By 
Took us a month to catch up, but here’s a recap of 16 hours of accessibility talks and panels worth knowing about.
00:00 – Intro
02:00 – DAY 1
02:10 – Update from the industry
04:55 – Accessible DOOM mod
08:15 – Servers up, Everyone is welcome
18:25 – Tourettes IRL
22:40 – Developing in the dark
26:46 – Cheat codes for all
28:25 – Forgetting is frustrating
30:25 – Overanalyzing and Syntezysing
33:12 – Accessibility to burnout
41:24 – DAY 2
41:50 – Seeing into your future, developing an accessible game for later today
45:30 – Open world and ADHD, a cautionary tale about love, pain and opportunity
48:13 – Cognitive accessibility UX in Star Wars Jedi Survivor
57:55 – #OpenForNaughtyDog
59:40 – More than a saving throw
1:03:05 – Skill tree unlocked, from consultant to inhouse
1:05:30 – Hell welcomes all
1:05:50 – How to line break subtitles
1:06:50 – Accessible gadget for gamers
1:08:40 – Developing the latest hardware accessibility offerings at Xbox
1:14:30 – Where to find all the talks
1:15:45 – Where to find us
Transcript below
Laura: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Ctrl, Alt, Access.
It’s a video game accessibility video and audio podcast.
I’m one of your hosts, Laura. I’m here as ever with my lovely cohost, Arevya.
Hi! How are you doing?
Arevya: I’m doing, I’m doing. We’re doing today.
Laura: We’re doing, we’re doing. We’re over 20 minutes late starting recording for various reasons, it’s one of those kind of days today.
Arevya: Put two disabled people together on a podcast, things will happen. That is just how it is.
Laura: Yeah, we’ve, we’ve got to remember to do it and be here and have the energy to do it and not have tech issues.
And these are more difficult to line up than you would think.
Arevya: Yes, yes.
Laura: But you know what we did do since last, last time we recorded?
Arevya: We did a lot of research. A lot.
Laura: We, we watched through all the talks from GA Conf USA 2024, the game accessibility conference had it’s… a little over a month ago now, had their USA conference for the year.
And we finally had the time and energy and focus to watch through like 16 hours of live streams to tell you about all of the various things that we found out about this year.
Arevya: I have all my notes ready to go. I’m actually really exciting because there was a lot of good talks and some talks that had, I don’t know how to say this other than they gave me like a, aha, and also gave me a Oh, shit. I, I, I need to, I need to, I need to think about that.
Laura: Yeah. Before we even get into the talks, I did want to note a couple of things.
Every, every time GA Conf happens, they open with like a, here’s the gaming accessibility news stuff from the last six months. And usually this is like, usually I’m aware of most of the things that are in there.
There were two things this year that I hadn’t, I had somehow passed me by that I thought were pretty cool.
One of them was the UMagic accessibility controller which… is it’s very similar to something like the Xbox Adaptive Controller, but it ships with like a metal base and all of your, like, buttons and switches and things are magnetic on the bottom, so you can place them where you want and they’re not going to slide around because they’re, they’re magneting in place on the board you’ve placed them on [Nice].
And that was pretty cool, and that’s not one that I’d, that had come across my radar, so that’s one I want to keep an eye on.
And the other was the news that Call of Duty Black Ops 6, nearly half of players at some point accessed the accessibility settings menu for that game. [Yep].
Which, that’s great!
Like, even if they’re not, all actually using settings, you know, some of it might just be people, you know, being curious and taking a look.
Half of people checking your accessibility menu is a good sign for like a wide number of people engaging with accessibility support.
Arevya: Yeah, and I also think it is cool and I know like, we should never stereotype, but it also is a stereotype that in more of these typical, like, FPS game or, like, Brogamer’s games that people don’t like accessibility, people don’t want accessibility.
We see now with numbers that, no, actually, a lot of people think are curious and go in and check and find something they like or not.
I don’t know, but I think that is a good sign because so often when I post something online I get these comments that like we don’t want this and it’s just like yeah you not might not want it but actually a lot of your coplayers do want it and I think that’s really really cool.
Laura: The vocal minority might not want it but clearly the numbers overall seem to suggest that these are you know things that people want in games and that’s cool.
Yeah
Arevya: And it also shows that accessibility sort of merges into all genres.
Like it’s something that combines us all of gamers like it’s something sort of and it is though it’s sort of a bit above gaming it’s sort of more than quote unquote just the gaming it’s a bit something that can happen to us whatever game we play we can have needs for or feel that is more comfortable for us no matter what type of game we’re playing and I think that’s cool.
Laura: Hmm, indeed.
So should we start with some of the talks from day one [Yes] of the conference?
Yeah, where shall we start?
Arevya: Start from the front?
Laura: Yeah, I can talk a little about the first one. [Yeah].
Accessible Doom: Slaying Demons with Accessibility, which is a panel by Alan Dewin who created something called the Toby Accessibility Mod for Doom.
It runs in the GZDoom engine, and it’s basically a Doom mod that’s designed to allow sightless players to play Doom.
It… it’s a really interesting talk, this one, in that, like, I like that this developer’s sort of starting point for trying to come up with this kind of accessibility tool was “Okay, how do blind people navigate the real world as a starting point?”
Okay you know, using senses like touch, potentially, with things like a white cane.
Using, like, various senses and working to, like, okay, “Maybe we can use vibrations, but if someone’s playing with a mouse and keyboard we can’t guarantee they’ve got something with rumble in it. Sound is really the only thing we can rely on everyone having access to, so that’s a starting point for how we’re gonna, like, work our navigation tools”.
And just a whole bunch of going into how this, this mod does things like sounds for impact detection, for virtual walking stick sounds, beacon sounds for interactables, prompt buttons for being able to be like, tell me my current compass direction I’m facing, snap me to the next compass direction.
You can place map markers on points of interest and have like a little audio pathfinder system that they described as being kind of like a virtual seeing eye dog.
And all these, all these various kinds of sounds, but it also, as a talk went into like, how do you avoid overwhelming players with too much audio, and how do you balance lots of information but not so much that you can’t tell what it’s trying to communicate to you?
Arevya: Yep.
Laura: Interesting talk, good amount of gameplay in there for if you want to get a sense of what that mod is doing.
Arevya: I think it also is cool what you said where the developer has decided to like, take a look at like, what do we know from real world?
Take like, inspiration from other, like, from other places in your life when you can’t, like, we do say a lot of that, nothing about us… nothing about us without us, and this is also another way of that, like, what would the person who are you trying to convey this to would actually use it, like, talk and look and hear and listen.
And we also see a lot of other developers that I will talk about later, who also say similar things.
They take inspiration from other sources.
And it shows that we aren’t in a vacuum.
We can take inspiration from each other.
And yeah, I think it was really, really cool.
I think it was quite, it was also a bit technical.
So I watched this live, so I got, I fell a bit out. It was like a bit too technical for me.
But I think what I really enjoyed was that you could see a lot of how it’s done.
There was a lot of, like, examples.
I highly recommend checking those out. Or just check, like, a playthrough of that.
Like, somebody actually playing it and see how it is, how it works.
Laura: After that we had Making Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR Accessible by Olivier Palomeiri.
Arevya: This one was cool.
Laura: Yeah, this is, this is, I think, the talk that most maybe go, I’ve not played this, but I need to go play it.
Arevya: VR is totally new for me. So not VR in itself, but VR accessibility is totally new for me.
As somebody who experiences severe motion sickness, I have been so, like, we’re, like, curious and how and I laughed and I kid you not I laughed out loud when the developer told us that’s one of the things so there are three ways you can do for like a motion sickness that can help you first is teleportation so instead of walking towards something you just teleport over there, it helps to sort of your mind understanding that you are not actually in the game.
The second one is dynamic blinders, sort of like a horse blinder, you like, make the screen a bit smaller, and it makes it sort of, you, you, your brain starts understanding this is a screen now, not actually what the eyes see.
Laura: It blacks out your peripheral vision, because that’s where, that’s the bit of your vision that studies seem to suggest is where most of the motion sickness happens.
Arevya: But the best part! You can get a fake nose.
I laughed so loud.
And then he said, with three sizes, so you can literally see three different sizes.
Laura: Yeah this is, this is my favorite because like, I love virtual reality games, but I get, I get motion sick pretty badly. [Yes].
I’ve seen different attempts of VR motion sickness mitigation, and I was really dubious because when this talk was talking about making this VR game accessible,
I’m watching them, like, running around doing parkour and jumping off roofs, and I’m like, this is the kind of game that would usually be a nightmare for me.
I’ve never heard of a VR game developer being like, oh yeah, you can see your nose in the real world, your brain just tunes it out.
Your brain gets confused that there’s no nose, we put a nose in the game.
I’m like, I need to know if that works, because if putting a nose in the game is enough to fix it, that’s going to be amazing.
Arevya: Ithink that’s genius.
So what I like, the only thing I could imagine, while, like, laughing here, spitting out my tea, was like, a person without the VR glasses, but just like, people like, as me, who can struggle just getting nauseous by just existing.
So if I just put on, like, force blinders and a fake nose, I, I, I’m good.
I can then walk around without being nauseous now.
I’m just like, hmm, maybe. One day.
Laura: I’m curious as well because they talked about the fact that the game has comfort presets for motion sickness that are sort of not just a thing in the settings, but it’s like, hey, a character’s going to ask you like real world questions about things that might or might not in the real world make you motion sick, and come up with a preset to try based on that.
And I was like, that’s, that’s interesting conceptually as well.
Arevya: Yeah, I, I really want a VR headset, but at the how it is right now, I don’t feel confident of getting a headset for playing one game that I know I’m not motion sick when I play, which is Beat Saber.
So I’m a bit like, eh, but I, I, oh, every year it gets so much more tempting.
I also like, thought it was really two things I also think is really, really cool when it comes to motion in general.
So they had like, because in Assassin’s Creed, you can go behind your back and like, take out weapons and take out arrows. But they…
Laura: As if you’ve got like a body holster on your real body. Yeah.
Arevya: And it’s really cool. And I think that like, I, one of the things I do like with VR is the fact that you get mobility training while using it.
I think that is a really good thing.
But that is also a access barrier.
So what they have done is that if you can’t do that, there is buttons on the screen where you can just push it.
And I think that was smart. It’s a smart thing.
It’s like, yeah, we like mobility training, but hey, if you can’t, you can’t.
And that is reality for a lot of people. So let’s just give you a possibility to do that.
Also, if you struggle like I do with shaky hands you can actually get a setting yeah that stabilizes it.
Laura: This was the coolest thing. This was one of the coolest things I saw in the whole thing, yeah, is hand stabilization [Yes].
And degrees of it. So you can, you can determine how much the game will, like stable, will ignore a degree of hand movement and just smooth out your movements in game.
Arevya: Like sort of the whole thing this talk did, you have seen a meme of like the brain, like *explodes*, that was like, that was my brain during this talk.
I was just like, my head exploded, all the stars, because there were so many new things I haven’t even thought about.
And I’m curious to see more and more games using this to see if they actually, like, how much do they actually work?
Do they work in this game specific or is this just something that works in general for people with these kind of problems?
Like the shaky of hand, the motion sickness.
So, yeah.
Laura: My last one I wanted to throw in on this game that I thought was really interesting was, because you’re running around on rooftops so much, there is settings for helping with fear of heights, including like a visualizer so you can see in the game “Okay, it looks like I’m this high, but I can see my real-world floor is just here, I’m not actually that high” as a reference point.
I thought that was such a cool idea.
Arevya: Yeah. I’m a bit unsure how they do that then, when you sort of like, jump in game.
Like, I, I, I was thinking about, you know when you do like the eagle dive in Assassin’s Creed?
Laura: Yeah, into the hay bales.
Arevya: Yeah. And I was just like, Oh damn, that is something I would like to see because I was so curious, like how, How does it move when you move really, really fast?
But it was a cool talk. I actually recommend everybody to take a look at it.
And I think I want to end with what like the game… the presentationer said, Olivier said, and he said at the end that accessibility features can sometimes contribute to VR comfort.
Just the fact that you’re thinking about accessibility in a whole, you’re making it also more comfortable just experiencing VR in general.
And I think that was a good thing to say, because we say it a lot.
Accessibility is so much more than just helping disabled people.
It is about universal design and helping and making everything more comfortable for everyone.
Laura: Indeed. So the next one, and we can sort of go over this one quickly but if, if people want to check it out, the, the full talk is up on the GA Conf YouTube channel.
This one’s called Servers Up: Everyone is welcome. And it was a panel about live service games.
It featured Morgan Baker from EA’s accessibility lead.
Drew McCreary, who worked on Diablo’s accessibility at Blizzard.
Jordan Hedges, who worked on accessibility for Mortal Kombat 1
And Topher Winward who works at Rare on Sea of Thieves.
It is a really interesting hour long panel.
I can talk about, like, a couple of the big takeaways I think were interesting from it.
When working on live service stuff where you have so many people constantly tweaking so many systems, it’s really important to prioritize teaching your team to think about accessibility in their avenues of the game, because so much is like constantly being tweaked and iterated on in, like, not one static place. It’s much harder for an accessibility specialist to be on top of everything.
There was also an interesting conversation in there about… with like a regular video game where you just release it on release day and then it’s out, if you try and get an accessibility feature in and you miss launch day, you could, in theory, patch it in later, but for most publishers, they will just say “well, you didn’t get it in by launch, it’s not in”.
Arevya: Ah, yeah.
Laura: With a live service game, it’s both a good and a bad thing that you always have a chance to put it in later. [Yeah].
I thought this was a really interesting take.
They talked about, you’ve never missed your chance to add it in, there’ll always be another update, there’s like, “oh, the next update’s coming in six weeks, maybe that’s when we get it in” but that also makes it easier for higher ups to justify kicking accessibility down the road.
Arevya: Yeah.
Laura: And going, “oh, oh, we won’t stress about getting it in for this update, because there’s another update two months after that. We’ll get it in for that one”.
Arevya: Two edged sword.
Laura: So, you’re much more likely to get more chances to get that feature in. but there’s more reasons that someone higher up the chain might just say, “oh, don’t worry about it right now”.
And the last one I thought was interesting was, there’s some talk in there about when working on Diablo 4 there was some accessibility features for lower vision players that, they, they’d started working on these features, but they weren’t confident that they were totally ready yet, that they would actually be helpful.
And with a more traditional game, you would just have to put them in the game and hope, to a degree.
But what they were able to do, because it was a live service game, was that they were able to put those accessibility features on their PTR test server, that’s the thing you opt into if you’re, you know that you’re going to play with features that aren’t quite ready, and could get feedback by going, here’s the low vision support, tell us what’s working and what’s not about it, so that they could keep working on it, and by the time they gave it to everyone, it was much more ready to play, which is obviously harder to do when you’re not making a live service game.
Which yeah, it was, it was an interesting talk. I think those were the big takeaways from it.
Did you want to talk about the next one? Tourette’s IRL by Pat O’Leary from Maxis.
Arevya: Yeah, that one was cool. It’s not that much about game accessibility, but he talked a lot about how to work with people in, like, when you have somebody in the workplace which has Tourette’s and there’s some, like, points I really, really, really want to point out.
There is he says strive to create a workplace where people like me can unapologetically occupy public space.
That is, like, that was, that was poetic because I had to, like, write it down and line it under.
It was really, really well said quote and learn me that one in a hundred meet the threshold of some time… some kind of Tourette’s during their life.
So a lot of people will experience it.
As somebody who has experienced, never getting diagnosed, but experienced similar symptoms in my life.
I think it’s really, really cool to hear of.
I struggle at work that I, I copy sound that I hear.
So I, and I work in an open office and I, yeah, I, I keep like whistling and saying words that my colleague says.
Luckily, my colleague is the most wonderful, brilliant person. She just laughs, but it is…
It can be hard, and just like, getting Pat to talk about all of this was so cool.
It was really, really cool.
Laura: Yeah. I have some similar, not Tourette’s, but similar enough that it felt really nice to hear this talk being done.
I, I do as, as someone autistic, I, I do something called echolalia, where I, I, I repeat things I’ve heard sometimes out of context.
And sometimes that will turn into verbal stimming, where I will repeat a thing out loud, I will verbally repeat a thing as a, as a repetitive action.
And it was a really nice talk in terms of, like, talking about the importance of, like, there was a bit where he talks about being tic neutral, like, in the context of Tourette’s, like, don’t necessarily react to tics happening, reacting can cause them to reinforce, and trying to create this idea of, like, sometimes a person might just say a thing, and it doesn’t need to be a big deal sometimes.
The brain just needs something verbal to happen. [Yep].
And that’s okay.
And like, trying to create that kind of culture around it.
Arevya: Yeah, he gave us five tips for Tourette’s in the workplace.
And the tips was tics change from day to day.
Don’t react to tics if you can help react to it.
Tics don’t reflect a intent or a value for a person.
And put twitchy people in your world.
And this five tips for Tourette’s in the workplace is a YouTube, so you can look it up if you want to learn more about it.
Laura: The last thing from that talk I wanted to talk about, and this was just a thing I did not know that was like a real eye opener, was during this talk he talks about a man called Charles Ray, who in 2003 was fired from working, I believe at Walmart, for having Tourette’s, because some of his tics were swear… were swear words.
And a judge ruled that he was too disabled to perform the core functions of his job because his tics were deemed inappropriate.
And yeah, that, that degree of, no, you’re doing the job just fine, but he was like being moved on to night shifts rather than daytime shifts rather than just allowing human conversations to happen of hey, sometimes a brain something misfires and a swear word comes out, it’s not the end of the world.
That’s clearly a person capable of doing a job.
Arevya: And it’s sad because it’s like that like clutching your pearls “Think about the children” kind of society, I do not like that.
It could easily, there are so many ways to navigate around that, that could like, you could have a manager that if situations happen, go forward and go like, “hey, this is okay, this is just how it is, and it’s okay”.
Like, there are so many ways they could have fixed this and they decided to be a really horrible person there.
So, yeah.
Laura: Yeah. Did you want to talk about the next panel the next talk that comes up Developing in the Dark by Zach Tidwell?
Arevya: Because if you have been in my YouTube channel, you actually see that Zach, me and Zach, I had an interview with Zach and it’s actually the reason why he ended up getting a GA Conf talk because like he got connected, connected, connected, said he had like contacted with me and ended up, at least that was what he said.
And I think that was really, really cool.
Developing the Dark, Zack Tidwell is a completely blind game developer.
And one of the things I remember from talking to him is that he is so annoyed that like Unity and all of these other big companies is talking about adding accessibility, you can add accessibility into your game with our platforms, but their platforms aren’t accessible.
And he had his talk where he talked about his history of he ended up after military getting quite mentally ill, and sadly hurting himself quite badly, ended up blinding himself and then having to go into university, but then hitting the same problem of inaccessibility all the time and ended up figuring out that, “hey, I actually want to code”, and figuring out how to do that.
So he has made a mobile game for the iPhone, which is called Zanagrams.
And it’s like a guessing game.
So you get like six sentences, and then you have a bunch of word like two or three letters combined together. And then you have to figure out what this word.
So one of the words I got up once was like the the biggest planet in the solar system. That was like my sentence.
And then you had to find the words, but this game is completely playable for somebody who does not have sight.
So if you are a gamer without sight you can play this game No problem, and he talked about like how… he said something really cool.
He said, accessible design is a problem of design rather than implementation.
I think that was really cool.
And he also had a quote where “tell me everything that was ugly”, because the problem he faced is sort of the opposite problem that what other developers face is that he didn’t know how to make his app look good for people with sight.
Because he was just like, he, when he went through it and he had his screen reader reading it out for it, so when he had a person coming, helping him to like, look it over and that person said like, but there is a line here. It shouldn’t be a line here.
And he went like, no, it’s not.
Because he was like, I know the code.
And they were just like, yes, it is a line here.
So as Tara said after the talk that it’s nice to see that all developers, blind or not, have the same confidence is that I know my own code. That is not how it works.
Laura: Yeah. Yeah. There was one other really nice thing out of that talk in terms of like, talking about the various ways that game’s accessible, because yeah, it’s accessible for sightless blind players.
But he talked about a bunch of other ways it’s accessible, including my favourite one, it’s playable on refreshable braille displays. [Yes!]
Which I was like, oh, that’s cool!
Arevya: That’s really cool.
So, for anybody who doesn’t know what that is, it’s sort of, a braille display is like It looks like a keyboard sort of, and it has a line on top, and you can lie your hands on top of that, and then you can feel the bumps, so sort of like when you finger, finger read braille, reading braille, and you, so the game lets you do that, so you can also sort of feel the game, read the game in the same way, or hear the game in the same way, I think that is really, really cool.
So yeah, I tried it out. You can, I know you can download it for the iPhone, so yeah,
So it is in the App Store and it’s free to play, so if you want to test it out.
Laura: Yeah. Another, another quick one we can talk about Cheat Codes for All by Tess Grossman.
I think we can summarize this one pretty, pretty quickly.
Cheating in games is a victimless crime.
Arevya: I love that one. That is the top of my list as well.
Laura: Guides, tutorials, and cheats are accessibility. Couldn’t agree more.
And I think this was like a nice takeaway from it.
Easy mode is what the developers will think will make the game easier, whereas customisable difficulty lets the player decide what makes it easier for them.
Arevya: Yes, it’s just like, you have just read my notebook now, do you know that?
Both: Yeah, yeah. Yeah,
Laura: That, that, that really, put a, worded something well that I’ve been struggling to put to words for a while.
Like, the problem with easy modes is that the developer has decided what will make the game more playable for someone, whereas customisable difficulty is like, no, let me tweak the things that I need tweaked.
Arevya: Yeah, they said easy mode is a myth. And I love that. [Yeah].
Also cheating comes when it’s necessary for a lot of people.
Like a lot of people won’t cheat in your games just to cheat. They will do it when it’s necessary for them because they either face a bug or face a problem that they cannot deal with.
So yeah. That was a talk strictly for single player games and offline games though. [Yeah].
Yeah, yeah. So, and I think it’s really, really cool.
As Tess said in their talk, I’m a cheater, and for that, I’m a cheater as well. Love that.
Laura: Indeed. Another one we can probably talk about quite quickly, because I think we’ve both talked about this topic a lot on this show.
Forgetting is Frustrating by Elizabeth White, who is Bethesda’s user research lead at Xbox.
We’ve talked a lot about this topic, but she talks about cognitive load as an accessibility barrier, basically in terms of being like, how much RAM you need to be processing things in real time and holding things in working memory.
And I’m like, yep, that’s a good, that’s a, that’s a good baseline way to explain it, I think, for people who don’t know the concept.
Are you asking players to take in too much information too quickly, quickly process it? Overload happens.
And that that threshold is different for everyone.
Arevya: Yeah, and it’s always almost speed versus complexity.
Do you want them to fix this quick? Or do you want to fix them like, be a complex puzzle or barrier they need to face.
And then that if you have both of them and it’s too high, you are like in a Valley of death.
No games can exist there. This is not fun anymore.
Then it’s a job. Then it’s not fun for no one.
And I think it was really really cool.
I actually highly recommend this for a lot of people because I think also it will not only be good for people that are developers but also for people that are disabled and have had learned that they have some sort of cognitive barriers to learn a bit more about why something can annoy you.
Because I felt that this talk here summed up everything that was my problem with Outer Wilds.
Like, how I try to explain why I struggled that much and why like, Outer Wilds like, literally pissed me off, but at the same time I love the story and still to this day it’s one of the best stories I have had in a game.
But I’m still pissed off while playing it.
So I think that was really, really good. I recommend this talk.
Laura: Yeah. Then we had Overanalyzing and Synthesizing: Crafting the Accessible Metroidvania Experience of Periphery Synthetic by ShiftBackTick.
I can talk a little bit about this one, I won’t go into too much depth, because it is a very technical talk and I would recommend, if you’re interested in it, just go watch this one.
Periphery Synthetic is a game that I showed off this year at the Accessibility Summer Showcase, it is a non-violent first person metroidvania that is entirely playable via audio.
It’s got a bunch of features… the basic ones screen reader support, 3D navigational audio, haptic feedback so you can use touch to sense parts of the world, no vision required to play.
A lot of this was just the technical journey of managing to put something like that together.
But I think the big takeaway, I would say, for this one of, like, that is, it’s gonna sound really obvious when I say it, but so many developers don’t think about this.
If you are a sighted game developer and want to very quickly do a bit of testing of whether something is working for blind players, you can just close your eyes and test whether you can engage with that.
You know, it’s no replacement for bringing in blind playtesters, but it will get you a lot of the way to knowing, “am I giving the player enough information to be able to engage with this?”
Arevya: I think it was, I think that one is cool, because like, as you say, it does not, It does not equivalent if somebody is blind, but it also take away the myth that us disabled people are like some kind of superhuman.
You don’t learn a third, like a fifth, whatever, like sense just because you’re blind or deaf or something else.
You just learn to be really, really good at relying on your assessing… yeah, like, your sight.
Laura: If you’ve never tried playing a game just based on audio, I really recommend giving it a go sometime.
Like, there are games like The Veil, I think it was called, which is designed to be played purely via audio.
Or just boot up a game like, you know, I played all the way through The Last of Us Part II based on audio, just because I was fascinated by the tech it was doing.
It is a really interesting experience just going, what tools are… how much am I not paying attention to in games when I am relying on visuals?
Arevya: Yeah, absolutely.
And it tells… it does not tell a different story, but it gives you a sort of a different perspective on the story and it’s a cool way of experiencing games.
Laura: Yeah. And then the last one of day one was the Accessibility to Burnout Pipeline by Shel Little.
Arevya: The call outs talk.
Laura: Yeah, so we, we had this with the, with the London GA Conf, where like they had a talk like this that was like, oh, oh God, I feel very seen.
But the thing I think made me feel very seen in this one is, this talk talks a lot about the specific difference between workplace burnout and autistic burnout, and how if you think you’re having workplace burnout, but you’re having autistic burnout, and you’re trying to fix it, you’re trying to fix workplace burnout that isn’t the problem, you’re going to continue to burn out without fixing the root problem, and I felt very seen during that.
Arevya: Laura, this was literally the talk that made me call my doctor and go like, Hey, I think I need an yeah, I think I need an appointment because I’ve just experienced exhaustion lately and fatigued and to a level I have not experienced in a very, very long time.
I think I might just be…. because it’s called autistic burnout…
It could also be called neuro… neuro, what do you call that word again?
Laura: Neurodivergent.
Arevya: There we go. Neurodivergent burnout because like I have cerebral palsy and I was just like, Oh, she’s talking about me.
Laura: Yeah, it was a real good talk. Some of the, some of the big takeaways, I think she talks it talked a lot at the start of the talk about we, the work that we do in fields like accessibility, but I think you could also apply this to like, political activism, lots of other kinds of work like that, is too important to lose people to burnout, because if people burn out before they can stick around in these kind of fields, they don’t stay around long enough to become senior people in those roles and fill senior job roles.
And that we are having a problem in accessibility right now of people burning out before they have been around long enough to take that knowledge they have and start doing those senior job roles teaching the next generation. [Yep].
Which I think is very, very true.
Arevya: I think the other thing that stuck with me was that she had she called it care washing.
Where your job, like, because for burnout things that you need to do is like reschedule work, get, like, less demanding, like, you need less on your plate and stuff like that.
And then they, there are a lot of works that then just say, “Oh, just go to therapy or just do mindfulness. Take a walk, take a holiday”.
And it’s just like, but this isn’t actually fixing the problem. It’s care washing.
It’s a similar word to what we have heard for before Pink Washing or Green Washing.
It’s when a company does something that is purely for look where we are actually thinking about you. And it’s actually not helping at all.
Laura: I was listening to a really good talk about this recently, I think it was a YouTube video, it might have been by Some More News, talking about the industry of sleep health apps.
Arevya: Yeah.
Laura: And the number of workplaces that will give you subscriptions to sleep apps, [WHAT?!] to be like, yeah, here’s a, here’s an app that we’ll pay for your subscription to, so you can get better, like, track your sleep and get better sleep habits.
But the point being pointed out was, having an app isn’t going to fix the fundamental problem, which is your workplace isn’t giving you enough time off of work to feel like you can sleep for longer.
Arevya: Yes, and she called, yeah, she called to move from an individual frame to a system frame and change the system, not the person. That was a good talk. Good talk.
Laura: Very much so. Last couple of little takeaways from that I thought were good was there’s a part of the talk goes on about losing the ability to tell between like, what is a small serious… a small source of stress and a big source of stress.
Because when you are burned out enough, particularly in like, autistic burnout, where you’ve got nervous system dysfunction going on.
Every source of stress feels like it’s the end of the world amounts of stress.
Which reminded me very much of watching… for anyone who’s watched Steven Universe Future, I was like, oh yeah, no, I’ve been here, I’ve seen this.
But also there was some really good stuff in there about setting healthy boundaries for where work ends and where you begin outside of that.
And as hard as that is, that being a really important part of creating those kind of healthy boundaries.
Arevya: I am also curious if anybody have any ideas, like, because I do my work at my computer, then I go and have dinner, but then I come back to my computer to do my hobby, which is gaming.
And I wonder if anybody has anybody figured out a way to like, let your brain understand, oh, now we’re work brain and not hobby brain.
Laura: I can talk a little bit about this, because like, for years, this is why I didn’t play PC games. [Yeah].
Because my good PC was in the office, and I associated that with work, and I, I couldn’t detach from work mode.
And it’s why I ended up getting a Steam Deck, was I wanted to be able to play PC games, but I wanted to be able to do so… as long as I was doing, like, playing them in the living room, away from my computer, I felt like I wasn’t in the workspace anymore.
And for me, part of it was just realizing, like, hey, sometimes it might be a slightly worse experience, but, like, If I set up my laptop in the living room and, um, use remote desktop, maybe the game is running up on the PC in my office, but I’m streaming it to my laptop and playing it over a slight delay on my laptop.
It might not be as good of a gaming experience, but I’m not in the office, and that helps me know I’m not in work mode.
That helped a lot.
I don’t know if it’ll help for others, but for me that was my workaround for that problem.
Arevya: No, but it’s a good idea because I find myself now, in the situation I’m in right now, to hover more to the living room.
Like, I don’t want to go into the office because I’m so tired, so maybe that’s a good idea? I will try it.
Laura: Yeah, last, last one on that talk. I just wanted to throw it because I thought this was really good. I’ve got so much on this talk.
I really like the bit of this talk that focused on accessibility specialists can be particularly, specially impacted by burnout because of things like lack of control in your job position, feelings of futility when you fight for a feature and it doesn’t happen or it gets cut, feeling like you’re putting in more effort than the outcomes you’re getting, constantly feeling like you’re fighting an uphill battle, unclear and changing job expectations, overly high workloads, and even having to fight for a seat at the table are all things that are very common in accessibility, and very common sources of burnout.
And I was like, that’s a really good point.
Arevya: And I, I, I think it was Tara who said it last year. Or was it this year? I can’t remember, but she said that we have to remember that accessibility is a community work.
Accessibility, even though it feels like can be at your work, that is an individual, your task only.
You are allowed to drop the ball.
When you are overwhelmed, when you need to go home from work, you drop that ball.
If your company does not have anybody else to pick up the ball, that’s on them.
You cannot save the world alone.
We are a system of many, many people. So go home, rest. Somebody else will take the fight.
We, all of us, need to rest. I’m talking to myself here as well. But all of us need to rest.
So trust that your community members will continue fighting the fight while you’re resting.
And if your company do not have the possibility to have more people fighting for that, that is actually a company problem and then you are doing enough.
Just being there then is enough. You cannot change the world. and it’s okay to take rests.
Laura: Exactly. So now it’s time for day two of GA Conf and you might have noticed mild lighting changes potentially.
My hair is considerably better brushed.
We jumped through time to the following day, much like GA Conf did.
So I’m going to start talking about day two of GA Conf because I don’t, from what I am aware, you didn’t watch this talk. [No]. Because you were in it. [Yes].
Yeah, day two started with Seeing Into Your Future: Developing an Accessible Game for Later, Today, which is a panel that featured Sean Bright, Britt Dye, and our very own Arevya.
Yeah, this was, this was a curious one in that this is about a consulting project both of us took part in for a game called Mystiques.
It was a panel that was like three different perspectives on one accessibility consulting on a game project.
It started with the developer’s perspective of, like, what it was like bringing, bringing a game to consultants and when was most useful and what was gained from that process.
Then it was Britt Dye who does some of the, like, putting reports together at Easy Surf, the group that we do some of our accessibility consulting stuff with.
And then the final section was you talking about your perspective as one of the people who did a round of playtesting.
We were in the same playtest as it was. We were the two people in that one.
Talking about your perspective of being involved in that.
Some stuff that was in there that I think was just nice.
Toward the end, the game developer was asked some questions like, “How useful was it getting in, you know, expert consultants from EasySurf to look at your game really early on?”
And his response, I think, boiled down to something like, “I feel like I got the better end of the deal. I got so much insight and useful feedback and really, like, really important information and all I had to do was, like, hand a little bit of money over and I got all this useful information”.
I was like, aww.
He’s a sweetie.
Arevya: It is true, and I think as I remember from the talk the one thing I really, really like about it is that they, it sort of make a triangle of accessibility realistic and affordable.
And Easy Surf works like in the middle there, and I think that is important.
And I think it’s important for everyone, no matter who you work with or whatever, that you have a realistic and affordable view on accessibility.
There is the, like a holy grail where things actually can happen, and things can actually be reasonable put into your game.
So I think that’s cool.
Laura: Yeah. There’s, there’s a few really good bits that are, that are in there talking about, like there’s some conversation about, like, how much of a privilege it feels to be able to be invited to look at someone’s game as early as that and how that sort of plays out.
The benefits of like having a round of consulting really early on before you have a playable build versus slightly later once you have that first build you can show off.
It’s a really nice, it’s another really nice little insight into the kind of work we do.
And it’s been really nice to have this and Cabernet a couple of months back, of like examples we can point to of like, hey, learn about what we do.
Arevya: And get a bit more of a realistic insight of what actually a consultant can help you with. And I think that was cool.
Laura: Yeah. Also, it was nice at the end that everyone involved in the Easy Surf team got a little shout out at the end, whether or not they were part of that one specific talk.
And it was really nice to see both Milan Patel and Brandon Cole get highlighted at the end of that talk.
I thought that was really lovely.
So yeah, from there we move on to a talk that I’ve seen this talk before that we’re going to talk about in a minute.
There’s a couple of day two GA Conf talks that I’ve seen elsewhere.
So this first one was Open Worlds and ADHD, A Cautionary Tale of Love, Pain, and Opportunity by Amelien F Chieson.
So, which, do you remember a couple of, a couple of months back I talked about going to Develop in Brighton? And there was this little accessibility talks event being held at Unity’s offices?
This was one of the talks I heard there.
Yeah, well, there’s another one we’ll talk about later that is one of those as well.
But yeah, this was a talk about playing open world games as someone with ADHD. And I really like a lot about this talk.
Arevya: Yes. I also do. I especially like the fact that she had something called, she called it the cycle of guilt. Which I think a lot of neurodivergent people will feel of playing an open game where you start the game and you have like, you sort of almost hyper fixate on this game, but then something else comes that can give you a feeling of FOMO, or fear of missing out, so you drop the game, but then when you come back to it, you can’t remember, you can’t get your cognitive back into it.
And then you either, a lot of us then starts restarting.
And I was just like, okay, yet another talk that calls me out, thank you!
But I am one of those, and I think that it was cool, and talking about like, she talked a lot about having a comfort game.
So when you get like overwhelmed or a massive game like this sort of gives you guilt, go to a game that you know by heart to play a lot of that can sort of like regulate you, which was a smart way of looking at it.
Laura: Yeah, she talks about it as being her The Office game, not as in being in the office, but I mean, the TV show, her sort of like, comfort thing that she can come back to but specifically, like, so that you haven’t started a new big experience that, like, is going to maybe knock that last big open world game out of your most recently played position in your head?
I’m like, yep, yep, I recognize that. I’m still trying to finish playing through Metaphor Re Fantasio and Vampire Survivors has been my “I don’t want to start another big game until I finish Metaphor”.
Arevya: Yeah, and I have yet not finished Skyrim. I love that game. Every single year I have liked Skyrim. As like a Skyrim month, where I just, I do nothing else than just breed and play Skyrim.
And I never ended up finishing it, but it’s worth it every single year though.
And I finally stopped guilting myself and just, just having fun about it. And that is nice.
Laura: Yeah, lovely. Then we had Cognitive Accessibility UX in Star Wars Jedi Survivor by Jordan DeVries.
Did you want to talk a little bit about this?
Arevya: Yeah. We started like we talked about this on day one as well, I said like where you as a game developer can take inspiration from other places like other games and other situations and also in real life situation, and Jordan here took a lot of inspiration from his knowledge in web developing and he talked something that actually shocked me quite is that accessibility was first referenced in web developing in 1995, that’s 29 years ago.
And I think like, that is so absurd, almost, to think about that, it’s so, so old, quote unquote.
And the way he says, like, how he has learned to web develop, where all you want to do in web developing is removing all barriers.
We can’t do that in games. Games are a strain of different barriers. We just need to make them as possible to overcome as possible for a given set of people.
Arevya: He talked about just like how you can do the, get the good knowledge people have from using technology and you can put that into games.
Laura: Yeah, he talked about like, I, I like the way he put it that web design is often about making the player think as little as possible about what they’re doing, whereas games are actively about engaging the player in thinking about what they’re doing.
The other example he gave that I thought was really interesting was having to recognize user experience patterns that a player might pick up on the web, such as learning to mentally tune out and ignore pop ups because those tend to mean adverts [Yes], meaning that when someone’s playing a game an objective pop up they might subconsciously ignore because in their brain pop up means advert, I don’t pay attention to those, and they might miss important information, and like…
Arevya: I have done that before.
Laura: Right?
Yeah, having to think about how do you communicate stuff in games so that people won’t tune it out because of mechanics they learned elsewhere.
I thought that was a really good observation.
Arevya: Yeah, and I’ve never thought about it before because I’ve thought a lot about like the positives we can learn from other places, but also, we also have bad habits.
Bad habits of, like, yeah, what we have learned from using technology, from using apps, from using the web.
And that was interesting, never thought about it before.
Laura: Yeah, there’s a couple of other things I thought were really good in this one. Talks at one point about like, sometimes there are objects in this Star Wars game that you can either push or pull with the force.
And when they were designing the game, like Hey, there’s a 50/50 chance the player will do the correct thing with it. But much like trying to put a USB in, it feels really bad when you fail a 50 percent chance check.
And they were like trying to work out like, okay, maybe we just label it the correct thing so that like, players aren’t going to come up against that friction.
And it made me think of one of my favourite little game design tricks that I know from Portal 2. Which is that, in Portal, you have like an orange and a blue portal that you’re supposed to connect up with each other. And at the end of that game, there’s a really dramatic moment where you’re supposed to fire a portal onto the moon.
But in theory you need the other side of the portal to be, like, one that is already active in the room, and you could fire the wrong portal at the moon and it wouldn’t, like, it would ruin this big dramatic moment, so the game will just cheat.
Whichever portal you fire at the moon, it’ll make the other portal be in the right place, because it feels really bad to have a 50 percent chance go wrong at a dramatic moment.
Arevya: Smart.
Laura: And I thought that was an interesting observation of like, yeah, working around the player not remembering a 50 percent chance is weirdly important in game design.
Arevya: That is smart. Sometimes it’s like a little white lie. Sometimes you can do it.
Laura: Yeah. And the other bit I quickly liked was not feeling the need to always label your in game stuff with like, in universe icons.
Sometimes the best thing to do is just show the player the button they need to press.
You know, let players go in and like have in universe icons if they want to turn those on, but like, sometimes forget about immersion, make the default just be, this is the button that does the thing.
Arevya: Yeah,they also, he also talked about that, When it comes to side things, like side things you can use the force on, they do not show the button.
I wish here there was a possibility to turn that on so you could get like, like, full immersion, less immersion, moderate immersion, and like just full tell me everything, because I have known that feeling before where I like, I forget again what I’m supposed to use, but then this is not the main story and the game doesn’t tell me and I’m just like, I get frustrated and then I got like, but why didn’t you tell me now?
And then I think it’s a bug and then that annoys me because I don’t as a player understand that this isn’t important because for me as a player it is important.
But it is, as I’ve also said before there are different ways of approaching accessibility and sometimes you have to pull a line and that’s the line they have decided to pull and that’s okay.
I think also it was cool to see that they do something called double reminders.
So, yeah, the menu buttons is also as a button prompt on the side. So both like to accept if you’re in a menu and imagine your menu is like on the left of the screen and the button prompts are on the right. There still are menu buttons like telling you how to accept or deny on the button.
When you roll down, if I explain that really well. Okay. Yeah, I think that was really, really cool.
And also that like, if you have a list over places in like navigation in your map, you will also get that name you’re trying to look for on the map.
So they sort of make sure with like no matter where you look, you will find information and they call that banner blindness, which is from web again, where part of the screen, you just blind out because, and I feel like this is common.
If you go into any pages that has a newspaper web page, there is always like a banner on top with just commercials and ads and people just don’t look at it. It just isn’t part of it.
So if any important information is conveyed to you there you will just not see it because your eyes just “nope, this is not for me”, and I think that was cool.
And I think it’s important to remember that you don’t know where people will look when they look at your game.
Laura: Yeah, and I think that pairs nicely with some of the other stuff that was talked about in here, of things like making sure that you have, like, multiple, I think he talked, he called it redundant pathways to get to various places in your menu.
So things like, hey, if you want to open the menu and then close the start menu, you could press the start button twice, like once to open it, once to close it.
Or you could press start to open it, but then B to close it, and both would do the same thing.
Having multiple ways in your menus to, like, navigate to the map, there’s multiple ways to get to it.
And then that sort of paired up with him talking about, like, duplicating information in multiple places so that if, you know, for example, you’re looking for a, for, for turning your subtitles on, they might appear in the sound settings, but also in the accessibility settings, so that wherever feels natural for a player to look for those settings, they’re going to find them rather than going, they’re not here, I’ll try the next place they might be.
And the last one I thought was really neat, because not enough games think about this, is working out ways to avoid zero inbox stress.
Arevya: Oh, yes.
Laura: Of, there’s a little glowing dot that says I have unread things and it’s gotten, it’s been there too long and I’m now too stressed to open it at all.
And instead of having these constant dots everywhere to tell you there’s unread things, there is just, Hey, here’s an unread category.
And anything you haven’t read will be in here, but it’s not flashing a little light at you to stress you out.
And like you can just go find things in their own menus.
Or you can look at what haven’t I read?
I was like, Oh, yeah.
Arevya: He also said that they got like removed after some time and what they found that people just don’t miss them.
Because if they actually are looking for something, they’re willing to go looking for it.
And I think also, what was that I was thinking about?
Yeah, he also talked about, that was really cool, that in a way where when they have map puzzles, like, or puzzles that are in a confined space, and they don’t want to show the end of, like, where you want to go figure it out on a map, they, marked the end.
So at least people who have some cognitive problems at least know where the end is. This is where you’re supposed to go.
But that also turned out to help people who is just completionists because they marked that on the map. They were just like, yeah, show me the end, and then I will not go there. I will go everywhere else.
I thought it was funny showing like the curb, a cut curb effect with accessibility.
Laura: Exactly. So the next panel, I don’t think we’re going to talk about a lot because I think if you are interested in it, you’re better off watching it than listening to our trying to summarize it.
The next panel was called #OpenForNaughtyDog: Brandon Cole’s Enduring Legacy.
It is a panel that was hosted by Ross Miner Carlos Vasquez, who was a consultant on Mortal Combat 1, Mike Fair, who was editor of Odyssey Magazine, which was an accessibility magazine for blind gamers back in the day, and Shailen Baker, who is a streamer, talking about their experiences personally with Brandon Cole over the years and his impact on the industry, but his impact on them personally as well, and it is a really lovely talk.
It is a lot emotionally.
I think the one thing I would take out of it that I think is a, a neat anecdote that isn’t stepping on the toes of reiterating people’s own experiences is that Brandon Cole’s work on The Last of Us Part II came around as a result of Naughty Dog did a GA Conf panel saying they wanted their future games to be more accessible to blind players.
Brandon had a talk later that day and said he was open to helping them, and by the end of that GA Conf day, someone from Naughty Dog was like, yeah, can I get, can I get Brandon’s contact info?
And that’s how The Last of Us Part II’s blind accessibility happened.
Yeah, it’s a lot emotionally to return to Brandon’s passing, but this panel has a lot of folks who were, like, particularly impacted by his work and his passing, and it is a good talk if you are, if you’ve got the energy for it.
Then we had More Than a Saving Throw by Steve Saylor: How Dungeons and Disableds shows the strength of adaptability.
Did you have any thoughts on this one?
Arevya: Not that, not much. It is about tabletop games and Dungeons and Dragons, which I don’t play, but I watched it. I was just like, it’s cool.
Anyways, it’s cool. And I think that the main thing I, took out of it other than, like, it is a cool project that they’re doing, is that their possibility to be disabled in their Dungeons Dragons, they don’t have to, but they can, so they can decide themselves. But it also shows that they don’t always need to be evil.
Disabled people doesn’t always need to be evil, but they can be.
And I think that is a cool thing because, like a big problem I want to say with like Disney is that every evil Disney character has a trait like they’re disabled or overweight or old and it’s sort of like petrols this vision about disability being inherently evil or that makes you less of a person and I think that is bad and I’m really really glad to see a gang taking on that and say like no I want to take that power back and like I can decide if I want to be evil or not.
Sometimes I want to because that’s I’m being a human and sometimes it’s fun to be evil when you play a game. And yeah, so I think that was cool.
Laura: Yeah. My big takeaways. I agree. It’s, it’s always nice to have… just because you’re on a, a show specifically about disabled people playing D& D, you don’t have to play a disabled character if you don’t want to.
That’s, that’s within player control.
I also like Steve’s approach of… Dungeons Dragons has a mechanic where if you are untrained in doing something, you get disadvantage, meaning that you roll the dice twice, take the worst number.
And he talks about, like, don’t give disabled characters inherent disadvantage you know, generally speaking, treat it like a character who is disabled would know how to work around their limits, unless a pre decided custom disability mechanic has been agreed between the player and the DM.
Yeah. And this reminded me of the one time that I have played a disabled character in D& D with mechanics involved.
I did a campaign with my wife a few years back called Polyarmory, about a polyamorous group of people working in an armory.
And I played a character who was autistic, and we found a resource, I believe on Tumblr, that was an autism sensory overwhelm table where when certain stressful things happened within a mission I would go down this table and mechanics would start happening.
I would start taking certain disadvantages based on how stressful the situations my character had been in were.
And that was a really interesting thing to explore on my terms with a DM who I talked through the mechanics with in advance and like what my comfort level and limits with that were.
And it’s nice to hear another DM talk about like that kind of healthy approach to having a player who wants to explore disability mechanically.
Arevya: A hundred percent.
Laura: The next one is another one of the ones that I saw in in Brighton at Develop this year was Skilltree Unlocked: From Consultant to In House by Stacey Jenkins from Ubisoft.
This one, I talked about this one when I saw it at Develop, but I found this talk really practically useful in terms of being someone who does freelance consulting now who would love to someday work in house.
I don’t know what you thought of this one?
Arevya: It was good. I think that one of the things that like, I really, really went like, yeah, yes. That was when she said that soft skills aren’t taught and I am just like, yes, because that is something that annoys me.
And I spend a lot of times every single work I have to have to send messages around to people going like, I don’t know if I am correctly assessing this.
Because I cannot trust my own soft skills due to the disabilities I have.
And that’s annoying.
Laura: Yes. As, as someone who is, as someone who is autistic, hearing that 85 percent of career success comes from soft skills, a bit, a bit intimidating to hear, you know, but there was some good, some good practical advice in there.
I think stuff like there is no shortcut to building trust with people in a team.
You have to be resilient when you hit barriers over time.
There is some good tips in there, and it is, if nothing else, it is important to know the skills that are important to practice, even if it is a bit scary to hear that the things you’re specifically, kind of, have difficulty with are the things that you need to be better at, but It’s better to know that than to not.
Arevya: And even though soft skills aren’t taught, like taught, in a lot of companies, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn it. That is not the same thing.
You can learn soft skills, but then maybe you can go somewhere else or to learn these kind of things.
And Stacey had a lot of good points on the list of, like, what was things to learn.
Like it’s okay to see, say you need to think about it.
And like you said, building trust and making things as easily digestible as possible and stuff like that.
So if you want to learn a bit more, it’s a good It’s a good take. It’s a good talk.
Laura: Yeah. A couple of other ones we can, we can quickly skim through.
Hell Welcomes All is a short documentary about designing accessibility for Diablo 4. Specifically designing blind sightless blind and low vision player accessibility support.
Go watch it, it’s worth watching, it’s like 15 minutes long.
How to Line Break Subtitles was a talk given by Ian Hamilton, and I can, I can tell you this talk because it’s a list of bullet points that are very quickly tellable.
No more than 40 characters per line
No more than two lines per caption.
Full stops end captions.
Avoid extreme variation in line length.
Match lines to linguistic units, so when there’s a natural pause in, in the sentence, that’s a good place to do a pause in the caption.
And ensure that lines are as even in length as possible.
Start by prioritizing the top of the list and work down.
Arevya: Yep. And I think that was really, really a good thing there was that subtitles are translating speech, captions cover sounds as well.
So either you do subtitles or you do captions, but they have the same rules.
Same rules apply.
Laura: Another one that we can probably do pretty quickly Accessible Gadgets for Gamers: Evaluating and Applying Video Game Accessibility in Therapeutic Settings by Eric Johnson.
I mean, my main takeaways from this were there are some unique barriers to helping people in medical settings, things like hospital regulations, policy, and, and sort of bureaucratic red tape, meaning that you might not be able to help someone fast enough before they’re no longer in that medical setting.
And there’s not enough specialists available to do the work at speed to get people the help they need while they’re still in the hospital sometimes.
And there was a nice point made of like, a good place to think about accessibility from sometimes is focusing on what a disabled player can do, rather than what they can’t as a place to design their adaptations from.
I didn’t really have anything else on that. Those were my big takeaways
Arevya: The only thing I want to point out is that he has made a web page called Rehab Arcade.
Which is for medical professionals.
It’s just, it’s both with sources, which I really, really enjoyed.
But it’s also a way to evaluate a person that wants to start doing accessible gaming.
So and you can of course use that on yourself as well, like, and it goes really systematically through the body of the person and go like, what can you actually use?
It’s not about what you can’t use, it’s what you can use. Where do you have the possibilities? And then it tells you where you can look for more information.
And it’s evidence based, which I think is really, really cool.
Yeah, take a look at that if you want more of the hardware side of things and need some more help.
Laura: Yeah. And then the final one of GA Conf this USA this year was Caitlin Jones from Xbox talking about developing the latest hardware accessibility offerings at Xbox.
And it was just a nice recap on like what Xbox is up to hardware accessibility wise.
The Xbox Adaptive Controller each USB port now supports up to 12 buttons a hat switch or two sticks, which is really nice.
You can toggle button holds, like you can on the PlayStation access controller.
You can now press a button and it, turns on a button hold, press it again, it turns off the hold.
My only point about this, it’s available for the Xbox Adaptive Controller and the Xbox Elite controllers, why is it not available for the basic controller?
Arevya: Yeah, I, I, this is where I’m, I’m starting to think, is there something just we as a, as the community just doesn’t know about how things are made, that they can’t talk about.
Because there have been so many updates for the Elite and the Xbox Adaptive Controller, that the regular controller is missing, that I feel like it’s a pattern now, and then I’m just so curious for why.
Laura: I don’t, I don’t think there is, because I’ve seen people who’ve made mods on PC to make their controller be able to do toggle to hold on basic controllers.
It, I hope that there is a reason, because from the outside it really looks like both Xbox and PlayStation have decided that toggle to hold is a feature that you get if you buy an accessibility controller, not a feature that you’re offered if you, you know, need accessibility, but a standard controller is better for you.
And that’s a weird distinction, if that’s the case.
Arevya: Yeah, but I’m also wondering if it can be lawyerhood, or managementhood, that it has nothing to do with the hardware, and the people, and the developer, and the software, but it’s like higher up, and that is why they can’t talk about it.
Laura: I’ll, I’ll say this.
It reminds me of the fact that, like, on PlayStation, if you buy a PlayStation Access controller, it comes with accessible stickers to make it easier to open the box, but that doesn’t happen if you buy a DualSense controller.
You don’t get those same accessible stickers. Same for packaging.
There are accessible packaging considerations for, like accessible controllers that aren’t on their consoles.
And it really feels like the industry does have a, we do these things for the accessible focus device, but we don’t do it for the average user, when you could do it for the average user for the non-accessibility focus use case.
And I want to, like, I don’t want to give them too much of a pass here. I want to say, is there a reason you can’t do this on a standard controller?
Because if not, it feels like you just haven’t thought about people who use a standard controller who also need that accessibility feature.
Arevya: Yeah, that’s a fair game.
The joystick. I think that was really, really cool. We got to, like, we know now it will cost 29. 99.
We know why it only is connected with wire, which was something I questioned.
And it is just cost. It’s cost and it’s weight.
Because if they add Bluetooth, the cost skyrockets, the weight skyrockets, the weight skyrockets. And I think that is a good answer. I’m okay with that one.
And, uh, Caitlyn talked about how it was important for them to make it look like a gaming device, not a medical device, which is something I absolutely love, and it can be used with both hands.
Laura: Yep a couple of other things for the Xbox Adaptive Controller you can now use you can map a hat switch to act, to act like a stick, you can use two flight sticks to be your dual analogue inputs, you can map thumbstick cardinal directions to be buttons, so like, up on the analog stick is an A button, for example.
You can map a joystick or a thumbstick to emulate a mouse now.
I also like them talking about the adaptive thumbstick toppers that you can go on Xbox’s website and like, select from six basic shapes select sizes and see sort of an image render of what it’ll look like.
And then they produce a 3D printer file that you can take somewhere else to get 3D printed.
And I think that’s really cool.
Arevya: It’s really cool. I wish also… I can understand it’s not possible, but I wish in the future they could actually send this to you because not like I, I understand, and I think it’s cool, and I, I, but at the same time, that is a big barrier. Like, I have no way to access a 3D printer.
There is some libraries, but they are often used and like, you, there is so many barriers until being able to do it.
I’m not saying this is not good, because I think it’s really, really cool. And I thought like the presentation, like you can see, and you can actually make a proper design for you. And it’s free.
It’s massively cool.
But I wish they would take it one step further. Let us be willing to pay for it and you can get it sent.
Laura: Yeah, I don’t mind them making a little bit of profit on it if there is the option of convenience if they do the printing and just send it.
Arevya: Yes, yes. That is just like as an option.
Because the barrier is for me to go out to get like in contact with the library to do all their like, because some of them have like you need to be part of a class, like you can’t just use the 3D Maker, you actually need, need to go through a course on how to use it, it’s just a small one, but it’s still there, and then that barrier for me is too much, so, yeah, I wish I just, you know, could pay them to send it.
Yeah.
Laura: But yeah, that is this year’s GA Conf USA wrap up. Only like a month late, but we got there.
Arevya: We got there.
Laura: Even if we had to do it over two sessions.
Arevya: We got there.
Laura: Well, look, look at that. Hey, if any of this sounded interesting to you, there’s two days of live streams. You can go get a whole bunch more, like, first hand, in depth versions of all these talks.
There is two eight hour long live streams that you can go dig through.
And all the stuff is in the order we talked about it today, so you should be able to scroll through and find the thing you’re looking for.
Arevya: And also, just quick, because I have gotten a lot of questions when I said that I was watching them, and people were like, where are you watching them?
I can’t see them, they are out.
When you go into their YouTube channel, you have like the normal setup of like just what is for you and then you have videos and then you have playlists and then there is a bracket called live.
You need to go into that one because it’s a previous live recordings. You need to go into that one.
I think that they will add up and like give us actually the talks later on as actual like videos. But if you want to watch the live now, you have to go in there.
It will not be in the video folder. It will not be, you can’t sort it out.
Laura: Yeah. You’ve just got to skim through live to see the live stream.
Lovely. Well, in that case, should we wrap up for this week?
Arevya, where can people find you on the internet?
Arevya: They can find me under Arevya wherever, except for TikTok because somebody stole my name there. I am ArevyaGaming and Laura, where can they find you?
Laura: People can find me at LauraKBuzz pretty much everywhere on the internet.
Arevya: Yay!
Laura: Thank you so much, everyone, for watching. We’ll be back soon.
We’ve not discussed what our plans are over the winter period, but we’ll be back soon.
You’ll hear from us soon.
Thank you very much, everyone.
Both: Goodbye!
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