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With the CVAA legislation waivers that dropped in 2018, more games than ever are accessible. Today, we’re talking about accessibility in gaming, the tools, hardware, and features that help make sure everyone can enjoy gaming. Amanda is joined in the discussion today by disabled game advocate Holly to discuss what game companies are doing right and what they can do better to accommodate all kinds of gamers.
Retro Rebel Podcast
Retro Rebel Podcast is hosted by Amanda Fox and Stacy Bishop. Each week they take a deep dive into the gaming industry and discuss news stories, the current games they are playing as well as the topic of the week.
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Intro Music – Final Impasse By Ground is Lava
What we’re playing
Amanda– I just played Horrified on the weekend. It’s a cooperative game where players try to save themselves and townspeople from retro monsters like the Swamp Thing, The Invisible Man, Dracula, and more. It was fun, only took around an hour to play and really challenging when you add more monsters in.
Holly– I’ve been playing Can’t Stop on BGA. It’s a push your luck dice rolling game for around 4 people where you’re making a mountain climb. If you can block off 3 paths to the top of the mountain, you win.
Main topic – Accessibility in Gaming
With the CVAA legislation waivers that dropped in 2018, more games than ever are accessible. Today, we’re talking about the tools, hardware, and features that help make sure everyone can enjoy gaming.
Amanda – I didn’t know how much is actually out there until I started researching this topic. Thanks to LauraKBuzz on YouTube, Microsoft and Make It Missoula for the crash course. Some features I learned about and agree should be a standard:
- Subtitles with non-verbal info, speaker denotation, and music lyrics
- Settings/development with colourblind spectrums included
- Fonts that are dyslexia-friendly
- Support for custom button mapping
- Support for text-to-speech communication & vice versa for multiplayer
- Support for adaptive controllers
- More games for the blind & visually impaired
As Laura says in their video, this support might be too expensive for smaller developers. So I think it’s worth considering grants for firms with less than a certain number of employees to enable these adaptations.
Holly – There’s a lot to unpack here. There’s so much that could be standard to help differently-abled gamers:
- Having the option to make your own difficulty by manipulating settings would be ideal.
- Enabling enlargement of scopes and colour changing of them re: surroundings
- Settling to make QuickTime events more accessible
- Promotion of the website “can I play that” & https://gameaccess.info/
- Understanding gaming issues and how they can impact mental health
- Maybe having a choice tree for skipping challenging sections without losing the story
- Accessibility testing & SuperBlindMan
- The accessibility for the Xbox series x is also out of the world and their rating system and suggestions for devs are a powerful tool for progress
I’m joined in the discussion today by disabled game advocate Holly to discuss accessibility in gaming and what game companies are doing right and what they can do better to accommodate all kinds of gamers.
Holly is a disabled enby who has spent the majority of their life playing games. Growing up in hospital due to childhood cancer, classic console gaming brought escape and joy to a hard situation. Always a Sega lover at heart, as shown by their classic console collection, the jewel of which is the Dreamcast they bought with their first-ever paycheck. Still a console gamer (PS4), they are a lover of J-RPG’s and obsessed with Kojima’s games, especially the Metal Gear saga to the point of getting a Foxhound tattoo. For Holly, Ludens is their life. Holly’s socials are Twitter: @HollyDspoonieme and PSN: Tiny_Caska.
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Check out Previous Episodes
Retro Rebel Podcast – Episode 150: 30 Best Platformer Games of All Time
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Retro Rebel Podcast: The 30 Best Stealth Games of All Time
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