Disability and Gaming Part 1: Accessibility

This is an outsider’s view on a situation that many fellow gamers face as well as an attempt at an informative feature to spread knowledge. The examples I have chosen are not representative of all the complications that disabled gamers face within the current gaming market.

For to next few days, we’ll be running a multi-part feature where I focus on the difficulties that disabled gamers face within the current gaming market. I’m going to pay attention to four main ideas: Accessibility, Fighting for Control (Remapping), Hardware and Where It’s Going, and What Anyone Can Do.

Let’s ask the most important question first.

What makes a game accessible for disabled gamers?

To answer this, I headed to AbleGamers to get a better understanding of what makes a game easily accessible for various types of disabled gamers. In their review process they take into consideration the precision required to play, one-handed gamers, deaf gamers, if the game is subtitled, color blindness, and if the game has any cognitive features.  These checks, if you will, are all features of the game that may or may not impact accessibility for any type of disability a gamer might possess. Upon a little research I found that they have a section where they post the most accessible games that have been reviewed by the site. Fallout: New Vegas, sitting at the top, is extremely accessible in all of these aspects, so I’ll be referencing a review written by Scott Puckett to provide some easily understandable examples as to what those terms actually mean within a gameplay setting.

To begin, the term ‘Precision’ is a look at how precise you need to be with a game’s controls to successfully play it. Games, like the referenced Fallout: New Vegas, have two options for actually engaging in combat that permit more than just aiming and firing. The VATS system within Fallout allows for a slower alternative to fighting that lets disabled gamers that might have problems using a joystick precisely play the game to the fullest. Other games may be more demanding by not offering these kinds of options. Unfortunately, precision isn’t only bound to the speed that the game moves, but it also relates to the complexity of the controls. If the controls are too convoluted and require too much movement it may be extremely difficult for quadriplegic gamers or gamers with debilitated motor skills to control. Street Fighter 4, for example, requires very precise timing and tight execution to be successful in varying levels of play. This type of game may be extremely difficult for a disabled gamer, depending on the disability.

The term ‘One-Handed Gamer’ has a fairly apparent meaning, but it affects a lot more than one might think. For a specific game to be accessible by a one-handed gamer (or similar disability) it needs to have a control scheme that is relatively simple to navigate.  Most games require the use of two hands for a full range of abilities on whatever you’re doing. However, there are some games that will allow you to fully customize the control scheme across platforms. This defeats a lot of the problems that one-handed gamers face in terms of accessibility. However, it’s surprisingly missing from many games today. Offering different templates does not always fix this issue, but is only rarely a possible solution. Fallout: New Vegas, according to the review, possesses a fully customizable control scheme that allows one-handed gamers to easily play it. (I’ll talk more on this issue in Part 2 of this feature.)

‘Deaf Gamers’ and ‘Subtitles’ can be lumped together due to the obvious overlap. Yes, an obvious solution for deaf gamers would be to make sure that subtitles are active and legible. It’s rare, but there are some games that still do not feature subtitles. With large studios claiming that they will make it a requirement to offer subtitles in all of their games, like Ubisoft, one has to assume that other large studios will follow suit. However, it isn’t the addition of subtitles that completely fixes the problem. Subtitles aren’t useful if they’re streaming across the screen at the speed of light, or if they’re in some cockamamie font that makes it impossible to read. A standard font one might see that is extremely legible is ‘Sans Serif’. This font makes it easy for people to read the subtitles on screen, but one must also take into account how large the font is. That being said, you can’t have subtitles covering the entire screen. 

‘Color Blind Gamers’ is a category that is a considerable amount more common than the others. Puzzles and mini-games are very common within many games as simple ways for players to advance through a door, locked chest, or whatever it may be.  Normally these aren’t a problem for those fortunate enough to see colors as the developers intended, but color-blind people may run into many problems with these systems if the proper precautions aren’t made. It’s as simple as adding a symbol to the puzzle where the color is instead of completely relying on color. In an article about Bioshock 2′s hacking mini-game, John Kershaw of Nukezilla compares the original mini-game to pictures of color contrasted photos displaying various types of color-blindness.

‘Cognitive features’ refers to anything in the game that a person with cognitive impairment may have difficulty performing. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, cognitive impairment is a disability that affects a person’s ability to think, concentrate, formulate ideas, reason and remember. Each case is unique in what it directly affects. “But what does this mean in gaming?” Well, it directly affects a person’s ability to decide things quickly. Meaning racing games where you have to turn left in a split second may be a problem. A person may have to calculate which way to turn longer than a person without a cognitive impairment. Some racing game remedy this by adding a rewind feature mid-race so you can go back to a safe area if you make a mistake. As for other games, they’re a little bit more strenuous when it comes to decision making. For instance, Pac-Man: CEDX requires extremely fast decision making at its higher levels to avoid ghosts while moving incredibly quickly across the board.

Accessibility is the main focus of this feature and that of disabled gamers. After all, it lets them play the games they want to play. As game developers continue to recognize (or ignore) their game’s accessibility for disabled gamers, we continue to see pushes forward for specific features that could be implemented to ease the complications involved for both sides. In Part 2: Fighting for Control (Remapping), I’m going to discuss the current pushes forward towards standardizing fully customizable controls.