A beginner's guide to making your game accessible

gamesindustry.biz:

Marie Dealessandri

Features Editor

Wednesday 20th July 2022

At Develop:Brighton last week, Rebellion's Cari Watterton and Lowtek's Alastair Low shared a talk on the topic of accessibility.

Watterton, who joined the Sniper Elite developer as senior designer of accessibility this March, gave a crash course in making games more accessible, while Low -- founder and director of indie dev Lowtek -- focused on sharing advice about designing for dyslexic players.

In this article we'll cover Watterton's portion of the talk, but stay tuned for more from Alastair Low and designing with dyslexia in mind in the coming weeks.

So what is accessibility and why does it matter? That's the first question Watterton sought to answer in her talk.

"Games are for everyone, or at least they should be for everyone"

"Accessibility is all about barriers; and barriers stop people from being able to play your game or experience it in the way that you intended," she said. "For example, a blind player can't operate the menu [if] there is no menu narration, [they] would just essentially be experiencing a blank screen and not even know how to launch your game to start playing it.

"So why does it matter? Games are for everyone, or at least they should be for everyone. According to statistics from Game Accessibility Guidelines, about 20% of gamers experience disabilities. The WHO says there's over one billion people that live with a disability."

But Watterton highlighted that "accessibility doesn't just mean disability," as there's a whole spectrum of impairments that need to be taken in consideration as well. Among others, she mentioned colour blindness, which affects one in 12 men, or low reading levels -- roughly one in seven adults has the reading level of an