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Over the past few years, both in my role as an accessibility consultant and as the organiser of the Access-Ability Summer Showcase, I’ve been involved in advising game developers on how best to handle messaging around the accessibility features they’re bringing to their upcoming video games. In that role there’s one piece of advice that I’ve given perhaps more than any other, don’t advertise your game, no matter how accessible you think it is, as being “Accessible for Everyone”.
Making a video game that is accessible for every single kind of disabled gamer in the world is, obviously, the ideal end goal of gaming accessibility discussions. If a game can be made playable by players with every common and uncommon category of disability, as well as those living at the intersection between different combinations of conditions, such that the core vision of the game is maintained without compromise, obviously that’s the ideal end goal.
There are increasing numbers of video games being released that are approaching that goal of total accessibility, but I would argue that even the most accessible video games of all time are not accessible to everyone.
Calling your video game “Accessible for Everyone” is like chasing an exponential curve – The closer we get, the more we see how far there is still to climb.
At the basic end I have seen the claim of being “Accessible to Everyone” made by games that are not accessible to major segments of the disabled community, such as games that are not in any way playable by sightless blind players without sighted assistance. At the upper end, I’ve seen the claim made by games that are obviously accessible for a large number of players across a number of the most common disability categories, but when pressed these games fail to be accessible for those with more niche conditions, more intense support needs, and those with intersectional overlaps of conditions.
When talking with developers whose games are at the upper end of accessibility efforts and who plan to describe their titles as “Accessible for Everyone”, I tend to ask them what work they’ve done to prove that such a claim is true. Have they actively sought out gamers whose access needs are more intense? Have they researched edge cases? Are they considering accessibility barriers that may exist outside of the game itself such as those specific to the platform the game’s being released on?
And sure, you might argue that the phrase “Accessible for Everyone” is common marketing hyperbole, a statement of definitive fact that is not meant to be taken as literal or to hold up under scrutiny. Nobody expects a coffee shop advertising “the best coffee in town” to have undergone objective tests of the quality of every other local coffee brew? Surely it’s not such a big deal to say your game is “Accessible for Everyone”, even if you mean it’s accessible to a wide range of people, right?
The issue is, accessibility isn’t something you can directly compare to these other kinds of marketing. If you advertise “the best cup of coffee in town” and your coffee is truthfully only “pretty decent”, the person you advertised to still had an acceptable quality cup of coffee. They still fundamentally got the thing that you were selling them. If you advertise your game as “accessible to everyone” incorrectly, you invite disabled gamers to purchase your game only to later discover they were sold something that is functionally useless, painful to engage with, or exhausting to progress through.
Not only does advertising your game as “Accessible to Everyone” lead to the possibility of making a promise to a disabled user that you cannot fulfill, but perhaps worse it sends the message to certain groups of disabled users that you failed to consider them and their needs as valid when promising universal accessibility. You risk the perception that you, for example, don’t consider gaze tracker users as part of “everyone”. You risk making a sightless player with moderate hearing loss feel like you don’t consider them as someone who is worth consideration. Whether you forgot a group of disabled users, failed to consider their existence, or thought of them and disregarded them as unimportant to support, a failed promise of universal accessibility is going to sting all the same to those users.
You can “aim” to be “accessible for everyone”, but any attempt to do so needs to come with a demonstrable effort up front to be accessible for as many players as possible, and a commitment to updates post launch if reached out to by those not yet able to play.
You need to be taking the time to research as many groups of disabled users as possible, noting down every method used by previous games to be accessible, seeking out intersectional and under-represented perspectives, and even then you need to recognise that you’re still a million miles away from completion. You’ll need to actively solicit feedback, work on making sure nobody gets left behind, and even then recognise that at best you’re “Accessible for Everyone we’ve tested with or spoken to”.
Accessibility for everyone is obviously the end goal, and we are as an industry getting closer to that every day. Not yet being “Accessible for Everyone” isn’t a failing, far from it, it’s a natural part of understanding the unbelievably wide ranging scope of accessibility needs. You’ll find that no two people with the same disability fully agree on what help best suits them and their needs, so chasing perfection is always going to be an uphill climb. As disabled gamers we know even the most accessible games sometimes won’t meet our personal accessibility needs, and that’s okay.
Making the promise of being “Accessible for Everyone”, rather than being honest about the state of accessibility in your title, only leads to false hope. I would always rather that a game developer be honest and own up to the areas of accessibility that they were able to identify existed, but were not able to provide solutions for due to time, experience, or budget constraints. Being open about the groups you aren’t accessible for is just as important to your game’s accessibility marketing as who you are accessible for. It’s not a failing to admit where you’ve got flaws – Admitting your accessibility weaknesses is the best way that I know to make me feel confident in believing the promises you’re making elsewhere with regards to accessibility.
If you tell me your game is “Accessible for Everyone”, that tells me you’re not approaching accessibility discussions from a broad enough perspective.
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