direct result of this game

and it isn't by accident either they made a lot of effort to actually tell people about their functionality and they aren't the only people to be doing it either so down at the other end of the scale this is a indie game called Legacy of the Elder Star and what this is is screenshots from the trailer from the game so they've dedicated the whole chunk of their trailer just to telling people about their accessibility features which kind of seems like an obvious thing to do tell people about your accessibility features but a lot of developers don't that's you know that's the worst situation you can be in if you dedicated time and energy and money into putting this stuff into place and Gamers don't find it so really really important to tell people about what you've done it doesn't have to be three fanasy videos either it can be other means such as in Final Fantasy this is something I've never seen before so in Final Fantasy 15 they've actually included accessibility information in the printed

manual but it doesn't need to be as Fanci that either this is going back to Hugh that color-based platform game they included one single bullet point about their Co bline mode in their press release as a result something in the region of 20 different Outlets picked up on the C bline made gave it a really really good reception and he actually gave talk about it on Monday and he reckons it actually pushed up his Metacritic score by a few points just from including that one bullet point this press release so it's nice for getting some good PR from as well and game developers aren't the only people who are telling Gamers about accessibility functionality this year game critics started including this kind of information in their reviews game critics is a mainstream game review site and that's of this year on every single review they put out they

include information on color blindness controls and hearing accessibility and on this topic of dialogue dialogue is a two-way thing right so it's not just about you giving information to Gamers about accessibility it's about you getting information from Gamers about accessibility as well and this is a really nice example of that this is earlier last year um Karen Stevens is the person who's giving the talk about the Madden accessibility she's actually set up and the email address and the Twitter account specifically for receiving accessibility feedback and she then roots that to all the various different EA Studios there's been explicit calls for feedback as well this is a survey that went out from fail better games asking for input from the community on ideas of how to make the games more accessible this is the same thing again from cliff

blazinski and this is actually following on from an experience that Cliff had earlier in the year that he wrote about so this is from a meeting that he had with a group of young veterans so Cliff there Cliff um isn't the only example of high level support and recognition for accessibility that's been happening this recognition goes all the way to the very top so in the past year able Gamers wish accessibility charity in the USA were invited to speak about accessibility at the White House special effect who are in accessibility charity in the UK their new facility was opened not just by the prime minister but by a delegation of senior politicians from across the political

divide and there's all kinds of nice quotes that came out of this um this is one of them it's probably not going to mean a huge amount to you if you're not from the UK to understand it basically replace uh Mr Cameron to Mr Trump and Tom Watson for Bernie Saunders so you can see in the UK this is kind of a big deal this kind of real real high level support and backing and understanding of the importance of accessibility but back in the games industry there's been this kind of high level support as well so at E3 last year um there was the gaming for everyone initiative announced by Microsoft and this is kind of a general inclusivity inclus inclusivity and diversity initiative but explicitly includes accessibility for gamers with disabilities and this is a quote from Phil Spencer he of Xbox about that so this kind of statement about the

importance of accessibility you know a couple of years ago this just would have been unimaginable another quote here from Phil Spencer as well so just to explain exactly what this is this is the head of Xbox praising a PlayStation exclusive game this is not something that happens every day and PlayStation themselves as well at PlayStation experience which is their annual consumer event they hosted a panel specifically on accessibility this isn't something that's happened before and this is a quote from Sean niden chair of signing World War Studios from the start of that event so you can see we really want to be leaders in this field this kind of high level support

and backing for accessibility isn't something that there's really been before and it's so important CU over the years speaking to developers on the ground who really really want to do nice stuff Implement nice features but they just haven't been able to because they can't get it up the chain up onto the backlog because management you know don't believe in the ROI all that kind of stuff you need that stuff if you want to Ena lasting cultural change it has to come from multiple angles you need to have people on the ground who understand what's required who want to do the work you have to have people at the top who believe in it who are willing to empower their star to make those changes and you also need to have pressure externally so you need to have the public The Gamers letting industry know that this is important this is something that they want to see and now for the first time we're actually starting to see all those three

pieces start to slot into place so that means that now like never before we have a real opportunity to enact lasting positive change to the industry we just have to reach out and take it thanks so as I said this was just covering kind of a few key themes um the first link on there is a much longer version It's let to get all the nice stuff that happened over the last year and the quotes as well um the next L down game advocacy if you want to get involved in kind of these advances about that's lots of ideas of things you can do to help push the field forward then lastly game accessibility guidelines if you want to implement accessibility features into your own games that gives you loads of good suggestions of things you can do examples of good practices stuff like that and lastly me um I'm always Keen to chat

if there's anything you ever want to know about accessibility anything you want to chat through anything you want to rant about get in touch I'll happily talk you R off so that's me um we got a bit of time if anyone's got any questions I'm more than happy if there's anything you're uncomfortable asking now just hit me up afterwards and we can have a chat any takers any going to start me off so question for you you uh you held up unity's action map as maybe an example of a way that a middleware provider could make it easier for game developers to build accessibility in the games yeah can you talk a little bit about other opportunities the platform holders or the middle World vendors have that could um make it easy to do some of the other things that you talked about today yeah absolutely so this this is a potential with things like mware to to make it easier for developers to do this kind of stuff there's huge huge possibilities there because historically engines have been a blocker to to accessibility they really could be an enabler um so yeah the the uh remapping

is a really good example another one is subtitling because a lot of the things are talking about those good practices they could be addressed at an engine level because often the problems you get are because of the way that subtitles fit into the production pipeline you don't get you can't actually produce the subtitles themselves until you have the audio you don't get the finalized audio Until the End people then build a system without any time and any resources and it's just a bit hacky um if it was done at an engine level you would get developers who would get to that point say oh my God the engine does it for me I'll put it into my game or just use that amazing if what is built by the engine at the engine level has all these nice good practices built in that means that those developers even those developers who quickly Chuck it in a rush have got all that really nice accessibility functionality in there from the start so just the things like the the ability to customize the letter boxing like having a decent default size all that kind of stuff could be nicely handled the engine level and stop people having to reinvent the wheel every time especially when

they're Reinventing the wheel as a square every time as well um yeah that's one example one that I'd really really love to see some progress on is um screen readers so that's the um technology that people who are blind use to access technology um so basically it just reads out text strings of whatever on the screen whatever is on the screen um it works very nicely on mobile devices um so this is on any mobile devices you've got whether it's um andro Android iOS Windows phone um you just turn on screen reader and it changes how gestures work so anything you would normally do with um two fingers sry with one finger you have to use two fingers for instead that frees up one finger so you can run your finger over the surface the screen and through synthesized speech it speaks out the label of anything your finger moves over so you can actually use your finger like an eye and visualize what's on the screen so stuff like interface based games is really perfectly suited for it doesn't work with engines because engines don't output native um operating

system interface elements they output just a bunch of pixels that's something the engine developers could address and if they did it would make a huge huge difference and I don't know if I if I can steal Evelyn Thunder y sure so um there's a talk tomorrow um by um Evelyn Thomas um is she also told is a program manager program manager program manager for accessibility EXP in her talk tomorrow she's going to be talking about um a new API on the Xbox that allows developers to access text to speech so game developers can actually make their interfaces blind accessible on the Xbox that's the kind of thing that could be done at engine level you know because all the engines have decent UI systems built in if they automatically passed out like the labels of those interface elements then there'd be a lot of interface based games that would just be blind accessible by default with no effort from developers which is how it works with natively built games it'd be amazing to see Eng based games doing that as well um but yeah yeah really good question there there's a lot of potential for good from

from middleware engines any other take us no we're good good stuff thank [Applause] you