How games like The Last of Us Part II are making great steps forward for accessibility.
We all love videogames, right? Whether that’s dragging out the Wii fit from the garage during some Christmas revelries, participating in one of the hotly contested multiplayer shooters or perhaps you’re still a fan of the 1972 classic: Pong!
But obviously it’s a different kind of challenge for those living with a visual impairment. As a medium where designers often choose to rely on visuals for communicating information and often require that to be perceived, understood, and acted upon very quickly, the design decisions involved can often leave visually impaired gamers behind.
We spoke to one of our beloved Members, Devante about video gaming who stated: “I used to play FIFA religiously but then my eyes got worse, so I found it harder to play. The colours were much harder for me to see. So, as an example, teams playing in red kits were much harder to see when it was a day time game. Also, for some games, the font size is so small, it’s very hard to see, I have to keep changing the angle of the screen to read different parts, I really wish there was an option to increase and change the font size. Also, I find it harder to play on bright backgrounds so an option of a darker background would be great just like how smartphones have a night mode, as well as they should the ability to adjust the size of the cursor on the screen. Hence, I’m looking to get a computer and see if it works with screen reader”. Videogames, especially on consoles, seem to have quite a way to go to make their games far more accessible.
However, big video game developers have been making steps forward to add further accessibility options in their videogames. Last month, acclaimed developer Naughty Dog released “The Last of Us Part II” and it was instantly recognised for its eclectic variety of accessibility options. The game has vision accessibility pre-sets which configure all the recommended settings designed for players who are blind or have low vision, with text-to-speech options, high contrast display, sonar, options to assist moving around the environment and aiming, and more. We believe this to be certainly a factor in The Last of Us Part II’s record-breaking sales.
The Last of Us Part II Game Designer Matthew Gallant, revealed to The Verge that one of the core reasons that the game was able to include so many accessibility features was due to it had been in the design process from the beginning. “We absolutely had to plan these features early in production,” Matthew States. “It was absolutely critical.” There were three features in particular — text-to-speech, fully remappable controls, and the high-contrast mode — that required large technical resources, and they wouldn’t have been possible without so much time. “We couldn’t have done this if we hadn’t, from the outset, said ‘This is a priority,’” he explains. (The Verge)
Berkshire Vison managed to speak to Ian Hamilton, an Accessibility specialist who helps studios avoid excluding gamers with disabilities, he consulted on The Last of Us Part II and we were very grateful to have the chance to speak with him more.
We first asked him more about the importance of further accessibility options in videogaming. “Accessibility is important because games are important” Ian states. “Games offer access to culture, to recreation, to socialising. These are things that many of us take for granted, but if your means of accessing them in day to day life is in some way restricted, games can then become a really powerful contributor to quality of life”.
We then ask him more about what’s the most important thing videogame developers can do in this aspect which he reveals is to “consider accessibility early in the development process. The earlier you can do it, the more you can do, the better it will be, and the cheaper it will be”. Ian continues “it can seem intimidating to developers at first but the basic principles are pretty straightforward. There are four main groups to consider; motor, vision, cognition, hearing. And sometimes speech too. it’s about figuring out what unnecessary barriers your game may present in these areas, and working to avoid or remove them, which usually means communicating a piece of information in more than one way or offering players some flexibility in how they play. Something else for developers to consider is what tools are available to understand the shape of the problems and get support in solving them. There are three key pillars. Using best practice guidelines, using expert advice, and working directly with the disabled gamer community. Each one of these has its own pros and cons, but if a developer is able to combine them, they stand the best possible chance of their game being as enjoyable as possible for as many people as possible”.
So, what does an accessibility specialist do? We asked him what his role normally entails, “it really depends on the individual company, the individual project and the stage of their accessibility journey that the company is at” Ian reveals. “A few recent examples of things I’ve been brought in for include hands-on design work and feedback on individual features, detailed audits and expert reviews on full builds, development of quality assurance tests, internal talks and workshops, R&D prototyping, development of training materials and internal standards and guidelines, community engagement, and guidance on legislative issues. So, as you can see, it is a real mixed bag. It is companies who have some kind of accessibility problem or opportunity but don’t have enough either experience or capacity to do it themselves at the time, so they call me in for some support”.
We’re keen to know more about “The Last of Us Part II” and how Ian worked on it. After all, this is a huge, highly anticipated release, and the fact it has such a range of accessibility options that is being reported on so frequently is launching accessibility options more into the mainstream. “Work done in the games industry is usually under strict non-disclosure agreements, so I’m not able to share any specifics of what I helped with and how I helped” Ian states. “But in more general terms, just talking about the game and the kind of functionality in the game, it’s really the work that they have done for blindness and low vision that excites me the most. The reason it excites me is because it hasn’t really been done in a big-name console game to this extent before. It being a big-name game is obviously important due to it being a game that many blind and low vision people want to play, but more important again is the impact that high profile games like this have on perceptions. Perceptions amongst gamers, and perceptions amongst developers. Particularly around developers’ understanding of how a game can be made accessible to somebody who is blind, is that can be a really hard concept for people to get their heads around. And now there is a high-profile high–visibility case study of how it can be done. Other developers can and will learn from this, run with it, build further upon it. Which makes it a historic turning point for the entire industry. The future for blind and low vision accessibility in games is now looking very bright”.
Thanks to Ian and Devante for their time, for more information about playing videogames whilst visually impaired, we recommend these websites: http://applevis.com and http://audiogames.net
