Continue your learning journey

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.

To prepare to share your game:

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.

5. Share your game!

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’s next steps

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.

Continue to develop your confidence

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:

• To what extent did you meet your 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!

Share your feedback

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!

Out of Circulation

This is the core Out of Circulation team:

• Programming and design: James Bouckley and Guillaume Saby
• Art and animation: Lucy Bourne and Stefano Guglielmana
• Technical art: Jack Tilling
• Quality assurance: Zuzanna Ciesielska
• Accessibility reviewers: Vivek Gohil, Stacey Jenkins and Dr Amy Kavanagh
• Audio design: Sounding Sweet
• Narrative content: Rosamund Williams and Kat Woolley
• Additional design: Zuzanna Cielsielska and Rosamund Williams
• Additional writing: Erin Williams
• Producer: Kat Woolley
• Creative direction: Peter Lee

Practical Game Accessibility

This is the Practical Game Accessibility course team:

• Learning design: Rosamund Williams
• Course reviewers: Veronica Brown, Vivek Gohil and Peter Lee
• Copyeditor: Connor Miscandlon
• Course videos: Jack Tilling
• Marketing: Jennifer Pyne

Special thanks

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

• Helen Brockelbank
• Aurore Dimopoulos
• Ellen Flaherty
• Josh Gabrel
• Neal Grigsby
• Chris Hodges
• Joy Horvath
• Mija Lieberman
• Robin Mitra
• Hope Rudd
• Aaron Sharp
• James Stone
• Joi Torres
• James Turnage-Lannan