Accessibility Meetup at Sainsbury’s
We recently hosted a London Accessibility Meetup (LAM) and thought it would be useful to share our experience on the two topics covered. Game Accessibility with Ian Hamilton was presented alongside Designing for the Extreme with Ruby Steel.
Game Accessibility with Ian Hamilton
Ian highlighted the importance of game accessibility due to their popularity in today’s digital world, especially amongst young adults and kids. The global video games industry is one of the biggest entertainment industries in the world, with games sales from the likes of Call of Duty and Fifa surpassing Hollywood favorites like Star Wars. It’s important to feel a sense of responsibility to make those experiences inclusive for everyone. We learned of key developments in the industry including recent US legislation along with captivating design challenges and incredible creative solutions. Ian highlighted how people with disabilities can play digital games and also how accessibility features in games are being used by large segments of casual and hard-core non-disabled gamers.
Key points included:
Design
- Ways to make something which is inherently inaccessible like gaming, inclusive, while keeping the fun of the challenge.
- Baking in accessibility features from the start can allow for more innovation and is less costly than fitting it in retrospectively.
- Personalisation options such as button re-mapping are key to delivering inclusive experiences.
- Multi-modal information delivery is key — combine and switch between visual, audio, haptic and other sensory feedback to provide information to the players.
- Allow for one and two-handed play, controlling the game using feet, second person copilot and AI (artificial intelligence) assisted play etc.
- Overlooking the importance of accessibility features is a common complaint from users, the most frequent being small subtitle font-sizes, evident in the case of The Witcher 3.
Point of critical mass
- Nintendo introduced inverted/greyscale colour settings for the Nintendo Switch. This marks the first time all major gaming platforms have in-built accessibility settings.
- Game accessibility guidelines are now available and hugely popular to provide straightforward references for games developers.
- Legislation in the US has meant all games studios must consider accessibility early in the development process.
- Support from the top down and demand from the user base are driving inclusion.
- Kim Kardashian tweets about and donates to disabled gamers — raising awareness amongst her 60 million followers. She isn’t alone; influencers from all areas are talking about inclusion in gaming.
Benefits
- The features benefit everyone and make gaming fun for all — while reducing the unnecessary exclusion for people with disabilities.
- One-handed gaming settings are used by one-third of gamers though only 1% of the population have this accessibility need — an example would be casual adult gamers who are holding a beer.
- Subtitles are an accessibility feature being used by over 60% of gamers — an example would be gamers playing on the underground with no headphones.
Key takeaways
Being excluded from something as large and widely popular as gaming is a big deal especially for young kids. It can have a huge impact on someone with a disability. It’s great to see the industry moving at such rapid pace to remove the barriers to gaming and seeing big studios and games platforms beginning to make accessibility a fundamental part of the design and development process.
Watch the talk
Designing for the Extreme with Ruby Steel
Ruby Steel is a Senior designer at Smart Design who also appears on BBC’s The Big Life Fix. She used the example of OXO Good Grips to describe how her company approach inclusive design.
Ruby put forward the hypothesis:
“Inclusive design results in better experiences for everyone”.
The approach she outlines is to take two extreme users — one user with access needs and another non-disabled user who uses a product to the maximum capability. In the cases of kitchen gadgets, the scale went from someone with arthritis to a pro-chef. By designing to these two use cases, the product was enhanced for many users
Her detailed example was from her BBC show “The Big Life Fix”. The challenge was to make a school playground accessible and inviting to Josh, a blind youngster in a mainstream school. Josh didn’t play in the playground due to poor access and this was making him isolated.
The team realised by designing for the young boy alone they were being too exclusive. The solution would need to appeal to all the kids who use the playground. By observing how the other kids played and designing for Josh, they came up with an incredible interactive tactile and audio solution. The tactile element was a path using pavement studs and stripes commonly used in the urban environment to assist people with low vision. Each path was assigned a different animal noise and on the intersection between each path an interactive post was installed which allowed the kids to trigger the animal noises. This both allowed Josh to get around the playground in a fun and engaging way and at the same time provided the stimulus for new forms of play amongst the kids.Unfortunately, it was costly to implement and so couldn’t easily be adopted in other schools.
Key takeaways
Ruby’s talk was inspiring and emotional. She underlined the importance of making the mainstream accessible by conducting user research and including accessibility upfront and throughout the design process to create a better experience for everyone.
Watch the talk
Forthcoming meetups
We’ll be hosting the London Accessiblity Meetup again on April 23rd, with the following talks about accessiblity within government.
A case study from the Home Office showing how they approached accessibility on the Passport Renewal Service and how accessibility support is being embedded in teams.
James Buller, Access Needs Lead
Charlotte Moore, Lead User Researcher
A case study from Government Digital Services showing how they designed, built and tested the accessibility of 5 components for new GOV.UK Design System and will share the vision of the Design System.
Ed Horsford, Lead Interaction Designer
Alex Jurubita, Developer
Tim Paul, Head of Interaction Design
If you’re interested in coming along, please do sign up on meetup.com, and we’ll see you there!
