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As someone who has done work as an accessibility consultant for game development studios, one conversation I regularly have with development teams is about the topic of who accessibility accommodations are being designed to support, and whether the way a design element is being considered could be limiting who it would benefit.
Obviously, when video game accessibility is being discussed, the first target demographics discussed are people with disabilities. A common starting point is broad but common disability categories such as designing for players with motor, vision, and hearing based disabilities. Then we might get a little more specific, covering categories such as people with cognitive disabilities, or specific conditions such as players who are colourblind or prone to motion sickness.
Generally speaking, accessibility conversations with regards to video games start at this top end. Accessibility accommodations are discussed in terms of trying to help users with one specific disability type be able to engage with your game at a time, and which end users you feel you’re able to take reasonable steps to support.
However, once you get past these initial discussions, that’s where we start getting into conversations about groups that accessibility accommodations can support who are not traditionally considered as being disabled.
Recently Alanah Pearce, a content creator and writer at Sony Santa Monica, published a video that caught some flak from parts of the internet. In it she discussed the idea that adding a pause button to Elden Ring would be beneficial and a potential accessibility accommodation for a parent with a young child, because they would be unable to play games that punish death and lack a pause button, because they may need to stop playing with little to no notice to keep their child safe. She referred to this as a “situational disability”, a term which may not be familiar to people outside of accessibility research circles, and one I want to talk about a little today, in the context of the Social Model of disability.
The social model of disability, a term coined by disability rights activists in the late 20th century, is a view of disability that centres the idea that primarily disability is about the external barriers a person faces between themselves and interacting with society, rather than something broken in the person experiencing the barrier. The idea is that for example if a person cannot enter a hotel because they use a wheelchair and the entrance features unavoidable steps, the unavoidable steps are the issue creating the barrier and are the disabling factor we should be focusing on fixing.
If you have the option of installing either a ramp or an elevator at the entrance of the building, rather than simply looking at the use case of the wheelchair user, the social model of disability would suggest looking at which of those options reduces access barriers for the highest number of users. A ramp is perhaps likely to also remove access barriers for hotel guests with heavy wheeled luggage who might not feel like they’re allowed to use a lift designed for a wheelchair user. A ramp might be the solution that removes barriers most effectively for the greatest number of users.
Within that context, we can start to discuss the ideas of temporary and situational disability with a bit of context.
A temporary disability is, in the context of accessibility discussions, anything that temporarily or inconsistently impacts your ability to interact with the world. Some examples of this might look like temporary experiences of traditional disabilities, such as a person breaking their arm and not being able to use it due to a cast for a few weeks or a person with an ear infection temporarily losing hearing in one ear. Most people would not refer to themselves as disabled if temporarily impacted by one of these, but their abilities are limited for that period of time. If the issue is commonly recurring enough that person might consider their temporary disability as making them disabled, such as a person who gets chronic ear infections on one side and defaults to telling friends to expect their hearing on that side to be worse, and to default to standing and speaking on their more consistently good side.
However, situational disability as a term can be used under the social model of disability to talk about access barriers that might not look like traditional disabilities, while being similar in the impacts they have and accommodations they require. If you’re out on a sunny day and due to sunlight glare can’t see your phone screen, a high contrast screen option might make it easier for you to see what you are doing. If you’ve got a young child, a car park might offer parent and child parking spaces to reduce the risks involved in having a child in proximity of moving vehicles more than necessary. If your hands are wet after coming in from the rain you might struggle to open a jar lid, and benefit from tools designed to help disabled people with low grip strength. You are not disabled under the medical model of disability, but at that moment you have a situational disability which could be alleviated by accessibility accommodations, whether they were designed with you in mind or not.
While temporary and situational disabilities are sometimes separated out this way, temporary physical changes to a person compared to situational or environmental factors causing impairment, there’s room for debate as to where the dividing line line is drawn. Using Microsoft’s accessibility guidelines as an example, you might see a heavy regional accent labelled a situational disability, in that it makes it hard for people to understand you when you travel to certain locations, but a person whose mouth is numb after dentistry as a temporary disability because it’s a temporary change to the person, rather than a barrier caused by the situation the person is temporarily in. The person with a numbed mouth is temporarily disabled, in that they’re temporarily going to face barriers regardless of context. The person with the heavy accent experiences situational disability only in the specific context of travelling to a place where that accent is not commonly understood.
To use another example being taken out of context by people from the Microsoft examples sheet, if your mobile app requires solving an audio Captcha to sign in, a deaf person and a bartender at a loud concert will face similar accessibility barriers, despite one facing a permanent and one a situational disability. Both could be served by the same accessibility consideration, making sure there’s a non-audio way to engage with the app helps both users.
Microsoft is not calling bartenders in general disabled, any more than Alanah was calling parents in general disabled. Both groups, in certain situations, experience accessibility barriers which line up with those of permanent disabilities, and could be helped by similar accessibility tools.
Now, under the social model of disability, we can start looking a bit more broadly at situational disabilities as anything that might pose a temporary or inconsistent barrier for someone, which could be assisted by accessible design or settings options, and is a product of outside factors.
If we look at the example Alanah gave, Elden Ring lacking pause functionality, under the lens of the social model of disability we can talk about the accessibility impacts of that decision more broadly. The lack of a pause button impacts anyone who cannot guarantee they won’t need to suddenly and without warning walk away from playing the game. That might include people with a permanent medical disability such as IBS who may with little warning need to use the bathroom, but it would equally impact a parent with a young child who might need to suddenly and without warning help that child get to the bathroom with minimal warning. This is a situational disability, where the barrier present is the same regardless whether the person facing the barrier is doing so because of a permanent medical issue or a temporary situational barrier. In this situation, their accessibility needs are comparable.
A person saying they are experiencing a situational disability in that context isn’t saying that having a child is a disability under the medical model. They’re not trying to argue that having a child means they should have access to all accommodations designed for disabled people at all times. It’s an acknowledgement that, in the context of accessibility, there is a situational factor which means accessibility accommodations would also benefit their use case at that moment.
Why is this important? Well, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it means we don’t overlook people whose use cases we might be able to support, and secondly because it helps us advocate for these features being implemented based on them helping a wider net of potential players.
Conversations about accessibility shouldn’t need to focus on numbers of people impacted, a small group of disabled people being supported by a feature would in a just world be enough to justify its implementation, but that’s not the reality we live in today. By being able to highlight that an accessibility feature supports people who would not consider themselves disabled, but who do face barriers caused by social model situational or temporary disabilities, it helps make the case that these features are useful to a wide range of people with equally valid needs. It’s not dismissing the unique struggles of people with disabilities, but it is acknowledging and normalising that accessibility accommodations support everyone, not just those with traditional disabilities.
If your game features a one handed control scheme, that’s useful both for the person with an amputated arm, the person with one arm in a cast, and equally for a parent holding their child and trying to rock them to sleep at 2am, who is trying to keep themselves entertained while exhausted. That’s a permanent, temporary, and situational disability use case being accommodated.
A game offering mono sound helps people permanently deaf in one ear, someone whose ears are prone to getting water trapped in them causing temporary hearing loss, or just someone whose headphones broke on the train home and who can only hear through one side due to that tech issue.
Reduced dynamic range, making a game’s volume more consistent, can be helpful for an autistic player trying to avoid sensory overwhelm, or someone playing games quietly to not wake a sleeping partner trying to avoid a volume spike for that reason, or a person who’s been working in a nursery all day who is experiencing situational sensory overwhelm from environmental factors.
When designing accessibility accommodations, it’s really important that we look at them in a three dimensional way. High contrast mode for example in games is often portrayed as being a feature designed to help low vision gamers, but it’s also helpful for gamers with disabilities such as ADHD who might find it aids focus, and gamers with cognitive disabilities who value additional information clarity, or someone who is playing a game streamed over the internet to their phone who benefits in this specific use case because the bright colours help make sense of the game on a smaller than usual screen with some bitrate issues. While it’s valid to have a target user in mind when developing the feature, it’s also important to think through who else the feature might be able to benefit, and often that list will include people who you wouldn’t traditionally consider disabled, but who are impacted by situational disabilities externally while trying to play.
While I understand that hearing having children referred to as a situational disability might sound unusual without background context, there is a specific meaning to the term. It’s not used to suggest that someone who has an amputated arm and someone holding a newborn in one arm face all of the same barriers throughout their life, just that in the specific context of providing them accessibility support, both are groups who might well benefit from the same accessibility accommodations for very similar purposes. It’s a term designed to help accessibility professionals keep in mind use cases for accessibility they might be missing due to preconceptions of who accessibility is for. It’s a term that’s there to help people who don’t consider themselves disabled recognise that there are accessibility accommodations which might regardless be useful for them.
As a disabled person, I have no objection to the term, and have used it professionally, but I am not an authority. It’s the term currently being used, and it serves a purpose to quickly act as shorthand for a specific accessibility use case. While I understand those who hearing it out of context feel like it does a disservice to people with permanent disabilities, I also think that the context it exists in is important. This isn’t a term being broadly used, it’s a term you’re unlikely to hear outside of very specific design discussion contexts.
Designing accessibility accommodations with situational disabilities in mind is important. Yes, that means that people not traditionally considered disabled should sometimes be part of your accessibility considerations. It’s not taking anything away, disabled people are still the primary focus of accessibility efforts, but we can additionally design for people whose circumstances lead to the same end results in terms of reduced ability to engage with a game.
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