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

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Overview

Choose your research area

Prepare to research your topic

Next steps

In this tutorial, you’ll learn more about accessibility in games as you investigate a topic of your choice.

Accessibility is critical to the future of gaming, and it has a longer history than you might imagine. In this tutorial, you’ll prepare to investigate an aspect of game accessibility in more detail.

This is an optional activity, but it’s a great opportunity to learn more about a specific topic that really interests you in a more structured way. It’s also totally flexible — you could set aside one hour of your afternoon to learn about something specific, or plan a deep-dive into a topic that you’ll explore for a longer period of time as you work on your game.

You might already have a topic that you’re very interested in researching, but if you’re not sure then you can choose from a number of different approaches.

Accessibility considerations for a particular genre or game type

It can be a very different experience to play different types of games. For example, a meditative story game and a roguelike platformer may have many things in common, but they’re also quite different!

Although every game is different, types of game may share many similar accessibility considerations. This is a great opportunity to research accessibility in your genre or style of choice before you start work on your own project.

Progress made by a particular studio or creator

The increased visibility of accessibility in games in recent years is due to the ongoing work of players and creators throughout the games industry.  Creators working on games, from AAA  studios to individual indie creators, have grown and developed their accessibility work over time. Those creators’ stories might be just the inspiration you need as you start your own journey!

Although accessibility in games may seem like a relatively recent focus, people have been working to make games more accessible for a long time. Researching a particular aspect of the history of accessibility in games will give you a clearer understanding of the journey towards the current accessibility landscape.

The current state of accessibility in games

Perhaps you’re more interested in getting a sense of the current state of accessibility in the industry overall rather than a narrow focus on a specific topic. If so, you can use this as an opportunity to gather a broad range of information on the state of game accessibility today.

When you’ve chosen a topic, you can then prepare to investigate it in more detail. 

1.  Choose a specific question that you want to answer. Defining a specific question will help you focus your research. It will also help you to identify useful resources.

Examples of focused research questions include:

Game type: What are the major accessibility challenges for roguelike games?

History: Who were the early pioneers of accessibility in digital games?

Creator: How has [studio name] improved the accessibility of its games in the last five years?

2.  Set a timeframe for your research. This is an optional constraint that can help you make the most of your research time while giving it a clear scope.

Examples of approaches to research timeframes include the following:

Committing to one focused hour of research

Setting aside twenty minutes a day for a week

Planning an extended research project that you will complete alongside working on your game

3.  Consider the wide range of resources available to you. Overview articles and videos can be very useful, but this is a great opportunity to seek out resources that provide the perspectives of players and creators in their own words.

Tip: The Game Accessibility Conference (GAConf) archive is a great place to start for many different topics!


Content note: The medical model of disability

In What is inclusive design?, you learned about the medical model of disability. You may encounter this model of thinking around disability in your research, especially if you choose a topic related to history. 

Research is an important tool for creators — the more you practice, the better you’ll be at finding useful information. This is useful for developing your understanding of topics, as you’ve just done, but it’s also helpful when you’re looking for potential solutions to a problem or examples that you can learn from.

Now you’re ready to focus on the first stage of design and development for your game: pre-production. 

Investigate accessibility in games

1. Overview

2. Choose your research area

3. Prepare to research your topic

4. Next steps

Complete this tutorial