Complete a project retrospective

Continue your learning journey

Production processes don’t end when you finish working on your game.In this final project, you’ll complete a project retrospective and prepare to share your game with a wider audience. You’ll also identify your next steps as a creator who prioritizes accessibility.

Continue your journey

Welcome to the course

Accessibility in games

Explore the vertical slice

Set your learning goal

What is inclusive design?

Inclusive design in practice

Digital accessibility

Accessibility standards and guidelines

Investigate accessibility in games

Choose and craft your concept

Consider your target players

Create a game design document

Create your production plan

Explore Out of Circulation

Player movement

Camera system

Conversation system

User interfaces (UI)

Audio

Important information

In this introductory project, you’ll learn more about the Practical Game Accessibility course and reflect on how you can use this course to achieve your goals as a creator. 

It can be very tempting to work on planning and creating your game straight away. That drive to bring an idea to life is a core part of being a creator, whatever your medium. However, if you take time now to explore the underlying principles of inclusive design and accessibility, you’ll give yourself a strong foundation as you work on your game. The principles are also deeply practical. Your work starts now!

Inclusive design and accessibility

You’re now ready to plan your game. This is a critical stage of the creative process, especially when you are focusing on accessibility. The preparation, exploration, and scoping that you do in this stage will have a direct impact on your experience when you begin design and development.

In this project, you’ll choose and scope a concept for your game with your target players in mind. You’ll also use accessibility guidelines to help you prepare a plan for production.

Project pre-production

In this project, you’ll explore and extend Out of Circulation as you work on your own game.

The tutorials are in a suggested sequence, but you can explore them in the way that works best for you. Each tutorial contains:

An overview of our work on a specific system or feature, including the impact of user feedback.

Discussion about key decisions that we made and why we made them.

Guidance on how you can explore and extend what we created for Out of Circulation.

Suggestions for ways you can apply what you’ve learned in your own game project. 

Design and development

When you make a game, you’re crafting a shared experience. Whether your game is a private gift for one person or a global commercial release, for solo play or many players, it’s an invitation to connect with and respond to your ideas as a creator. When you make your game more accessible, you’re extending that invitation to a wider and more diverse audience.

This course is a practical introduction to accessibility for intermediate creators. As you complete it, you’ll choose a game to create and work on making that game as accessible as possible. 

By the end of the course, you’ll be able to:

Apply an inclusive design approach to your work as a creator

Identify critical accessibility requirements for your projects

Implement accessibility review and feedback cycles throughout development

Design and develop features using an inclusive design approach

Maintain a focus on accessibility while adapting to constraints and emerging project needs

Practical Game Accessibility

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Overview

Prepare to share your game

Ongoing feedback and evaluation

Optional: Re-check your understanding 

Review your learning goal

Continue your accessibility journey

Credits

Completing your game isn’t the end of your learning journey, but it is the end of this experience and the beginning of a new stage. In this tutorial, you’ll prepare to share your game more widely and reflect on the progress you have made.

You’ve now completed your game and your project retrospective, and you’ve almost completed this course. 

In this final tutorial, you’ll prepare to share your game and consider the role of ongoing feedback in your personal journey as a creator. You’ll also have the opportunity to evaluate your progress by completing an exercise that you first attempted in Inclusive design and accessibility.

Whether you’re sharing your game with people in your network or publishing it more widely, there are a few things that you should prepare in advance to help potential players find your game and decide whether they want to play it.

1.  List your game’s accessibility features and include this information on your website or publishing site page.

2.  Check that your website or publishing site can be accessed by screen readers so that players who use this assistive technology will be able to find out about your game. You’ll find guidance on improving the accessibility of your site readily available online.

3.  Check that your marketing materials meet the needs of a wider variety of potential players. Even if you created your images and videos with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) requirements in mind, it’s important to verify rather than presume that you have met these requirements.

4.  Decide whether you will gather ongoing accessibility feedback and how you will go about this. Your choices will depend on your particular situation as a creator, but planning in advance will help you gather feedback in the most efficient way possible.

Your opportunities to learn and grow don’t end when you share your project with a wider audience — in fact, you’re likely to encounter new and more diverse feedback from your players. You might have the opportunity to revisit your game and make iterative improvements to incrementally make your game accessible to more players.

However, if your game was purely a learning project and not intended for a wider release, you might decide to apply any feedback you receive to your next project instead. That’s fine too!

Out of Circulation is a case study to support this learning experience, and it’s definitely not perfect! We encountered many decisions that forced us to compromise and adapt our original vision. The members of our project team are creators who are constantly learning and growing — just like you.

We’re currently aware of a number of ways that we could enhance and refine the vertical slice to make it more accessible to more players, and we’re keen to get more feedback to help us develop our work further.

What we learn from this feedback will be applied to our future projects, and it may also result in future updates to Out of Circulation. (No promises, but we’d love to make it even better if we can!)

In Inclusive design and accessibility, you completed an exercise to check your understanding of accessibility considerations that could apply to different design and development tasks. 

The game that you have made is evidence of your current understanding of accessibility in games and your progress as a creator. It can also be useful to assess your progress against an earlier baseline to get a clear sense of how you have grown.

Complete the exercise again and compare your answers. You might notice progress in any of the following ways:

You can quickly associate accessibility categories and considerations with the tasks because you have grown more familiar with common barriers that cause exclusion as you progressed through the course.

You can confidently navigate resources to identify relevant accessibility considerations — remember, you don’t need to rely on your memory to do this!

You can define more precise and nuanced questions for players to help you move beyond assumptions.

If you still found this exercise challenging, that’s OK! It can sometimes be challenging to complete exercises like this in the abstract, rather than as part of a specific project that you are working on.

The best way to become more confident at identifying accessibility considerations is to continue to prioritize accessibility. You’ll learn from players with lived experience, and you’ll develop your skills and knowledge with each project that you work on.

At the start of this course, you set a personal learning goal. Now that you’ve reached the end of this learning journey, take a moment to reflect on that goal.

You may have completed everything that you wanted to do, or you may have had to adjust your goal along the way. If you had to compromise and adapt your original vision as we did, remember that this doesn’t mean you failed — adapting to your circumstances is an important skill for creators.

Use the following questions to help guide your reflection on your initial learning goal:

How did you adapt your goal along the way?

What do you know now that you did not know at the start of the course?

What can you do confidently now that you could not do at the start of the course?

Did you identify any new goals as you were working on this one?

Tip: If you’re struggling to answer any of these questions, you may find it helpful to refer to your devlog and project retrospective notes.

Your reflection completes your work for this course — and it can be the starting point for your next project, too.

You’ve now finished the Practical Game Accessibility course — congratulations!

Whether you plan to continue working on your current game or you’re ready to start something new, we hope you now have the confidence to take an inclusive design approach and prioritize accessibility in your work. 

We can’t wait to see how you apply what you’ve learned in the Practical Game Accessibility course as you continue your journey as a creator! 

We’d love to know more about your experience of the Practical Game Accessibility course. Please complete this short survey (it should only take five to ten minutes) to share any feedback you have for us. Thank you!

This is the core Out of Circulation team:

Programming and design: James Bouckley and Guillaume Saby

Art and animation: Lucy Bourne and Stefano Guglielmana

Accessibility reviewers: Vivek Gohil, Stacey Jenkins and Dr Amy Kavanagh

Narrative content: Rosamund Williams and Kat Woolley

Additional design: Zuzanna Cielsielska and Rosamund Williams

This is the Practical Game Accessibility course team:

Course reviewers: Veronica Brown, Vivek Gohil and Peter Lee

We’d also like to thank the following people for their support and assistance, which contributed to the development of this course:

Continue your learning journey

1. Overview

2. Prepare to share your game

3. Ongoing feedback and evaluation

4. Optional: Re-check your understanding

5. Review your learning goal

6. Continue your accessibility journey

7. Credits

Complete this tutorial