For years, gaming has been labelled as a pastime everyone can enjoy, regardless of ability. But that hasn’t always held true. Visual, motor, and hearing impairments can all affect the enjoyment of gaming, or even the opportunity to join in at all.
Sometimes unreadable text can create barriers. Sometimes the difficulty level is the problem. Essentially, certain games can alienate a percentage of potential players. Thankfully, change is afoot, with video game developers thinking more about the accessibility of their titles.
In this article, we list some of the accessibility options developers are adding to their games to ensure they’re accessible to all.
How Has Gaming Improved for Those With Visual Impairments?
First, let’s look at the options developers are adding to help people with visual impairments.
1. Color Blind Modes Make Everything Easier to See
It’s incredibly easy to take the ability to see variations in color for granted. While most people can distinguish between different hues with no problem, around 1 in 12 men in the US suffers from some form of color blindness.
Any of the three main types—Protanopia (red weak), Deuteranopia (green weak), and Tritanopia (blue weak)—can make something as simple as the UI interface of a video game incredibly difficult to read.
Adjusting the way hues present on the HUD and above characters can make a huge difference to playability. This is the approach that games such as Destiny and Battlefield have taken in the past, and it can result in a very natural experience.
Other titles, such as Fortnite, DOOM, and Call of Duty, have introduced full-screen filters so that the entire game world and all of the elements are easier to recognize.
2. Specific Filters to Help Blind or Partially Sighted Players
What if it’s not just individual colors you struggle with? What if you’re partially sighted, or even blind? How does a developer go about adjusting so that a medium based on visual feedback becomes enjoyable for everyone?
Well, one fantastic example of this is Naughty Dog. The company has been experimenting with ways to make its titles playable for everyone since the Uncharted series, and these efforts culminated in an outstanding suite of options for The Last of Us Part II.
It’s not just about the size of subtitles or the HUD, although these are options within the game. Some players may benefit from the High Contrast Display option, which will mute the environment colors while also making allies, enemies, items, and interactive objects much more distinctive.
Other options include Enhanced Listen Mode, which allows you to scan for items or enemies individually and will trigger an audio cue based on their height and distance relative to you.
What If You’re Affected by Physical or Motor Impairments?
Next, we examine accessibility options for those who can’t use a traditional controller.
3. Customizable Controls and Alternative Grip Solutions for One-Handed Gameplay
Gaming isn’t just a visual medium. It’s influenced by the input of you, the player. You’re the one holding the pad and controlling the action. However, your fine-motor skills may mean you’re not able to reach all the buttons or hold the pad in a traditional way. This is where customizable controls and alternative grips come in.
While you can change the button to jump in Crash Bandicoot 4 or take a shot in the latest version of FIFA, being able to completely change the controls to your needs isn’t usually an option. However, The Last of Us Part II offers another outstanding example of accessibility, with four different ways to hold the controller and all with fully remappable controls.
The Nintendo Switch takes the idea of adjustable controls one step further and allows you to adjust the fundamental settings of how you play. By going through the system’s settings, the Switch will allow you to use just one Joy-Con, rather than both. Each button can also be remapped and saved to one of five different presets.
Pokémon Sword or Shield instantly becomes a game that you can enjoy with one hand, with no need to use the bumpers or shoulder buttons.
4. The Xbox Adaptive Controller Helps Almost Anyone to Play
Like Nintendo, Microsoft also looked past options within the games themselves when it developed the Xbox Adaptive Controller.
Released in 2018, it was built with input from different companies, including The AbleGamers Charity, The Cerebral Palsy Foundation, SpecialEffect, and Warfighter Engaged, as well as community members, and it offers a huge leap for inclusion within the industry.
Every single button can be mapped to external devices, such as switches, mounts, and joysticks, all of which use 3.5mm jacks or USB ports to connect to the controller, and all of which can be swapped out any time. Being able to mount it on a tripod ensures those with limited movement can take part in a round of Gears of War or Halo.
The personalized nature of the controller means that there are almost no limits to who can play, and the games you can play aren’t dictated by the options developers add in. Those with cerebral palsy, people who have had strokes, and those who have suffered a spinal or neck injury now all have a way to experience games.
Accessibility for Deaf or Hard of Hearing Gamers
For players who suffer from some level of hearing loss, the following features are incredibly important.
5. Subtitles Are Practically an Industry Standard
Subtitles can be found in a huge amount of games.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole, the Assassin’s Creed series, and even the Story Mode within FIFA all offer an option for subtitles, and the way they’re presented is getting better all the time. Small additions, from optional backgrounds for text to adjustable font sizes, can make it easier to read what’s being said on screen.
Changing the color tabs for each character, or simply adding a speaker label, can also remove some of the barriers for deaf or hard of hearing gameplay.
6. On-Screen Visualizers Make Sounds Visible
All that effort with subtitles would be for nothing if a deaf or hard of hearing player was unable to interpret what’s happening on screen while actually playing the game. In this case, visual indicators can make a massive amount of difference. Fortnite does this in an incredibly clever way, by placing a sound visualization circle around your character.
Shots fired, explosions in the distance, and vehicles and footsteps behind you, are all represented on screen in a clear, defined way. Enabling this option also disables other sound cues on screen, including the compass, so it’s an effective way of leveling the playing field without giving hearing players an extra advantage.
What Else Is Being Done to Make Games More Accessible?
Finally, let’s look at some other important tools that make video games easier to play for all kinds of players.
7. Improving Text Options for Those With Reading Difficulties
Text-heavy games can provide a massive barrier to anybody with reading difficulties. Allowing users to choose the speed of text, as well as introducing button presses to move the story along, means that any game can be played at any pace.
Clearer typefaces, along with better spacing between letters, words, and paragraphs may be used to make story-heavy games more accessible to people with dyslexia.
Overland, released in 2019, used OpenDyslexic, which aimed to make it easier to read the information being presented. This open-source font uses a variety of techniques, including weighted bottoms, to make it easier to distinguish between the different letters that dyslexia tends to mix up or flip upside-down.
Adding voice-overs can eliminate the need to read entirely, so you can still be immersed in the story without having to read text on the screen.
8. Adding Difficulty Assists Can Transform a Title
Sometimes, a game can be inaccessible simply due to what’s being asked of the player. If you’re not great at combat, but love puzzles, then being able to adjust these to your own individual ability can transform a title that previously frustrated you. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a great example of this malleability, allowing you to change how the game plays from the outset for your own enjoyment.
Celeste is also proof that a few simple options can make an incredibly difficult game, one that usually requires pixel-perfect jumping dexterity, much more accessible.
Pausing the game will reveal an option for Assist Mode, and from here you can make different adjustments. Changing the Game Speed will give you longer to react to jumps and obstacles, or maybe you need Invincibility to get past a particularly tricky section. It’s the very idea that Celeste can be molded to your needs that reduces the barriers within.
Will Gaming Continue to Become More Accessible?
By no means is this a definitive list of the different ways in which developers have thought about their communities. It’s also not a definitive list of impairments. Everything mentioned here is just a small sample of the extra accessibility options that are being added to video games.
Hopefully, this progress will continue, and gaming will truly become a hobby that almost anyone can enjoy.