The first episode of Access-Ability was launched a little over five years ago on this channel, and in the time since then I’ve spent a lot of my time keeping track of updates to the ways the video game industry informs players of accessibility features in games they might be looking to play.
From the advent of accessibility tags on console digital storefronts, to increased availability of accessibility information in pre release marketing, to increasing numbers of accessibility reviews from varied disabled critics, we’ve seen a massive boom in the availability of accessibility information during the time I’ve been creating this weekly series.
Today’s episode of Access-Ability is taking a look not at an individual game, but a new website recently launched to try and help disabled gamers find games that match up with their needs and preferences when it comes to accessibility.
AbleToPlay is, in essence, a database of video game accessibility information, able to be easily cross referenced and scored in comparison to your stated accessibility needs. The idea is that you create an account, tag your accessibility needs and preferences across a variety of common categories, and the site will generate an overall accessibility score for you based on how many of your stated factors are present in a game.
Each option available for your profile can be set as a need, something that if not supported will act as a firm barrier and stop the game from being playable, or as a preference, where you’ll still be able to perhaps play but your experience will be negatively impacted.
Options available currently to tag on your account include, but are not limited to, the following:
Vision – Adjustable brightness, Field of View settings, no strobing or flashing, adjustable motion blur, motion sickness support, text resizing, UI recolouring, narrated UI labels, UI resizing, contextual outlines, colourblind support, text to speech, gameplay audio cues, camera shake settings, screen reader support, and play without sight support.
Mobility – Remappable controls, keyboard and mouse support, touchpad friendly controls, gamepad support, multiple device shared inputs, sensitivity, single stick control, slow time, automatic movement, inverted axis, aim assist, button holds to toggles, Quick Time Event options, lock on, and eliminate repeated taps.
Auditory – Closed Captions, subtitle customisation, subtitle backgrounds, speaker indicators, speech to text, mono audio, proximity cues, directional audio, and play without hearing.
Cognitive – Quest tracking, dialogue choice clarity, hint systems, quest or goal guidance, in game glossary, difficulty settings, adaptive difficulty, accessible reading level, alternative UI, and review controls at any time.
Triggers – Arachnaphobia, claustrophobia, and thalassophobia support, phobia or trauma content warnings, sensitive or traumatic content support, disable blood and gore, no addictive mechanics, no animal suffering, no drugs or alcohol, no jump scares, no adult themes, no child suffering, and no existential themes.
Other – Pause gameplay, auto save, skippable gameplay, replayable losses, save any time, checkpoints, dedicated accessibility menu, player mode options, interactive tutorial, accessible onboarding, text tutorial, practice mode, adjustable haptics, invulnerability mode, and all ages appropriateness.
Once you’ve input your data, you’ll be able to browse a page showing games sorted by genres and accessibility scores, with the ability to click on a game to then see a more detailed breakdown of which of your requested features are or are not present.
To give a sense of how this scoring system works in practice, after inputting my own needs and preferences, one of the first games I was shown with a 100% perfect personalised accessibility score for my needs was a game called Cabernet, a game that I worked on as an accessibility consultant last year, whose developers used feedback about my accessibility needs to improve their game’s accessibility. That’s a pretty good sign that their algorithm has a solid practical sense of games that are tailored to be accessible for my needs and preferences.
Now, Able to Play’s system as it exists does have some issues, and ignores some of the nuance inherent in gaming accessibility conversations, as I think is inevitable for any site trying to give a definitive accessibility score to a game based on hard and fast tickbox rules.
If you put that Subtitles are a Need for you in games, and a game features subtitles but they’re too small for you to personally read, AbleToPlay might list that game as having the feature that you need, even if that doesn’t reflect the actual experience you’ll personally have with the game.
If I put that motion sickness accessibility tools are a Need for me, that doesn’t tell a complete story. They’re a Need for me in most first person games, but very few third person games, and they’re more important in games with low or inconsistent framerates, or games where I have to do a lot of running frequently around a location at high speed. Putting that as a need on my account may cause my score on certain games to lower unnecessarily, third person platformers with static backgrounds for example may get marked down for not having a feature that I don’t need in that type of game.
Accessibility needs and preferences, in reality, are often complex, nuanced, and contextual. This is why it’s really hard to give broadly applicable advice to game developers on how to make more accessible games, without insight into the specific project they’re working on. Accessibility needs vary person to person, and game to game, as do the solutions that will ultimately help.
If your game for example supports the font Open Dyslexic, that’s going to make it more accessible for some Dyslexic players, but won’t help other players who find more standard Sans Serif fonts easier to read and actively struggle reading Open Dyslexic. There’s a nuance to accessibility conversations that a limited number of checkboxes will never truly account for.
Additionally, at the time of writing this script, AbleToPlay seems to weigh Needs and Preferences equally in their scoring metric, meaning that an unsupported preference impacts your score the same as an unsupported Need. This, obviously, is an issue, as a missing need is going to be a dramatically bigger barrier to play than a missing preference.
I am told this is something expected to be tweaked in the coming weeks, and the creators of the website are taking feedback on these kinds of aspects of the site. I have confidence the way these aspects are balanced will improve over time.
Lastly, you do need to be aware that the site only functions because you give it a lot of data about your own accessibility needs and preferences. This might include, for example, information about fears, phobias, and things that you struggle with such as gambling addiction issues. As much as I personally trust the site’s organisers not to misuse this information, it is worth being aware that if the site were to ever become compromised in some way, that is information you have disclosed about yourself. I say this not to fearmonger or dissuade from using the site, but just as a reminder that anything you privately confide in a site like this could end up public in a worst case scenario, and you need to be comfortable with that before providing information that you may feel is of a sensitive nature, or that you would have an issue if disclosed.
However, with these limitations in mind, I do really like what AbleToPlay represents, and think that it’s going to be a really useful tool for disabled gamers, with the correct caveats in mind. As long as you don’t take its overall score as a definitive metric, looking at the score breakdown and perhaps reading reviews or looking at gameplay clips to confirm the execution of features matches your needs, the site could be a really good way of finding new games that you didn’t know about that have accessibility support you find valuable when gaming.
AbleToPlay is a very new site, and one that I plan to keep an eye on over the coming weeks and months, as well as a site that I plan to use to keep an eye out for new accessible games that may have gone under my radar and might be worth me checking out.