Video game developers are becoming more proactive in designing features that make games more accessible, a welcome change after years of pushback from disability advocates and accessibility consultants. The recent proliferation of accessibility options signals a shift towards a more inclusive video game industry.
What's changed?
It used to be rare for a video game to include settings that allowed players to customize their gameplay to fit their needs. "But now mainstream developers are leveling up," PBS News Hour reported. In the last few years, developers have been "increasingly considering accessibility when designing their games, whether to accommodate a visual impairment, a motor control issue, or an anxiety disorder."
Disability advocates have been saying for years that the industry is slow to consider the needs of people with cognitive and physical disabilities and those with auditory and visual impairments. Mainstream and indie developers are taking notice. Some hire accessibility advocates and organizations as consultants during the game's development process.
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Anita Mortaloni, accessibility director at Xbox, told PBS that company policy mandates that creators consider accessibility from the beginning of the game's development. It had made integration easier than in previous years when accommodations were often added to games retroactively. "If there are barriers to play because a game's not accessible or inclusive, people won't play it," Mortaloni said.
The Game Accessibility Conference Awards started recognizing the efforts of those who "raise the bar for accessibility." Still, identifying what makes a game accessible is more complicated than adding new features, Tara Voelker, co-director of The Game Accessibility Conference Awards and senior Xbox Game Studios accessibility lead, said. That's because "different gamers have different needs and different barriers that stop them from being able to play," Voelker explained in an interview with Polygon. "A title may be incredibly accessible to deaf/hard of hearing gamers but completely inaccessible to those who are blind."
What are the new accessibility features?
A few developers recently incorporated features designed to help people with specific phobias play their games. Sony PlayStation included a thalassophobia mode in a recent update to "Horizon Forbidden West" for players afraid of deep water. The mode allows users to keep their character from running out of air while swimming underwater and adds "pulsing and glowing effects to the game's underwater environment," Axios described.
Electronic Arts' "Star Wars Jedi: Survivor" and Warner Bros. Games' bestseller "Hogwarts Legacy" have arachnophobia modes that change some creatures' appearance to look less spider-like. Members of Electronic Arts' Star Wars team at Respawn Entertainment said they began designing their "arachnophobia safe mode" a year ago after a developer had trouble working on a critical level with a spider-like creature. The whole team valued being able to "create that accessible game for players [who] otherwise wouldn't have been able to complete the story and experience the journey," Respawn senior development director Jonas Lundqvist told Axios.
PlayStation unveiled Project Leoonardo, a codename for a fully customizable controller the company built with accessibility in mind. Though many of the studio's games have extensive software accessibility features, "the company's accessible hardware options have been noticeably lacking," Grant Stoner wrote for Wired, "meaning that some physically disabled players couldn't experience those award-winning worlds or their award-winning features."
The device will allow physically disabled players to customize the buttons and layout of the controller to fit their unique needs. The controller was built with a split design, "meaning players use significantly less energy to move between inputs," Stoner explained.
Indie and mainstream developers are also making games increasingly accessible for low-vision and blind players. Features like audio cues and descriptions, text-to-speech, and assisted navigation help visually impaired players participate without assistance from another person.
There is still room for improvement, Stoner wrote for his IGN series on gaming accessibility. "Accessibility in games should seamlessly coexist with the user experience," Stoner said. Instead of having to wade through numerous options on a menu, "disabled players should expect their game to be playable, and if necessary, use options to alleviate barriers that design cannot fix."
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Theara Coleman has worked as a staff writer at The Week since September 2022. She frequently writes about technology, education, literature and general news. She was previously a contributing writer and assistant editor at Honeysuckle Magazine, where she covered racial politics and cannabis industry news.
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