Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Creative Director Talks Accessibility and ASL

gameranx.com:

Many of you today will be playing Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and we don’t blame you one bit. The title from Insomniac Games seems to be everything that fans could want and more, and they worked hard to deliver a truly robust experience while tailoring it to feature representation across the board and giving options to those with special needs. In a special interview with the PlayStation Blog, Bryan Intihar talked about the early sections of the game and certain other elements. We won’t spoil anything, but one thing he did really appreciate in one particular mission is the inclusion of Hailey.

We met Hailey in the spinoff with Miles Morales, and her character stood out because she’s deaf and thus uses ASL in the video game, a rare thing to see these days. She’s the focus of a mission in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and Intihar was very proud of it:

“That certain quest – which I’m gonna try to not go into too much detail – I will tell you, is definitely one of my favorite parts of the game. Not only because of what it is, but how it came to be. Because the team – I can tell you right now, we didn’t go into this game with the idea of making that quest. Definitely did not. But it was something that the team talked about and proposed. And I can tell you, it didn’t fit in the schedule. It didn’t. And this was something that the team was really passionate about, and they went for it… Our entire team was like, ‘hey, let’s figure out how to make this happen’, even down to [it being] one of the last things I reviewed. One of the last things I actually came into the office and reviewed, was that mission, was that quest.”

He went on to note that accessibility is something that Insomniac Games is very passionate about. They’ve been doing their