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Today’s episode of Access-Ability is going to centre on UK politics, rather than video game specific accessibility barriers. However, if the topic of this video comes to pass it will undoubtedly have an enormous impact on disabled people in the gaming industry, both developers and players.
The following is my personal subjective opinion.
The Equality Act 2010 is a major piece of UK legislation designed to protect members of minority groups in the UK from discrimination, harassment, and victimisation, both in the workplace and in everyday life.
A consolidation of multiple previous separate anti-discrimination laws, the Equality Act protects people in the UK from being treated unfairly, systemically or individually, based on nine protected characteristics: Age, Gender Reassignment, Marriage / Civil Partnership, Pregnancy / Maternity, Race, Religion / Belief, Sex, Sexual Orientation, and Disability.
As a married, lesbian, transgender woman with multiple formally diagnosed disabilities, I rely on the Equality Act to protect my legal rights. In the UK, at least in theory, this act protects me from being denied housing because my landlord doesn’t want a transgender person living in their property. It protects me from being turned down from a promotion because my boss is outwardly homophobic. It protects me from being denied a job because my employer doesn’t like the idea of offering reasonable accommodations to a qualified but disabled candidate.
Last week Suella Braverman, a member of the far right Reform UK political party, announced that if the party is elected as the UK’s ruling government, on day one of their rule they plan to scrap the Equality Act in its entirety. Their claim can be paraphrased as such: The legislation, by protecting minority groups from discrimination, is actually harmful to those in the UK who fall into the majority within the act’s listed categories.
Having watched numerous interviews this past week with members of Reform UK by the UK media, a pattern has in my opinion been made clear – members of Reform UK will insist that after scrapping the Equality Act they would replace it with new anti discrimination legislation, but any attempts to ask clarifying follow up questions quickly reveal the gaps inherent in that promise.
They’ll bring back legal protections from discrimination on the grounds of sex, but those will come alongside language to make it clear that transgender people are not real, and that gender transition is not grounds for protected or legally recognised status. Any protections of race and gender from discrimination will be written with an eye to banning programs that actively create opportunities for overlooked communities to reach equal representation. Protections for disabled people will be written in ways that limit who is considered disabled, and who is eligible for support or legal protection with regard to their disabilities.
Obviously, all of this is terrible. If you’re someone who follows me and my work, or the content that I publish on my channel, I can be reasonably confident that you agree that these kinds of changes to UK law would be devastating. As a trans woman I worry a lot in particular about my rights if this comes to pass. That said, today I am here specifically to take some time to focus on the impacts that this would likely have on the disabled community here in the UK.
When we think about the ways that disabled people are protected from discrimination under UK law, at least in theory, the protections that exist cover a lot more aspects of life than you might consider if you’re not yourself disabled.
Protections exist to make sure that a disabled person who is incontinent can’t be denied the right to rent a home based on that disability. Protections exist to make sure that I can’t be denied a data entry office job because, while doing my work perfectly well, I might rock left and right in my chair to self-regulate because the sound of the electricity in the halogen lightbulbs in the office is really overwhelming. The equality act protects my ability to attend doctor’s appointments during work hours if necessary, and not be fired as a result of that. If my boss starts making exaggerated physical rocking motions in my direction to get my coworkers to laugh at me for my disability related mannerisms, I am legally supported to do something about that kind of workplace harassment.
The Equalities Act is the reason that doorways in new UK buildings need to be wide enough for a wheelchair to go through them. It’s the reason that government websites are required to be offered in formats that are accessible to people with common disabilities.
In a world without anti-discrimination protections for disabled people, the government would be well within their power to make a mandatory UK government website such as the Passport Renewal website for example inaccessible to blind people, with basically no recourse to do anything to stop them.
And, of course, Reform UK would deny if asked that they plan on any of this happening. They will say that despite repealing the Equality Act they’ll replace it with some as of yet unseen piece of new legislation which would definately protect, in their eyes, “legitimate” disabled people’s rights. Maybe they’ll continue to mandate minimum door widths in buildings perhaps, who can say for certain.
But there are some things we know they will change if given a chance. They’ve said in interviews this past week that they will change who they classify as being considered disabled, and who they accept as being able to qualify for disability related financial support here in the UK.
The UK’s financial support system for people living with disabilities is PiP, or Personal Independence Payments. The system as it currently exists in the UK is already incredibly difficult to access and qualify for – The assessment process is full of traps designed to find reasons to deny a person’s valid experience of their own disability, and even once a person is cleared to receive financial support the system is set up to strip that support with minimal notice.
In December of 2025 for example, Shaun Rigby from Telford had his Personal Independance Payments taken away because of a video taken of him playing cricket in 2023. His leg was amputated around age 2, and he uses a prosthetic. It was decided that because on a single day two days prior he had felt well enough to play a gentle game of cricket on his prosthetic with his family, that he no longer needed financial support to live with his disability day to day. Because he had one day feeling able to be active and have fun on his prosthetic, he was no longer allowed to be seen as needing financial support to get through day to day life. This is prior to Reform UK scrapping the Equality Act.
Reform UK have already made it clear that they view the current version of PiP as being too lenient in who it allows to receive financial support for their disability, taking aim in particular on people with cognitive disabilities as targets. They have dismissively lumped a large number of cognitive disabilities under the label of “mild anxiety”, and expressed a desire to end financial support and legally protected status for those whose disabilities they’ve written off as “just feeling a little nervous”.
Things in the UK today are far from perfect in practice for disabled people, I know enough friends who are wheelchair users for example who have had busses refuse to pick them up because “the ramp will take too long to deploy”, and others with invisible disabilities have had reasonable adjustments refused by their employers because their condition wasn’t taken seriously. Things here are not great right now, but under Reform UK, with a scrapped Equality Act, things will get a lot worse.
Pulling this briefly back to video games, a lot of the progress we are seeing globally in terms of accessibility is coming as a result of legislation mandating progress. Websites are only as accessible as they are today because in large part websites had to become accessible to avoid getting sued by disabled users. While there are some companies attempting to be more accessible simply because it’s the right thing to do, that’s far from a universal fact.
A lot of the progress being made to make video games more accessible is thanks to the work of disabled people working in the video games industry, either as outside consultants or in permanent job roles at studios.
If the Equality act is rolled back in the UK, we could see more disabled game developers turned down for job opportunities. Fewer disabled people with lived experiences of disability being hired at studios is inevitably going to hurt the fight for increased accessibility in the games that we play. The result would be games that are less accessible for disabled players than they might otherwise have been.
But, even outside of the practical aspects, I simply believe that under a Reform UK government we would see a pushback against disability representation and accessibility socially. You only need to look at countries like the United States right now to see how the attitudes of a ruling government can cause wider shifts in public attitudes against communities painted negatively by legislation. If the government continually tells the people that they’re fighting against people pretending to be disabled to steal your tax payer funds, you’re going to see a rise in scepticism aimed at the disabled community, and rising belief that disabled people are financial scammers.
I know that I am largely preaching to the choir here – This video is probably not going to spread terribly far beyond my usual viewership circle, and I doubt any of my regular viewers are UK based and planning to vote for Reform UK. Still, it feels important to discuss this while we can.
If you’re based in the UK, or you have UK family or friends, discuss this with them. If anyone you know is planning to vote for Reform UK, or simply not motivated to vote against them, I beg of you to make the case against Reform UK on our behalf.
Reform UK coming into power would be devastating for a vast number of minority groups living in the UK. If you’ve ever felt apathetic about the idea of voting, I implore you to do what you can with your vote to prevent a Reform government ever coming to power.
I know it can be easy to feel like every UK political party is basically as bad as each other, but right now Reform UK represents a unique threat in UK politics, and one that we cannot afford to take lightly.
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