thehen

Hey! I was like you! I was a game developer who just started his own studio, secured a bit of funding, and set out on the journey to create his dream game. This game was called Hue, and revolved around colours.

The first thing we did right was getting it in front of people early. Very quickly we found that people with colour blindness really struggled to play the game.

Next we reached out to the community. Posting in /r/ColorBlind/ got us a ton of feedback, suggestions on how to address the issues, and offers to help test the game.

This was really my first real exposure to game accessibility, so it was all very new to me. It did however lead me to Game Accessibility Guidelines, where I learnt about the accessibility benefits of remappable controls, larger font sizes and subtitling audio, all of which made it into the game.

The thought of making games blind accessible seemed borderline-impossible to me too, until I attended this years GAConf. Once I understood how screen readers could work, it all made sense :)

Game Accessibility Guidelines has a basics section, which I find to be a great starting point.

Ian also ran an accessibility game jam here in London. I think a dedicated accessibility project would be a great way to get students thinking about this stuff, and it also doubles up as an excellent exercise in solving real-world problems through design.

I had a similar experience with Ian when I started developing Hue!

I think there needs to be more awareness about the business-case for accessibility options. We were over the moon with the critical reception of Hue, but one thing I noticed was consistent praise for our accessibility features in the reviews. For us, better accessibility features meant better reviews, meaning more sales.

Thanks so much!