Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Access-Ability.
March 2024 is drawing to a close, and as such I wanted to use this week to put together a rapid fire recap video covering a handful of smaller gaming accessibility stories that might not by themselves justify a full episode of this show, but are worth reporting on and discussing regardless.
First up, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Ubisoft’s highly accessible side scrolling metroidvania title, received a new update last week, which included a number of interesting new accessibility settings and features.
In my opinion most exciting, players now have two new options available to make parrying incoming enemy attacks more accessible. The first option allows players to increase the window of time in which a parry will be successful, a setting we’ve seen offered in other similar titles which is always really appreciated as an option. Secondly, players can now select for parrying to be successful regardless of the direction that the player is facing in relation to the incoming attack.
In addition, players can now further tweak game difficulty with new options to alter enemy health and enemy damage output, as well as setting the game’s Athra meter to automatically refill over time.
Next, I wanted to note that this year’s spring 2024 GAConf Game Accessibility Conference will be taking place in London next month, on April 22nd and 23rd. The event will consist of two days of talks given by industry professionals about video game accessibility.
While a full schedule can be found on the GAConf website, linked here, I’ll take a moment here to highlight a talk on the 22nd of April being given by Mollie Evans titled “Making the Content Creation Space Accessible For Disabled Creators”.
Mollie has recently had two freelance pieces published on the Access-Ability website, which I would love if people went and checked out. She does great work, and her upcoming talk is bound to be a highlight of this upcoming conference.
I’ll be attending GAConf in person this year, so if you’re attending in person and would like to make time to meet up and chat, drop an email to LauraKBuzzOfficial@Gmail.com
While the event is taking place in person in London, all of the event’s talks will also be streamed live, online, with captions and ASL interpreters. If you register, you’ll be able to network with others attending remotely via Discord, while watching the stream live via Zoom.
For those attending in person, Covid safety measures in place will include a cap of 120 attendees in person, with those attending requiring proof of vaccination and a negative covid test. While masks have not been mandated, I will be masking while in attendance, and encourage others to do so if able.
Lastly, during the GDC Game developers Conference which took place last week, Xbox announced that they were making their Gaming for Everyone Product Inclusion Framework publicly available for the first time.
The framework, which is designed to teach a set of tools and options rather than act as a strict checklist, covers a few more broad areas where developers can make their games more accessible to more people. Approachability covers making sure that people with any level of gaming experience can approach games. Representation covers ensuring that games are respectful and thoughtful about who they represent, and how they represent them. Globalisation seems to overlap with concepts like localisation, helping to ensure that games are thoughtful about their reception in different places that they’re released. And lastly Accessibility, obviously, covers ensuring that there are as few barriers as possible between players and their ability to play games.
Xbox has for many years now been making educational materials, training tools, and other resources related to accessibility available to the public, and this step seems to be a continuation of that ongoing trend. Xbox have been making an obvious effort over time to share their knowledge and expertise on accessibility with the wider game development community, and that type of sharing of knowledge is really exciting to see continue.
So there you have it, a quick roundup of a few stories that I wanted to make sure that I covered before this month was up, but didn’t necessarily feel needed a full length Access-Ability episode to cover.
I’m currently working on a few longer form Access-Ability episodes with a slightly wider scope, but those are going to take a little bit of time for me to work on. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this quick catch up on the news stories of the week.