Disabled players are not one group with identical needs. A player with limited hand mobility, a player who is Deaf, a blind player, a player with chronic fatigue and an autistic player may each meet completely different barriers, and two people with the same condition can want very different things.
Needs also change: with fatigue, injury, age, the equipment someone has or simply the day they’re having. That’s why our philosophy centres on flexibility and choice rather than a fixed set of “accessible modes”, and why we see players as the experts in their own experience.
Grouped by the kind of barrier they address. Many players will benefit from principles in more than one group.
How players physically interact with a game is often the first barrier they meet.
Information only helps if players can perceive it and make sense of it.
Games communicate constantly through sound, visuals and vibration.
Challenge should come from the game itself, not from obstacles that add nothing to it.
Good intentions need to be checked with real people and real technology.
We don’t believe we have all the answers. Disabled players, accessibility specialists and other developers have built up a great deal of knowledge, and publicly available resources such as the Game Accessibility Guidelines and the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines are valuable references for any studio.
Guidelines are a starting point, not a finish line. The most important source of knowledge will always be players themselves, which is why inclusive testing and community feedback sit at the heart of our approach.
We’ve tried to apply the same thinking to this site. You can read about what we’ve done, how we’ve tested it and its known limitations in our website accessibility statement.
If there’s a barrier you meet in games that you’d like more studios to take seriously, we’d like to hear about it.
