What is inclusive design?

Inclusive design in practice

Digital accessibility

Accessibility standards and guidelines

Investigate accessibility in games

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

Welcome to the course

Accessibility in games

Explore the vertical slice

Set your learning goal

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

Complete a project retrospective

Continue your learning journey

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. 

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

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

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

8288c50c-4239-5962-bbbc-26a4ba5efb11:IJ50VM7ryBj2kIwUvpGCMY

Overview

Games are for everyone

Identify potential exclusion

Don't act on assumptions

Proactively address barriers

Give your players choice

Reflect on your experiences as a user

Next steps

In this tutorial, you’ll learn about the basics of inclusive design. This design approach is the framework that you will use as you create your own game throughout this course.

Inclusive design is a methodology for designing products that include as many potential users as possible. It particularly focuses on the needs of users who have historically been excluded, such as those with disabilities.

Inclusive design isn’t an exact recipe for success. Instead, it’s a framework that you can apply to your design and development processes, either by itself or in combination with other design approaches. Inclusive design has evolved over time through the work of a wide range of thinkers, designers, and creators.

Our inclusive design principles for this course are:

In this tutorial, you’ll learn more about these principles. We’ll also share additional resources to help you learn more about inclusive design and other design methodologies.

We’re all different, and we all have different needs. If you don’t design for that wide range of needs, many potential players could be excluded from your game. 

When you think of your target users, it’s very easy to think of someone just like you. After all, as a creator, you’re working on ideas that excite and interest you! Inclusive design means taking a more expansive view of your potential players and prioritizing users who have been historically excluded. This includes players with disabilities and members of marginalized communities.

Designing for a wide range of different users can sometimes feel overwhelming, particularly when you’re at the start of your journey as a creator. The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit is a great inclusive design resource, and it includes some helpful guidance on meeting this challenge in its manual (page 11): 

“Designing inclusively doesn’t mean you’re making one thing for all people. You’re designing a diversity of ways for everyone to participate in an experience with a sense of belonging.” 

Note: The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND).

Exclusion is when someone is blocked from participating in an experience. There are many different types of barriers that can cause exclusion, and you need to identify potential barriers in your game.

This course uses the social model of disability. Models are frameworks for understanding a particular topic.

In the social model of disability, disability is the outcome of mismatched interactions between a person and the world around them. These mismatched interactions are caused by barriers and result in exclusion. Disability is not caused by any medical or health condition that a person experiences. 

Barriers that cause disability include the following:

Social barriers, such as prejudice and bias

Environmental barriers, such as spaces, systems, and products that haven’t been designed with a wide range of different users in mind

Information and communication barriers, such as communications that are only available in one language or do not have alternative formats to meet a wide range of needs

The best way to learn how users who experience disability might be excluded from your game is to work directly with those users. When you do this, you’ll be able to identify potential mismatches between the needs of those users and the experience that you want to create.

An alternative (and older) model is the medical model of disability. This model frames the medical conditions that a person experiences as the cause of their disability, rather than mismatched interactions with society and the world around them.

Models can be useful, but they are often an oversimplification of how individuals and organizations actually work in practice. You may encounter perspectives that blend elements of both the medical and the social model of disability.

Assumptions can be very harmful, and they lead to poor design. Let’s explore how assumptions can impact a production process through an example scenario.

Imagine that you decide to make a cake for a friend. You choose a flavor and type of cake that you think is delicious and also demonstrates your best skills as a baker. But when you present the cake to your friend, there’s a significant problem: they don’t like the flavor you’ve chosen and they’re actually allergic to one of the ingredients.

There are two sets of emotional and practical outcomes here: one set for you as the baker (the creator) and another set for your friend (the user).

Defensive of your choices — “but everyone likes chocolate!”

Hurt by what you view as the rejection of the cake you have made.

Disappointed that they have been given something they cannot eat.

Pressured to conceal or minimize the fact that they can’t eat the cake, in order to ease your hurt feelings.

This isn’t a very positive outcome for either of you. So how could you have done better in this situation? 

You could have avoided this issue completely if you had checked your friend’s requirements before beginning to make the cake. This would have been the most efficient approach.

You could also have checked your friend’s requirements after you had begun baking, if you didn’t remember to check at the start. This isn’t an ideal solution — it’s likely to result in wasted time and resources. However, it’s better to pivot partway through making something than to ignore your user's needs.

Conclusion: What does this mean for you as a creator?

We all have biases, whether we’re aware of them or not, and these inform our assumptions. As a creator, put your users first: ask them what they need and really listen to what they tell you about their requirements and experiences. This will help you to create games that truly meet the needs of your players.

Just being aware of potential barriers and the needs of your users isn’t enough — you need to convert that awareness into action. Making your game more inclusive and more accessible isn’t an add-on, it should be at the heart of design and development. When you proactively address potential barriers, you create a better game that more people will be able to enjoy.

Everyone experiences mismatched interactions and exclusion sometimes, and user needs aren't always permanent.  The solutions that you find to address barriers for players with permanent needs can also benefit many players with different, related needs too. Consider curb cuts: the ramps between footpaths and roads. Curb cuts mean that wheelchair users can navigate streets with greater safety and ease, but they can also benefit other people, such as those who use other mobility aids or someone who is pushing a stroller.

Let’s apply this to games. Subtitles for character dialogue are a critical requirement for many players with permanent user needs, including those who are hard of hearing. However, they could also benefit users with situational or temporary needs too, like a player in an environment where they need to keep the audio muted or who has difficulty understanding a character’s accent.

The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit’s Persona Spectrum includes related user needs for a range of different permanent, temporary, and situational scenarios. You can explore the Persona Spectrum and other guidance on pages 34 to 44 of the manual.

You can’t always design one thing that meets everyone’s needs without any customization. It’s important to make sure that the core experience and default settings of your game meet the needs of as many users as possible, but choice is a key tool to help you meet the needs of a wide range of players.

It’s impossible to know exactly which barriers any one player might encounter without asking them. When you build in options that meet a wide range of needs, you give your players the power to customize their experience of your game in a way that works well for them. This sort of customization includes adjusting the size of the user interfaces, configuring the game audio settings, or removing time pressure from a game.

You may encounter the term universal design during your exploration of inclusive design. Universal design is an approach that aims to design things that are usable by as many people as possible, whatever their needs, without needing adaptation. 

Sometimes people use inclusive design and universal design almost interchangeably. However, these design approaches aren’t identical; they’re different ways to address the challenge of creating experiences that as many people as possible can participate in. 

One high-level way to break the difference down is as follows:

Universal design aims to create experiences that work for as many people as possible with minimal adaptation.


Inclusive design aims to address the specific needs of a wide range of users. This often involves creating experiences with greater flexibility for users to adapt the experience to their individual needs — through customizable game settings, for example.

In this course, you’ll apply an inclusive design approach to your game design and development, but there’s much more you can explore if universal design is interesting to you as a creator.

If you want to learn more about universal and inclusive design, try Deque’s UX Virtual Panel: Accessibility vs. Inclusive Design Vs. Universal (YouTube). This panel talk is a nuanced exploration of the different design approaches, featuring digital accessibility specialists.

We all have needs and preferences as users. When those needs aren’t met, it can be an incredibly frustrating experience. It can be helpful to reflect on your own experiences as a user before beginning to create something for others in order to remind yourself of the value of putting your users first and working to meet their actual needs.

Tip: You might find it useful to record your reflections in this step so that you can return to them later if you want to. You could also include the reflections in your devlog.

Take some time to reflect on an experience that didn’t meet your needs as a user. This experience could be a game or something completely different (for example, using an online form or visiting a shop to make a purchase). 

Use the following questions to help guide your reflection:

How did it make you feel when your user needs weren’t met?

Were you able to achieve your goals even if the overall experience didn’t meet your needs? If so, how hard was it to do so?

How did you feel after this negative experience? Did you take any particular actions or change your behavior in any way?

Now reflect on an experience that met your needs as a user really well:

How did the experience meet your specific needs? Did anything particularly impress you?

How did it make you feel to have your needs met?

How much effort did you have to make to achieve your goals for the experience?

How did you feel after this positive experience?  Did you take any particular actions or change your behavior in any way?

As you identify potential barriers for players in this course, keep these reflections in mind — your design choices will have a significant impact on your users. That’s an important responsibility!

In this tutorial, you’ve taken some time to explore the basics of inclusive design as an approach, and you’ve reflected on your own experiences as a user. 

Next you’ll consider inclusive design in practice, in the context of a setting that’s integral to the Out of Circulation vertical slice: a community library.

What is inclusive design?

1. Overview

2. Games are for everyone

3. Identify potential exclusion

4. Don't act on assumptions

5. Proactively address barriers

6. Give your players choice

7. Reflect on your experiences as a user

8. Next steps

Complete this tutorial