Abletop – Episode 3 – Visual Board Game Accessibility

Quick Points

🔤 Use a clear sans serif font and avoid all caps, underlines and italics.
📝 Use good text formatting, like left-aligned paragraphs, good spacing, and line breaks.
🅰️ Highlight keywords using bold and/or a different high contrast colour.
⬆️ Indicate orientation for numbers and text, considering table layout and where people will be trying to read from.
🔍 Check symbols for readability and similarity at all angles, especially on dice.
🗑️ Favour skeuomorphic icons to boost comprehension and understanding.
⭐ Consider using iconography in place of text to reduce reading, make components more language-agnostic and reduce localisation.
🌍 Check regional meanings for your icons and colours to ensure they translate accurately across locations.
↕️ Print text and icons at the largest size possible, even consider using a bigger font for components with less text.
📕 Move flavour text to the rules or another booklet to save space on components.
🍎 Function over flavour always! If something helps someone to play the game more easily it should take priority over flavour text.
📱 Use QR codes on components to link to an app/webpage to work towards assisted tabletop gaming.
📄 Provide larger print versions of your game or components, for free or as upgrades / editions.
♟️Differentiate components of different types through shape and size so they can be distinguished through touch.
🦯 Consider additional tactile elements like bumps, pips, embossing/debossing.
🔄️ Make use of the reverse side of components where art would be duplicated or left blank.
👁️‍🗨️ If your game has an open state of play, consider how it could be played through just descriptions and how you can facilitate that.
🖨️ Make and provide 3D print files for tactile components.
🏁 Use a contract checker, but keep in mind digital versus printed contrast is different! Print is usually always darker. Use pantones and prototypes to check.
🧙‍♂️ Provide clear differentiation for miniatures, like coloured rings or 3D flat icons on the bases which can be easily painted for quick recognition.
🎨 Don’t use colour alone to differentiate pieces or information (use pattern, icon, text, numbers, clearly distinct art/borders) or make components colour-agnostic.
👁️ Make sure any dual-coding is large and clear.
🎲 Consider different transparencies or pip shapes for dice of different types.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

01:08 – Text Clarity

11:01 – Iconography

20:06 – Large Print & QR Codes

28:19 – Braille & Tactile Components

36:52 – Contrast

42:31 – Colourblindness & Dual Coding

48:48 – Visual Overwhelm

52:21 – Outro

Transcript

Laura:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Abletop, a series of videos where myself, Laura Kate Dale, and my lovely co-host, Cari Watterton, talk about board game accessibility. This is the third video in a six part series. And today we are going to be talking about visual accessibility in board games. So that text clarity, iconography, colourblind considerations, things like tactile gaming, all that sort of stuff for people who might have various kinds of visual disabilities. Where do we want to start today? Talking about this?

Cari:

Shall we start with text clarity and then we can work into the more colours and icons later?

Laura:

I think text clarity is a really easy one to start with. A lot of, there’s a lot of very established standards we can talk about here.

Cari:

Absolutely. I think like my the big thing for me is like looking at dyslexia-friendly style guides. The one by the British Dyslexia Association is my favourite because it not just goes into- doesn’t just go into fonts- it goes into formatting as well and layouts. Which I think is something that’s incredibly important looking at not just what fonts are you using, but how are you laying out on the page and are you doing it in a way that’s going to be accessible because it doesn’t matter if you use the most accessible font in the world, if it is tiny or the spacing is terrible or it’s a colour that you can’t read, then it’s not going to help.

Laura:

Yeah, so fonts is like where a lot of these conversations start and in a lot of cases it’s as far as people think. And I think it is worth talking about dyslexia fonts, because I think there’s a couple of pitfalls that people fall into in that have a cursory knowledge of the subject. So. Let’s, let’s start with this one maybe. There is no one dyslexia friendly font that is going to work for everyone. And there is- there is a lot more complexity to the conversation of dyslexia friendly fonts than: use this one, this one will solve all your problems. In video games where you can have multiple fonts available to people, we’ve sort of gotten that industry as far as like a lot of people are offering open dyslexic, which is a contentious font in that there are some people who have dyslexia who use this open source font and look at it and go, Oh, that’s fantastic. I find it so much easier to read. There are other dyslexic people who look at it and go, Really cannot do that. Something about it just is jamming up my brain even more than the standard text. And I think like the thing that’s important to think about is like there are various approaches outside of like, fonts that are designed to be deliberately dyslexia-friendly, that can sort of be part of how you think about dyslexia fonts. A good part of that is some people who are dyslexic find very standard fonts that they have seen in lots of places like Times New Roman – counterintuitively – find them the easiest to read with dyslexia because they are the folks that they encounter most frequently out in the real world. Sometimes the best thing to do is to just use simple sans serif fonts. Like, I know it gets mocked online, but Comic Sans is a font that, like a lot of dyslexic people find a lot easier to read. None of these answers is going to be a 100% perfect font choice for everyone, but I think it’s worth looking at the arguments for each of these and being aware of the pros and cons when making your font choices. The big thing being don’t use a weird custom font that’s style over substance and that people have never encountered before. That is going to be your worst case scenario.

Cari:

Absolutely. I think like 100% everything you’ve just said there. There’s a really interesting correlation in like research where like the fonts that were standard in like Microsoft Word documents across the ages become more and more like recognisable because like now it’s I’m going to mispronounce it, but Calibri, whereas before it was Arial, so like there’s correlation there between thing that you’re seeing most often like you’re saying I think some things as well in terms of like the styles of fonts, you can have decorative fonts, that’s okay. Like for headings and things like that. And there’s things like you should avoid all caps in like sentences and paragraphs. The reason being is because the characters are all the same height you’re not using like the descender or like having the smaller characters, like the O’s and A’s, like, have not have the ascender. So it makes it harder to tell those characters apart in an all caps thing. So I tend to suggest that we try to avoid all caps as much as possible, but headings is where you’re going to be able to get away with things like that in the most thematic way when it comes to like core rulebook text, like keeping the formatting simple, keeping a nice font, the is trying to avoid things like italics as well. Italics and underlines big things for me where I’m like, don’t use that. Use bold. If there’s other things you can do, like a colour that still maintains good contrast, then you can use that as a secondary way to highlight it. And yeah, I think things like that. I was- there, there was something else that’s completely gone out of my mind. But yeah, I agree with you. I think a sans-serif font – clear sans-serif font – is a good place to start. There are ways you can make your online PDFs have different layers of visibility, and if that’s something that you do want to go down, you can have like a version where you can toggle on something like open dyslexic because as we say, some people find it really, really useful. And I’ve met people on both ends of the spectrum of like, this is terrible. I can’t read this.

Laura:

I’m on the side that finds it really helpful, which is really frustrating when I want to use it for projects and I know that there’s a portion of the same community who are going to find it really unhelpful. But you get to your point of PDFs, like, I think that’s a really easy thing to offer where you could go like, look: If the font that we have chosen in the printed rulebook is unhelpful for you, go on our website. You can find it in like three different other fonts that you can print out yourself to have a version you’re going to find easier to read and reference. Something like that could go a long way to giving people the flexibility to do what’s going to be easiest for them to mentally pass.

Cari:

Absolutely. I’ll talk about one last bit of text formatting that I really enjoy and fascinates me, which is left aligning paragraphs. Loads of people like to do the justified paragraphs. And the reason that that can be sometimes tricky is because it’s inconsistent spacing between the words. So the left align paragraph, not only have you got consistent spacing between the words, but your eyes also are returning to the same starting point. Like I’ve seen some people right align paragraphs before and I’m like, This is horrible, please don’t do this. But yeah, so that’s one of the things as well. People will say, Oh, we should be left aligning this and they always ask why. So that’s a couple of the reasons why it could be helpful. But yes.

Laura:

But as you say, like font isn’t like the beginning and end of those kind of things, like are you making sure that that font is high contrast that it is large enough that it is like consistently applied, making sure that like you have frequent paragraph breaks so that you have places for someone to finish internalising what they’ve just read before feeling like they need to move straight on. Like paragraph breaks can be really helpful for not just making a person zone out and completely not internalise what they’re reading that like all of these things do ultimately go into the readability of text for people who might struggle to take in written word.

Cari:

Absolutely. And I think just a little note in terms of like those larger paragraphs, if there’s something in there that’s like important. Again, we’re talking about like the keyword highlighting something that I’ve thought about before is like prewritten tabletop RPG adventures. If you’ve got like a big paragraph of, like, this is what’s going on in, on, in the room and like, these are the things that are happening and then you’ve got like a skill check in the middle of it that you’re asking for people to do if you’re not able to like have a break in that paragraph or a way to like, call that out more effectively, looking at how you can highlight that within that paragraph. So someone reading through and delivering it can quickly pick out that information. So that also helps to break up those larger paragraphs too. Shall we chat a little bit about number orientation?

Laura:

Yeah, do you want to you want to jump in on this?

Cari:

Yes. So when I think of number orientation, one of the things that I think about the most is like a six and a nine, both being the same thing but reversed. And there’s a couple of different ways that you can like show that orientation in terms of like I’ve seen that would be like a full stop or a period after the number or like an underlying on them and things like that. And yeah, I think that’s something that should be considered in games as well, not just with numbers, but with any other characters that might be like slightly less distinguishable from each other. So if we’re thinking about like I depending on the font, like a U and an N and stuff like that, looking at like: are there characters that when I look at this from a different angle, it’s going to be hard to tell them apart? And so is there something I can do there in terms of indicating what way it should be?

Laura:

Yeah, I see a lot of this considered when you look at say something like a dice that like you are going to be rolling and inevitably you can’t predict its orientation. I don’t see it considered so much in say, text written onto the player board that is going to be viewed by some players from, you know, the correct way up, some players from the side, some players upside down. That ability to read your text upside down is going to struggle when certain characters look like all the characters went upside down or went sideways. And those same considerations of having like an underline or a dot aren’t usually put on to on the boards as you say, because like, they’re like, Oh, that’s a static orientation. Surely that will be obvious.

Cari:

Yeah, exactly. But you don’t know what anybody’s table is like. They might have like a super long bench as well. So you might be like looking in the same angle as other people. It might be a round table. I’ve played board games on a massive roundtable before where no one could reach the middle. It was it was a thing that existed, those kind of things. But yeah, I totally agree actually on the on you talking about like viewing things from different orientations.

This might be a nice segway into a little bit of the iconography stuff. So one of the things that I was thinking about was the difference between skeuomorphic icons versus abstract icons. Skeuomorphism is a thing, it’s in user experience design, but it’s the idea of making something that is representative of like the real world. So it reduces the learning barrier for someone. So for example, on your desktop, your trash can that you have on your desktop looks like a bin because it’s recognisable versus something like an abstract set of icons. And I think one of the examples I was thinking about with this was Calico and Sea Salt and Paper have different ways of showing colours through icons. Calico uses more skeuomorphic icons where they’ve got like a flower for pink and they’ve got a blueberry for blue and things like that. And then Sea Salt and Paper is using something called the colour alphabet, which is really, really cool. It’s a nice sort of resource. You can go and look it up online and it’s meant to be this very approachable, very easy to read language set, but some of those, when viewed upside down, look similar or the same to other ones. So like if you’re considering using abstract icons or you’re considering using that, making sure that there’s something in terms of the orientation of the cards or components that you’re putting on it to make sure that those are readable as well.

Laura:

Definitely, iconography is a really interesting one to start digging into for accessibility, because one thing that I think a lot about with iconography is how easily and quickly and clearly can you explain a shape to someone else at the table and not have it mistaken for a different shape you might be describing? It’s one of the things that comes up with games that have dice with like fictional runes on them as opposed to like, you know, the triangle has come up. I can instantly communicate a triangle to someone. I have language for that. This looks sort of like a U with a capital T in the middle and a line across the center of that. Maybe I could recognise that icon, but can I communicate it in a way where someone else is instantly going to go: I know what you’re describing. And that, I think, also ends up coming up in your sort of discussions of things like Skeuomorphic icons versus abstract icons, is can I instantly at any angle go as, as you say, that’s the blueberry like I recognize what shapes that is, versus, there is a un- like a not necessarily instantly available language I’m going to have to apply to describe this.

Cari:

It’s really interesting what you’re saying there about like the runes. In some games that I’ve made before, I really enjoy – or like escape rooms – I really enjoy those puzzles where you’ve got like the languages in two different places and you have to have the people communicate like and you end up with amazing, fantastic concoctions of like it looks like a guy with a hat, but also there’s something there.

Laura:

It’s like when that is the intended challenge and you know that that is deliberately going to be challenging. I think that’s great. I think of things like the video game, keep talking and nobody explodes, which has several games where like someone in the VR headset is seeing a symbol and trying to describe it to someone. Not in VR looking at the manual, but it’s one of those things. Don’t have that be a barrier in your game if it is not an intended barrier, they don’t accidentally fall into that being a barrier that players are going to be challenged by.

Cari:

Yeah, exactly. I think like so like one example was there are some of the dice faces on Dice Forge, which we talked about before, and one of them, they use a lot of a lot of really kind of complex icons for their faces. And most of them make sense once you start to learn the way that they’re like communicating. And then there’s this big one, which is just this big, like it looks like a blue wax seal with a question mark in the middle of it. And every single time I’m like, What does this mean? I need to go look this up, or they’ve got one; so it’s got like boars on it as in, like the animal, like a wild boar and stuff like that. And so having a reference there for what do these dice faces mean? Again, they can get quite complicated – go for it.

Laura:

Yeah. I think one place where that becomes really important is when we’re talking about things like colourblind accessibility. I know this is slightly jumping around, but you want your ideally I think you want your icons in your game to be so to be as identifiable as instantly as someone who has colour vision would recognise a colour on a die face. I think that level of I’m instantly picking- like I know which one that is without having to stop and think and cross reference makes for a much smoother gameplay flow experience. And the more that you require someone to like have to stop and internalise, what does this abstract thing mean? The more you are putting barriers into the smoothness of play.

Cari:

Absolutely. I’m a massive nerd on this front because my- one of my projects I did at uni was I made like a fictional board game and pieces for it. And one of the things I did was like creating icons for a dice that was supposed to be like a dice that had different bone symbols. And then I like had all of these sheets where I’d rotated all of the different icons to different angles. And I was like, Do any of these look like each other at different angles? But things like that, I think something I find quite interesting as well. I was thinking about Elder Sign and they’ve got sort of two versions of icons they’ve got on the cards themselves like a skull icon. It’s got quite a bit art around it, like a scroll that’s also like really coloured in. And then they’ve got the simplified versions of those icons that exist on the dice. One thing they have with orientation is they’ve got like little numbers as well. So it’s like, is it a one scroll or two scroll or something like that? But I found that was really interesting in terms of like they’ve got the correlation and they’ve got like a more artsy version over here and then they’ve got the simpler version over there, which again, we’re talking about being identifiable. You can be like scroll a magnifying glass skull. Yeah, go for it!

Laura:

Yeah, I think you’re absolutely nailing this. Um, yeah. Was there anything else we wanted to talk about on iconography when we were on it still?

Cari:

Oh, something I did want to talk about was the idea of universal components. Oh yes, yes. Yeah. And so with board games, if you got text on your board games, then one things that you will have to consider is localisation. Whereas if you have just icons on your components, then you don’t need the localisation because you’re not translating any text. So something like Fort, again, we’ve talked about that a couple of times, has a big card that gives you the overview of what all of the icons mean. And then it means that only really that card in the rules and the player boards need to go through localisation and translation. All the cards themselves are almost like language agnostic. And it’s not just about the localisation cost, but it’s also like if someone has a low reading level or if they’re not very confident reading and using the visual elements to be able to play the game. And you can see this again in something like Codenames Pictures. I love the way that Codenames have done different variations of their game and the picture one just opens it up because suddenly it’s much more visual and you’re not relying on someone reading and also understanding what the word means in like the standard version of Codenames.

Laura:

I will add one thing on this, which I think is an important consideration that I’ve seen a once or twice come up just unintentionally is you need to do a little bit of legwork to check that your iconography sometimes is universal in as much as making sure that the meaning of certain icons translates across locations it’s not a particularly common thing that’s going to come up. But for example, like the difference between like a thumbs up and how a thumbs up is perceived versus say, how using your index finger and thumb together to make a sort of okay symbol. Some of these are not as universal across regions in terms of their meaning, as you might imagine. And it is worth checking that that kind of iconography you’re using is consistent in its meaning and that that is still something visual that might need taking into account for localisation.

Cari:

Yeah, absolutely. I know my partner did as part of his uni course – he was working on something with Steam China and there were like interesting things there with, like the colour red and four-sided shapes and things like that. So yeah, have a look at sort of and making sure, as you say, that those things are going to be able to be translated universally.

Laura:

So yeah, yeah. Other stuff on, on visual, I think this is going to be one of the big, big things that everyone, you know, imagine we’re going to talk about when we talk about visual accessibility, print size, making sure that things in your board game are big enough that someone who might struggle with reading small things can instantly visually follow them. And like, there’s a couple of obvious ways this is comes into account. Icons. Are your icons big enough so that like you can make out small details? Because obviously if you’re trying to work out the difference between a circle and square, they’re fairly different. But if you’re looking at like a diamond versus a rhombus, maybe having that large is going to make it easier to pick those differences out.

Cari:

Absolutely. Something, poor Celestia, I feel bad, but in Celestia, the icons on its cards are another pet peeve for me in terms of they’re really small and some of them are really complicated, especially with the items that have like you’re going to be doing this to the dice and they’ve tried to communicate that in the icons. And they’re tiny on the card! And it’s really, really, really hard sometimes just to like, quickly understand which card it is that I have. And there’s so much space on this massive card. The only other thing that’s one is art. And I’m like, could they not have just made these a little bit bigger, please, so that I could more easily differentiate them?

Laura:

Yeah, yeah, agreed. Again, speaking of making proper use of the space on your cards available – make your text big! Increase the size of your text! The number of board games I’ve known where there is like a set size text box but no matter how much or little text they have, they’ll always use the same size. And I’m like, if you’ve got the ability, maybe increase the size. If there’s only if there’s less text on this one, just make it a little easier to read if you have the space to do so because text size is such a big factor to legibility.

Cari:

Yeah, it really is like if you have the space to even if it’s on only some of the components, like, like if you’re thinking about maybe right, you’ve got simpler cards earlier on the game that might have less text. Having those bigger is fine. Like you can have a little bit of inconsistency in the components for the sake of readability but yeah and like and one of the things I really liked about Wyrmspan, which I think we mentioned before, was the fact that they took the flavour off of the cards. And so that meant that they’ve got more space on there to have larger text explaining what the Dragons does. And you’ve got the flavour text in the massive big dragon book and it’s great because it reminds me those big dragonology books that I used to get when I was a kid that I was obsessed with, but so it’s great you’re not missing out on the flavour and is there is like that optional thing if you want it and you’ve still got the gorgeous art of the Dragon to kind of give you that experience as well. But it’s just little sacrifices for readability and usability over flavour I think is really important.

Laura:

Yeah, this is example that we’ve not got it written down on out list, but it’s one we talked about between recordings the other week. There’s a game recently me and my wife got called Daybreak – I think it’s called – that does something really interesting on its cards which is that every card has a QR code, nice small QR code that when you scan it will take you to. One of the things it does is it takes you to like some flavour for the card and how it works and some rulings information about it on the card. So that you can like, solve rulings problems. But I look at a solution like that and go something like that of just a QR code on your card. If you cannot accommodate full text size legibility, that’s like you scan the QR code and now the text is on someone’s phone so they can blow up the text size manually like, you know, to a size that that is legible for them. It’s not ideal, but I feel like that wouldn’t be the worst workaround in the world, is every card has a quick easy scannable that lets someone look at the text larger on their own device.

Cari:

Or even like screenreaders as well. Like I think that the QR code would have such a massive impact in terms of assisted tabletop gaming. I think like yeah everybody would like- it would be great to have cards that were Braille and that were tactile, but I think we’ll talk a little bit about this in terms of the practicality of that and the implications on like production costs, but something like QR codes that you can scan and again, companion apps that we kind of mentioned before that can help you to like this is what you’ve got in your hand. This is the stuff that you have in front of you and you can have you have one earbud in or you can have bone conductive headphones on. So you can still hear everybody at the table, but you’re getting that information so you can still engage in play. I think I was fascinated when you sent this to me. I was immediately obsessed because I’ve been trying to do something like this for a while and figure out how small can I get these QR codes? Like how?

Laura:

The answer is surprisingly small! The Daybreak ones are remarkably small. And they scan really well for something that small. You know, Daybreak’s not a perfect execution. I’d rather the rulings information they give you be above the flavour text. But you know, that’s a little quibble ultimately for what I think that sort of works as a proof of concept for. Also on print size, the alternative is just to have a larger version of your game that accounts for larger text size.

Cari:

Yes, absolutely. So like the example that I think of is we got the ticket to ride expansion and it has larger, larger tickets and larger trains on it. I think we kept the larger tickets because they helped me in terms of being able to see the board more clearly. But I gave the larger trains to my parents because they’re older than me and the smaller cards are sometimes a bit more difficult. So it’s like here you can have these and you can use these, but something like the tiny epic games, they as we said, they’re super compact, they are tiny and their cards can be really small and like that is obviously their USP, but like, yeah, it’s-.

Laura:

It is unfortunate because there are several of the tiny epic games where I’m like, this is lovely. I only ever play this at home. I would have paid for a larger version of this that was a little less fiddly because like the fact that it’s tiny isn’t always why I want to play it and I know that that’s suggesting printing an entire separate version of a game that that contradicts its own USP. I know, but there’s no reason your game has to be tiny. Is it possible to make a bigger version?

Cari:

Yeah. I think they’re really cute, for what it’s worth. And I do. I really do love and respect the fact that I can have, like, several of them taking up the same space on my shelf as, like, Calico or something.

Laura:

Oh, there are several that have stayed permanents in my collection. Like Tiny Epic Mechs, Tiny Epic Zombies we’ve had a lot of fun with, but they are tiny because the selling point is they’re tiny, not because that is necessarily the best gameplay experience they could have been.

Cari:

Yeah, I like the Tiny Epic Dinosaurs one was pretty good, so that’s been one of my favourite ones. And Tiny Epic Dungeons was fantastic. I loved seeing that. And I was actually quite surprised by the amount of table space that that one took up once you actually got everything out and like on to the table, like those games be small but mighty. But yes, if you have the luxury of like looking at, you know, if being tiny isn’t your USP, if you have the luxury of like a little extra in your production cost, can you go up a size in cards to be able to accommodate larger text size or larger icon size and things like that? Or can you do something like Ticket to Ride has done or Codenames has done with Codename XL, where you can have expansions or components that are more approachable for people who might need those larger components?

Laura:

Yeah. Is this a good time for us to talk about tactile gaming elements?

Cari:

Yeah, I think so, yeah. I think we touched a little bit on like, yeah, production costs and stuff.

Laura:

I’m curious to hear about this because you, you apparently have a little bit of insight on this one.

Cari:

Yes. So as a bit of background. My partner and I have been making board games since 2016, just as like our own little fun board games. But we did several times, tried to go down the route of like getting them published or getting them made. And what we discovered is that production costs in board games are ridiculous. Like, yes, they are.

Laura:

They are, they are.

Cari:

And like there’s a reason the board games are really expensive is because their production costs are so high. And it’s every little thing from like deciding like what kind of varnish you want to like, okay, is this size of- all the size- is this is going to fit in this size of box or do I need to go up a size of box? All that kind of stuff the production costs just kind of like increase quite a lot. So it’s very fascinating. But it does mean that so the RNIB store has a specific section for board games where they have lots of tactile things like Braille, Scrabble, a tactile version of Ludo – bless you! And it makes sense why there is like a bespoke, dedicated space in like RNIB or other like blind charities for providing those kind of tactile games. Because the practicality of like we’ve talked about dual-layer punch boards and let’s take Monopoly. You could do a dual-layer punchboard with a Monopoly board so that you’d be able to like, tell where all the different spaces were. But now you have potentially doubled the cost of producing the board because you’ve got two layers of punchboard as opposed to just one. So there’s a lot in terms of like, okay, how much can you do with what you have? Are there things that you can do? We’ve talked about using the reverse side of the Frosthaven cards for strategy cards. Are there other things that you can do with the reverse side of components to be able to increase their readability and things like that? So yeah, I think tactile gaming is fascinating and I really love a lot of the work that’s been put into it. Hand-to-Hand Wombat did a fantastic panel at GDC where they talked about how they made it so that it could be completely playable by the blind. And I played with Sightless Kombat before as well. So I know, I know it works. I know it can happen. And yeah, they did things like they had little raised dots on each of the pieces so that you can count how many they are and try and like stack the towers that way. But if your limit- there are limits in terms of the production stuff that you can do. And that’s probably why we don’t see a lot more tactile gaming accessibility in standard games.

Laura:

Yeah, there’s a lot of considerations for things like if your game is particularly text-heavy, Braille takes up a lot more space than written text usually does, and that sort of will necessitate increasing sizes of components. You have issues with if you’re using something like Braille as your main way of communicating information that is going to necessitate in a competitive game certain things being a little more obvious about what a Braille using player is planning to do. In fact, there’s a difference between using Monopoly as an example, as you brought up before, maybe glancing at the board to see what spaces you may be thinking of buying versus feeling the board and sort of assessing what you’re planning that way is going to have uneven amounts of information about player plans being communicated. You have things like unseen components and like the fact that if you are reaching into a bag to pull components out, someone who is feeling tactile components is going to have more information about what they’re pulling out potentially than someone who can’t. And none of these are reasons that you can’t do a tactile adaptation of a game, but these are things you have to consider about like would Braille be a good fit for the mechanics that are on show here, or is there better ways of making something adaptable such as we kind of brought it up a minute ago, like the idea of having QR codes on cards for assisting, like, as you say, having something like, you know, bone conductive earphones on so that like you could still hear the rest of the table, but no one can hear what you’re listening to. Scan a card, hear a text to speech narration of what that card’s information is, might be more practical than a larger redacted version of the card with Braille in certain circumstances.

Cari:

Yeah. So that it’s going to be a case of consideration. And there are places where you can look at your components and go, Is there something more I can do for tactility here? Like if you look at well, the, the Flamecraft food tokens, the deluxe edition tokens are all different shapes and it’s like, that’s fantastic by default, by design. They are different shapes and that’s something that’s quite can be quite easy to do with punch board tokens. If you’ve got different tokens, are they larger for like different currencies. Like if you’ve got like a one, a five and a ten or are they slightly different shapes for different types of resources. So there’s things there that you can do when you’re thinking about your production. Like you don’t have to just make all of your tokens like circles.

Laura:

And you can also, I think, think about design elements in terms of can you make your game inherently playable without the necessity of something like tactility for blind players, Like, for example, is your game perhaps a cooperative game with open hand information? I think of something like Kim Joy’s Magic Bakery, a game that is about making little recipes for animals the woods by picking up or trading with other players ingredients that you have and that you are cooperatively trying to collect the things you need to make these recipes. That is a game that you could theoretically play completely open ended share information between each other about like, okay, well you’ve currently got these. I’ve currently got these. Okay, okay. What’s currently out in the shop? Yeah, I’ll have one of those and have someone hand you a component based on that. There are, there are games that kind of lend themselves more to having a sightless player and a sighted player playing together. You can work around a lack of visibility and that’s not necessarily something that, like every board game is going to be able to inherently do. But it might be worth thinking, is my game close to being playable that way? And could I then make tweaks to get it to that point?

Cari:

Absolutely. I 100% agree with all of that. Like, as you say, an open state of play, like where you can have people that are all like able to communicate what’s going on. Like yeah. And then that does mean that there’s like less of a barrier in terms of like having to listen to something or having to feel specific components that hopefully as long as it’s done well, could still afford a player without, say, a lot of agency over like the actions that they’re taking. Yeah, absolutely.

Something else I would say quickly, just because it’s actually right in front of me, one of the things that you can do if you have a half an hour, I know how to Google Blender tutorials like I do, is you can also make little 3D printable things. So this is a tactile dice that I made.

Laura:

Oh, that’s a lovely!

Cari:

It’s very cute. I enjoy a lot. And I did a little Braille version as well. And so these are letterbox so that you can tell the orientation of the numbers. Oh! So yeah, don’t- and we won’t talk about balance, but no dice is 100% balanced anyway. But if there’s something where you think, actually I could make a resource like and make it freely available that someone can 3D print if they have the resources to, then that’s also a way to kind of consider making optional tactile versions of components for your players.

Laura:

Definitely. So yes, other visual elements to talk about contrast, this is, this is an important thing. This is something that we, we came up with. We had these discussions when sorting out the visual elements to this show and making sure that you have proper contrast ratios between the elements to make sure that things are clearly visible from each other.

Cari:

100%. It’s a little bit easier to do in video games because there’s a lot of really great tools for analysing colour contrast. One of the big things that will be of note in printed components is that printing is typically a lot darker than what shows up on your screen, so there needs to be if you have a whole bunch of like pantone swatches, you should be able to look at them in front of you and see, okay, is this red actually going to come out the way that it looks like it’s going to on the screen or come out as something slightly different. But this is also why prototyping your components is really helpful because, yeah, I’ve done it before. I’ve, I’ve especially one of the things I found and this is more of a decorative element when I’ve been making board games as I’ve done, like a repeating pattern for the back of a card and I’ve set something to a certain level of opacity because I think that that will be nice. And then it prints and then it’s actually way darker than I expected it to come out and it looks really bad. And then I need to like rejig that in the file. So yeah, thinking about how is this contrast going to go from being on these digital files to actually physical.

Laura:

You cannot assume that something that you checked with a digital contrast checker will still pass contrast standards once printed and you have to go out of your way to double check that that’s still the case.

Cari:

Absolutely. I think that the digital contrast checkers are a great way to do initial checks. And what I would do is I would like, instead of using the values that they recommend, I would bump those up a little bit. Yes. When you’re doing like when you’re checking your files that you’re going to print, that’s a good way that I’ve found to work around it.

Laura:

You give yourself some leeway.

Cari:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But yeah, I think we mentioned things like Sushi Roll / Go / Party. They all have like really big, nice, chunky, clear icons. Again, there’s another example of the way that they translate dice in sushi roll and the way they’re simplified there. And what’s interesting about those dice as well, if I remember correctly, because the dice are different colours, they use different inks for the different colours of dice to ensure that there is like better contrast. I might be lying about that. I will check that!

Laura:

Yeah, other areas where like contrast is important outside of say your card design and printing – so many games will have all of their miniatures be the same colour, be that all plain wood miniatures or plain grey plastic minis which can be really hard at a glance to distinguish from each other. And you know, there are workarounds for that. You’ve got games. I think Scythe is one of these where like your minis are metal and grey, but you can have coloured rings that you place around the base of them. So like okay, there’s at least a splash of colour to differentiate them at a glance. It’s not a perfect solution, but it at least gets something that’s a little less: ‘that grey versus that grey’ that I’m trying to distinguish. In a perfect world, if you’ve got the financial ability to do so in your production run printing things in different colours so that at a glance that’s not the same as that can go a long way.

Cari:

Yeah Absolutely. I found that the ink-washed minis have been really helpful actually. That’s kind of like an in-between step of taking something that’s completely just a plastic grey. And instead of it being colour, the ink washed ones make the darker areas one more darker and helps the contrast pop. And that has helped me visually to be like those are definitely different things, but I have sort of like a better level of vision than some other players do. Colour rings, as you say, are not a perfect solution, but I think also a lot of the minis that you see have like flat plain bases that they’re standing on. Yeah, I think that you could do something on those bases as some kind of like again, a tactile thing, like whether it’s a tactile icon or something that could help distinguish it. And also what they could then do for other people, say, for example, you’ve got here’s your set of these fraction of minis and they’ve got like a triangle on their bases, like between their feet. And this faction has a star between their bases. Now if someone wants that distinction, instead of having to paint the whole mini, they can just paint those icons like even just painting those like white so that there’s greater contrast between the base and the face of the icon. It can really that can be like a much more approachable way. Because I know we’ve got Monumental, which is a great game with amazing miniatures that I’ve been desperate to paint but is overwhelming the amount of them that are there. And in terms of just like if there was something quick that I could do as a player, if I know my friends are coming round who are colourblind and we want might want some more assistance rather than just the coloured rings providing something like that, like a three dimensional icon to be able to get an approachable level of making this different.

Laura:

Yeah, I really, I really like that as an idea actually. I think that’s a great, great point.

So yeah, last few things to talk about in terms of visual stuff this week. We talked a couple of places here and there about colourblind accessibility. One of the most important things when considering trying to make your game accessible for any kind of vision issues, being low vision, colourblind, etc., is double coding your information, making sure that information is conveyed in more than one way. The obvious version of this you see a lot in colourblind considerations is: don’t just communicate information via colour maybe like, Oh, I’ve got to- What’s the example I’m thinking of? The video game Among Us has a wire cutting mini game where the wires are coloured, but they’re also different patterns along them so that if you can’t see the colour, you can go, Oh, it’s the polka dot wire, it’s the diagonal forward slash wire, making sure that you have like a at least a second way that you are conveying information that will help identify what’s what.

Cari:

Yeah, absolutely. And this can go as far as like I’ve seen things in board games where it’s like the red cards and the blue cards and the green cards and it’s like, is there something else that you can do on these other than just those colours, whether it’s if you have a piece of art, is there something you can do behind that? Art is the background to be like, you know, the green one has leaves or something. Again, it can be abstract, it can be skeuomorphic, it can be whatever. But dual-coding, as you say, yes, it should be something that you’re thinking about. And try and do it as something that is bigger and obvious. Namiji is a really great game. I love it. And they’ve got some colourblind accommodations in there in terms of they’ve got different fish and they have little icons on them. The icons are teeny, teeny tiny. And so I would love it if there was a more obvious sort of dual-coding element to that.

Laura:

Yeah, that’s, that’s the thing is like dual-coding is great, but it can’t be a just barely there elements it has to be as again I said this earlier, it needs to be as obvious as if I was to look at a card and go: Yeah, I instantly know what colour that is. It needs to be a very you glance at it and you can tell. But the second way that information is coded just as easily I think is important.

Cari:

Absolutely. Looking at- there’s a really interesting article that was on the differences between like Wingspan and Wyrmspan. And in Wingspan you’ve got the different power colours. So you’ve got like pink and blue and brown. And then in Wyrmspan they made icons instead for like, this is what happens when your little adventure man goes over it, or this is what happens when this card is played and they’re using those icons. They actually removed the colour from there. So they’ve just used that as a kind of direct replacement. But it’s something that dual-coding is so easy to do if you think about it at the very beginning. If you don’t think about it and you leave it to the end, you end up with having to slap things on that maybe don’t make sense and can’t be as naturally incorporated. But there are some really good examples of just like nice native dual-coding.

Laura:

Yeah, examples I like. We talked about this game the other week. Canvas that game about you’re trying to match colours but also shapes and patterns and things to win various awards. All of the things there are communicated by like sure, that’s the red space, but it’s also got a different kind of outline on it and it’s always in this position. So you know where it is and it’s got this of pattern on it. Okay, well now we’re trying to work out circles or squares. And everything in it has distinct iconography, but consistent rules that can be used to take a game that is like on its surface very much about colours and make it completely devoid from actually needing to know what the colours are.

Cari:

Yeah, 100%! Canvas is a fantastic example because like you at the bottom of the card, you’ve got those five swatches and they’re always in the same order. And so it’s really, really easy. The other thing that I love about Canvas is that there are little ribbons. All are different shapes. So again, it’s another tactile component where it’s different shapes as well as like the red ribbon, the purple ribbon, the blue ribbon. Yeah. So yeah, I think it’s for a game that is about art. It’s really, really well considered for it, like, being able to be colour-agnostic.

Laura:

Yeah.

Cari:

I love that. Yeah. Something that I did want to talk about a little bit. And we’ve touched on this in previous episodes about how board games are made up of intentional barriers, or sometimes there’s something that you just can’t do about. So. Sagrada. I love Sagrada, its one of my favourite games, but there is no dual-coding for the colour-matching aspect of it because it’s all about rolling the dice and then putting the right colour of dice into the right places. They can’t be adjacent and all this sort of thing. And I did. I was a terrible human being and I did get my very colourblind friend to play it with us and it was a sad time, but and like, there are solutions for it that I can think of. Like, okay, some people might think about like what- you can do different opacities of dice. If you want to do different colours, you can look at different opacities as well. But with Sagrada, part of the theming of this game is you’re building a stained glass window. So those dice need to have that level of transparency in order to fit that theme. And I think that that’s okay. The only other way that I can try and think of making those dice dual-coded is by changing the pip shapes. So some are circles. Some are square. Some are triangles. But again, that falls into like a massive production uptick in terms of having to have now bespoke dice for different parts. So I think like it is something you’re going to run into where this isn’t accessible and you know that it’s not accessible. But as long as you’re transparent about like this is something that that wasn’t able to be done, it’s more about communicating those both intended and unintended barriers and just be like, we did think about this. We have considered this.

Laura:

Yeah, there’s an example on our list for this week that I think is a really good example of like a game I love that is deliberately about being visually kind of inaccessible. Micro Macro Crime City is a game that is basically just a where’s Wally style map with like hundreds of people running around the city. But you’re trying to solve these crimes by like finding a person and then finding them somewhere else along their journey and finding like, trying to track them through this very dense city of very small figures that you’re looking for. Minute details to recognise that’s the same person you saw earlier and follow them around this map. It is a game entirely about very little details and very small details and throwing huge amounts of visual stuff at you to sort through and process that is a game that would not work if it was not visually overwhelming and made up of lots of tiny, very specific details. Like even in a game like that. It’s not to say that there is no way that you could make it more accessible. You could offer people the ability to print their own version at a larger size, for example, and that might help. And, you know, there are things you could do, but sometimes a game will inherently be about barriers that will come up against visual accessibility.

Cari:

I mean, the truth of it is the games are made up of barriers. It’s how we make challenge like and if they don’t exist, it’s not a game, it’s just an experience. So like, yeah, but as you say, that is exactly the barrier that’s there. Micro Macro Crime City does include a little magnifying thing, which is a very nice addition.

Laura:

It’s not I don’t find it particularly actually helpful in the sense it’s my opinion is it’s a nice thought. It’s not really a very functional magnifying glass.

Cari:

It was a cute idea. It works for some people. Like, yeah I, I also just prefer to because sometimes the movement of it gives me a little bit motion sickness in terms of it’ll warp in a funny way, you know, I’ll just be like, no.

Laura:

It warps toward the edges too easily for such a small thing. It’s very easy to not be in its sweet spot. Yeah, but again, that the thought was there of is there something we can include that might make it more accessible? And I appreciate that line of thinking about accessibility.

Cari:

Yes, exactly. And I also like how in the game itself, it’s got a couple of different ways that you can play through the crimes. It’s like you can either go in like, no, no hints and just try and get through the whole thing. Like by yourself and then go through after. Or you can have someone acting as a little bit like a games master who’s there and who’s able to see what the next part of the puzzle is and can maybe give you hints or some guidance and stuff like that. So they have like different ways of doing it. But yes, I agree with you totally. It’s all about visual overwhelm. It’s one of those games that I get super hyper fixated on like hyper focused on. I’m like, yes, I’m just like trying to find the little stories and the little people. And then I come out of it and I go, Oh God, that was actually quite a big like brain workout and visual workout in terms of processing all of that.

Laura:

You have the like I spent 20 minutes getting nowhere and then suddenly, Oh, there they are. There they are, there they are here. It’s going.

Cari:

Yes, yes, exactly. So no. So yeah, that’s a really cool, really cool example. And I think it was worth bringing up for like visual stuff. Do we have anything else that we want to talk about in visual accessibility in board games?

Laura:

I think that was everything we had down for today’s visual episode. So given that we are coming up on that hour, should we, should we start to wrap up for this one?

Cari:

Yes. Yes, we can do. I think we did very well today.

Laura:

I think we got quite lot in with our hour there. So yeah, I’m Laura. I can be found at Laura K Buzz pretty much everywhere that people show up on the internet. Cari is there anywhere that you want to point people at?

Cari:

You can try and find me on Bluesky. I don’t post up very often, but I do check it.

Laura:

Thank you everyone for watching we will be back in another week with our next episode. Episode four – we will be talking about cognitive accessibility this is one I’ve been looking forward to. I think this one’s going to be great.

Cari:

I have been looking to it so much!

Laura:

Thank you, everyone for watching. We’ll be back soon. Goodbye. Thank you.