Video game makers aren’t catering for gamers with disabilities, study finds

There are infinitely more accessibility settings and devices on the market now than there's ever been. Ever. I get that not everyone is able to play, but the industry is leaps above what it was before.

Like, game reviewers have even started pointing out accessibility features specifically - a major release without them is kinda newsworthy.

Sure, indie games might not be complying, but the amount of indie games with no key rebinding or GFX settings is a problem too - those might not be catering to all able-bodied folks either.
- I'm happy to give indies a pass because they generally don't have the resources to know what accessibility settings people need, and they often don't go through the major reviewers. I think people should absolutely point out those issues, but I really expect new releases to be fully accessible.
- Don't forget Nintendo titles being the most locked-down zero options games on the market. I played a Nintendo game for the first time in a decade recently and my god it felt so antequated. Couldn't even change volume levels lol.
Yeah, I'm hearing impaired and need captions. I've never seen a major game without them for many years now, and recent games have gone above and beyond with things like captioning sounds (not just dialogue) and directional indicators.

I kinda hope someday they'll remaster the original Assassin's Creed. It's the only non-spin off in the series that I haven't played. I own a copy, but gave up on it because it has no captions and I couldn't understand what anyone was saying.

I also love how difficulty settings are much more common now. I'm never gonna buy a Dark Souls game. Fuck those. I tried the first game and learned my lesson. Thankfully, most games these days don't take such an elitist stance with difficulty. It's really common that games these days will let you change difficulty on the fly. Some games have split puzzle vs combat difficulty. I've seen some games have specific settings just for reaction timing. And also love those settings that highlight interactive objects so I don't waste so much time looking for subtle hints that something is interactive.

Not sure how a dev can change fast-paced gameplay without seriously altering the nature of the game, but remappable controls should be the norm, and flashing lights have been known to cause issues for so damn long that it's baffling that they keep doing it.

Unreadable text is something I know a bit about though. I've done some accessibility work for web UIs in the past and I can offer some guidance. Text should have good contrast with the background, said background should be static or even one solid color, text should be large and comfortable to read, and use normal fonts rather than dumb or fancy shit.

My eyes are shit, and I wish every game allowed me to make the text better. Even with glasses I have issues with newer games and tiny writing
- UI elements and text should be made to be resizeable and customizable wherever possible. I don't care if it becomes an ugly blocky mess so long as I can read it.
  
  Personally I have excellent vision but I'm colorblind and sometimes I don't even know what I'm missing lol.
Yeah, the number of games that list epilepsy warnings is way too high, devs should just not do it. I am not sensitive to flashing lights yet I still hate it.

So devs, if you feel like you need to put a warning, just fix the game to not do that.

I can't exactly fault developers for focusing on 99.99% of customers that doesn't have disabilities.

I'm sorry, but 99.99% is a laughable hyperbole. A huuuuge number of people have disabilities and disabilities are extremely diverse. A simple example is colour blindness. Google says 8% of men and 0.5% of women are colour blind. Video games frequently do use colour in a way that makes colour blindness a problem and colour blind modes are an accessibility option.

Google also says 15% of the world has some degree of hearing impairment. That's admittedly biased towards seniors, but I can find numbers that say 9% of 20-39 year old Canadians have detectable hearing losses. Captions are an accessibility option.

And those are just two examples. There's tons of disabilities out there. Even when an individual disability might only be 0.1% of the population, add them all together and there's a substantial number of people who are left out by lack of one accessibility option or another. Aside from obvious disabilities, there's also just general worsening of reaction times as people age.
- Just because someone has a disability, doesn't mean it's game-breaking. Yes, 8% of men are red/green colour-blind. But that doesn't mean 100% of those can't tell the colours apart. You can be more or less colour-blind. Or so my friend says, because he is colour-blind, but have never experienced that to be an issue in games. Red for him doesn't look like red does to me. But he still knows what red is. And believe it or not. Most developers don't exactly use a colour-blind test palette for their gameplay or menus.
  
  Subtitles have been around since at least the playstation2 era. I feel like you would almost struggle to find a modern game that doesn't have subtitles these days.
  
  You may think my hyperbole is laughable but your response does nothing but follow suit. If you suffer from bad hearing, I'm sorry to say that you might not be able to fully experience a game with speakers. Might want to get a pair of headphones, so that you can 1. Amplify the volume if needed. and 2. raise or lower frequencies you can't hear, into a range that you can hear. It's going to sound a little distorted perhaps but at least you will be able to hear it. I'm sure developers do their best to create captions that are important. But I don't think you understand just what a monumental task it would be to create an automated system for full CC captions of the ambience in a game.
  
  And I'm sorry, did you just list lack of reflexes and reaction time as a disability to gaming? If you don't have any arms, basketball might just not be for you. If you suffer from bad reaction time. Maybe pick a game that doesn't rely on reaction time. That's not on the devs. That's on you.
I work on a product that strives for Section 508 compliance, despite the fact that any improvement we make will only be used by fewer than 1% of our userbase.

Yes, we can and do exactly fault developers for ignoring users with disabilities.
- Catering, and ignoring. are two completely different words with two completely different meanings. Did you read the article?
  
  Everything they touch on is so incredibly vague that there is no way to make out what the problem actually is.
  
  "fast-paced gameplay (34 per cent)"
  
  34% complained about the gameplay being too fast-paced. What where they playing? No one knows. Could be sitting playing Call of Duty and raging about being 360 no scoped for all we know.
  
  The article is vague on everything. And that's always on purpose. They're vague on purpose to maximize outrage. Oh this sounds horrible, look at this, the devs are not catering to disabled players. Should we mention that the kid with 1 hand is upset he can't play CS:GO competitively? Nah, just call it "lack of customisable control options"

Video game makers don’t cater to most minority groups because they’re small. If video game makers really cared about gamers rather than than money, then loot boxes, micro transactions, launch day DLC, pay to win, annual fifa and madden releases, and multiplayer only games wouldn’t exist.

This is what makes the small Indy game makers that make games for the fun of it shine, and I bet they care about their players a lot more.

I’m glad the article mentioned flashing lights. I hate those so much in games, that and all the lens flare that’s being added in lately. I’m photosensitive and they can trigger migraines in me, and I’ve had to stop playing when some games when some stupid stylistic lens flare out of no where punches me in the brain. I wish games had settings to turn those off.

I absolutely hate it when a game or movie puts up a fully white screen, especially after a dark scene. It's just painful and stupid.

I just instantly thought of that blind kid that beat Ocarina of Time.

He use emulator and save states tho very impressive ofc. But I prefer blind warrior sven he plays street fighter competitivly while blind
- That sounds impressive AF. Gonna find that dude rn.

Unfortunate but unsurprising, with the broken state many games ship in these days I don’t expect many publishers prioritize accessibility features.

Who paid for this study?

I just want removal of anticheat for single player games/coop (or a toggle option like master chief collection). Trainers are so helpful for younger children and the disabled to enjoy the game with a bit of a skill level adjustment. Subtitles are a must too.

some stuff like colour blindness filter settings would take them like 10 minutes to implement >_>

You've never worked in software development, have you? Adding colorblind modes isn't as simple as just adding a filter and calling it a day. UIs have to be redesigned for each colorblind mode you add.

Do you have text in a menu that says "Click the red button"? Gotta change that for each colorblind mode. Also gotta change that for each language you write the game in. Can the user adjust the settings on the UI, themselves? Then you've gotta account for user-adjusted settings, too. Does the UI change itself depending on the context of things happening in the game? Gotta have alternates set up for those, too. Does a voice-acted character refer to the colors of anything that may be impacted by colorblind modes? Gotta record extra dialogue for those, too.

Each of those stack on top of each other, and take a lot more time and effort than you're making it out to be. Not saying it's an impossible task, but it's far from a 10-minute implementation. Very rarely is the solution "just a few lines of code" like people tend to think.
- I mean, you can always just follow reasonable contrast advice from square 1, and colorblindness won't be an issue. It's a pretty solved problem in the web world if people are willing to actually give a damn about it. You can have red and green text and buttons all across the screen as long as their contrast is enough that color-blind users can differentiate them.
  
  Adding colorblind mode to a product you've already spent years on saying "fuck colorblind people, I don't care about them". Yeah, that's not so easy.
- Or, hear me out here, maybe don’t use colors from jump that a lot of folks with colorblindness can’t differentiate. Red-green colorblindness is the most common, but games keep using those colors for puzzles instead of picking different colors.
Closer to a week or two, speaking as an actual software dev.

You have to first include the investigation into "how do we do it? What our are best options?" which is a day or two

Then the couple meetings as you go over your findings and get the sign off and approval that you can go ahead with it.

Then a couple days to implement it, write some tests for the code.

Another day for all the documentation to be added to Confluence, detailing all the above.

Another day or two for the code review process back and forth.

Another day or two for the QA testers to validate things are working.

There's many many steps involved in going from "Idea" to "Implemented, reviewed, and tested", and the human element in the back and forth stretches it out as you wait for people to take their lunch breaks, join the zoom meeting, the usual "your mic is muted mate" "oh jeez sorry" back and forth, etc etc...
- Thank god I haven't worked at a company like that in years (well, the "findings meetings" part of that at least)
  
  But then, I wouldn't want to be held to a 2-week deadline adding context-aware colorblindness support to an otherwise finished project.
Color blindness settings and subtitles is really such a low bar, it's crazy to think plenty don't even bother with that
- You have to be able to convey business value to get approval on anything corporate deems "extra"
  
  At the end of the day, the project manager is going to have to be able to "prove" that color blind settings will translate to $$$ to the people above them, and not only that, but reliably more $$$ than it will cost to implement.
  
  Which means first you need to know how much money it actually is likely to make, and we have actually very little data on what % of gamers that enjoy (genre) are colorblind.
  
  So you're already off to a pretty dang rough start.
  
  Usually you only actually get these features when the CEO themself has buy in, like, "Oh yeah my cousin is colorblind and told me how much games suck about it, so make sure we include that feature"
  
  Thats pretty much the only way you'll be seeing that sort of inclusivity, when you have direct buy in to the movement of inclusivity coming from the very top at a company culture level.
- I'd say the lowest bars are letting people change controller bindings and not adding features that rely purely on colour.
Oh! Oh thank you, You make a very good point. It's very late and I was thinking that people were complaining that there weren't enough characters in wheelchairs in the last of us for a second or something like that.
- Why did your comment remind me of ClapTrap from Borderlands 2? Specifically the scene where you walk along together and suddenly you have to walk stairs and he goes like STAIRS?! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! How did you know stairs were my ONLY weakness?!
- LMAO
- Don't worry, when there's nothing to outrage about, that will be next.
When you post and get the devs coming out saying 10 minutes is not reflective of the true amount of time it takes to make 1s and 0s exclusive 🙄
- Because half-assing the implementation is the way to go
  
  Let's deliver a broken version of accessibility in 10 minutes, that's much better.
  
  No, simply adding "colour filters" isn't a fix either, and if that was the fix then a game wouldn't even need to do that, there are plenty of apps that can already do that, a game doesn't need to do anything for that (similar to how your screen warmth can change when it becomes night), reshade as an example of something that can do just that.
  
  But thinking about the problem is ofcourse too hard, it's easier to whine about it and act like you know how simple it is. But when we implement accessibly we do think about it, because people with accessibility issues deserve to get something that actually helps rather than the "10 minute solution"

When games like starfield exist I beg to differ