Welcome to the course

There’s no one profile of a gamer — a wide variety of people love to play games. When you make games, you’re crafting shared experiences. 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 a game more accessible, you’re extending that invitation to a wider and more diverse audience.

By the end of this first tutorial, you should know whether this course is right for you and be ready to get started.

This course is a practical introduction to accessibility for intermediate creators. It’s based around a case study project: Out of Circulation, a small playable section of a point-and-click narrative adventure game. As you explore the course and the case study, you’ll create your own game using inclusive design principles. This design approach will help you to create a game that more players can enjoy.

This course focuses on creating with Unity, but you can apply what you learn here to working with other engines too.

Although Practical Game Accessibility uses games and game development as its core example, you can also apply much of what you’ll explore here to other non-game projects, such as simulations, visualizations, and other real-time applications.

Course approach

We’ve designed this course to be:

• An opportunity to grow as a creator and engage with a wider community focused on accessibility.
• A case study you can explore to help you learn, rather than a set of instructions to follow.
• A community resource that references other community resources.

Case study approach

Out of Circulation, the case study for this course, was created using:

• Unity 2021.3 LTS, the most recent long term support version (which is recommended for new projects).
• The open-source UI Accessibility Plugin, to support screen reader compatibility. Without this plugin we would not have been able to include this functionality in the project’s scope.

This course is for intermediate creators who have started making small games or other experiences in Unity. You might be a developer (in which case, you’ll have completed the Junior Programmer pathway or have equivalent experience) or a creative collaborator in another role — there should be something here for you either way.

You may also find this course useful if you are:

• A beginner who wants to learn more about game accessibility but isn't quite ready to independently make a game.
• A more experienced creator looking for targeted guidance on a particular aspect of game accessibility.
• An educator who wants to embed inclusive design and prioritizing accessibility in their curriculum.

This course is organized into five projects:

1. Welcome to the course: You’ll learn more about the course and plan your learning journey.
2. Inclusive design and accessibility: You’ll explore the fundamentals of inclusive design and accessibility both generally and as applied to game development.
3. Project pre-production: You’ll choose and scope a game idea and plan for development, prioritizing accessibility from the start.
4. Design and development: You’ll explore how we created Out of Circulation. You’ll have the opportunity to extend and adapt our work in the Unity project, and then you’ll apply what you’ve learned in your own context.
5. Continue your journey: You’ll complete a project retrospective for your game and identify the next steps for your ongoing learning journey.

We recommend completing these projects in order, but if you’re a more confident creator you can work with them in a way that suits you.

Accessibility is a priority for the team responsible for Unity Learn. Our mission is to help users find what they need to achieve their goals with Unity — as part of this, we’re committed to making our learning platform more accessible and more inclusive. This is an ongoing journey.

Unity Learn accessibility goal

We use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) developed by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3) to improve and maintain the accessibility of Unity Learn.

Our current accessibility goal is for Unity Learn and the content on it to meet the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. We are working towards this standard by:

• Aiming to meet the WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines for all newly developed web pages.
• Assessing existing web pages against the WCAG 2.1 AA requirements to identify existing issues.
• Prioritizing identified accessibility issues in the Unity Learn development roadmap.
• Integrating both automated and manual accessibility testing into our development processes.

How accessible is Unity Learn?

We are aware that Unity Learn does not currently meet all WCAG 2.1 AA requirements. However, all newly developed work and content targets this standard. Older pages and content may not yet meet this standard.

In this course, we’ll frequently recommend other resources for you to explore outside of the core learning experience.

Gaming accessibility fundamentals on Microsoft Learn, created by Xbox and Microsoft, is a comprehensive free resource that will guide you through the basics of gaming accessibility. If you’re a beginner or want to refresh your memory of the basics before working on a practical project, we recommend taking this course before you begin Practical Game Accessibility.

A lot of different people were involved in making Practical Game Accessibility.

The core project team

The core team for this project worked as a small game development team. From programming to QA testing, game art to narrative, we worked to make the best possible case study for the course.

The work of this core project team was also supported by a wider team — our learning experiences wouldn’t exist without people in a range of roles providing support.

External accessibility specialists

Our team was supported by external accessibility specialists who reviewed game builds throughout development and gave critical feedback to help us improve the vertical slice:

• Vivek Gohil
• Stacey Jenkins
• Dr Amy Kavanagh

Other people at Unity

Lots of people at Unity are deeply committed to improving the accessibility of games and Unity itself. Their support and feedback made this course better.

In the next tutorial, you’ll consider the importance of accessibility in games from the perspective of the people it directly impacts: your players. You’ll also learn about ways that you can connect with the wider accessibility community.