PATCH NOTES PATCH NOTES: GAME ACCESSIBILITY GUIDELINES CONTENTS INTRO VISION Why bother? 2 Do not rely on colour alone 34 Use an easily readable font size 36 AUDIO Ensure a good level of contrast 40 Do not rely on sound alone 6 Use surround sound 42 Subtitle essential information 8 Allow interface resizing 44 Provide separate volume controls 10 Ensure screenreader support 46 Visually indicate who is speaking 12 Provide audio descriptions 48 Allow subtitle customisation 14 Provide visual communication in multiplayer 16 OUTRO MOTOR Allow control remapping 20 Provide adjustable sensitivity 24 Support multiple input devices 26 Avoid repeated inputs 28 Ensure simple controls 30 WHY BOTHER? Accessibility means avoiding unnecessary barriers that prevent people with a range of impairments from accessing or enjoying your output. 15% of the population are disabled, As well as the numbers making good rising to 20% amongst casual gamers. business sense, there is human benefit. Other conditions that aren’t registered Games are entertainment, culture, disabilities can also hit barriers. 14% of socialising, things that mean the the adult population have a reading difference between existing and living. age of below 11 years old, 8% of males For profound impairments this goes have red-green colour deficiency, even further, with games meaning and many people have temporary therapy, pain relief, escapism and impairments such as a broken independence. arm. Many more have situational impairments such as playing in a noisy room or in bright sunlight, and all players have different levels of ability and different preferences – there’s no ‘typical gamer’. PATCH NOTES INTRO 2-3 'svyat' playing CS:GO (2019) AUDIO DO NOT RELY ON SOUND ALONE Conveying essential information by sound alone is an obvious barrier for people with physical hearing loss, but it also causes problems for situational impairments, such as playing in a noisy environment, through poor quality speakers, or with sound muted to avoid waking the baby. An easy test is to ask someone to play through for the first time with the Fortnite (2017) Visualise Sound Effects sound muted. If at any point they are unable to progress due to information being missed, it needs to be conveyed by another means. Usually visually, through an icon, effect, text, or other visual device. PATCH NOTES AUDIO 6-7 SUBTITLE Overwatch (2016) Subtitles for Ultimates ESSENTIAL INFORMATION Important speech means that which Subtitles are widely relied on by would make a significant impact to the gamers, more than consumers of other experience without; either narratively types of media. They are used for all or to someone’s ability to play. In kinds of reasons – due to physical most cases this means speech by hearing loss, due to low quality mobile protagonists, and instructions and speakers, due to a noisy environment, prompts given through speech. because of unpredictable dynamic sounds mixes, to avoid waking the baby, because localisation has been done solely through subtitles, and many other reasons too. PATCH NOTES AUDIO 8-9 PROVIDE SEPARATE VOLUME CONTROLS Loss of hearing can affect certain frequencies more than others, so being able to control volume independently is essential. Control over sound levels is often impossible in dynamic situations, but in scripted conversations, cutscenes etc, bear in mind that what sounds like good balancing through your own setup will not necessarily be how players hear it, due to either differences in their hearing or differences in their sound hardware, so err on the side of caution and ensure that important audio such as speech is as distinct as possible from any background audio. Diablo 3 (2012) Volume Sliders PATCH NOTES AUDIO 10-11 VISUALLY Conversations can be difficult to follow when you can’t hear the distinguishable A common effective approach is use of colour at all times, then the first INDICATE accents. A difference in colour for each time a speaker appears in a scene or speaker, floating of text towards the any time dialogue occurs off-screen, WHO IS side of the screen that the speaker add the the name of the speaker as is on, naming the current speaker, or text at the start of the line. Another SPEAKING even representing the speaker’s face approach, commonly used in RPGs, all help – and a combination of them is to add an indicator directly to the used together is even better. person speaking – for example a speech bubble above their head. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered (2020) PATCH NOTES 12-13 ALLOW SUBTITLE CUSTOMISATION Some people have no access to audio, and are reliant on understanding every single word, so need them to be as clear and obvious as possible, with access to extra information such as who is currently speaking. Some others use subtitles for localisation, so still need them to be clear and obvious, but have no need for extra information. Others still only glance at the text occasionally, for example when an explosion goes off during an important moment of exposition, or when a word is missed due to it being spoken in a hard to understand foreign/alien/robotic accent. Allowing player to configure how the subtitles/captions are presented is an effective and relatively easy to implement solution, and a solution that is standard in other industries too. For example Netflix and YouTube both have extensive caption customisation menus available to the user. Marvel's Spider-Man(2018) PATCH NOTES AUDIO 14-15 PROVIDE VISUAL COMMUNICATION IN MULTIPLAYER Call of Duty: Warzone (2020) Either environmental, allowing points These are particularly useful for players on the map to be pinged for other with impaired speech, or hearing, players or markers left directly in the but also a useful tool for all players game environment, or directly, via regardless of impairment, such as player emotes. communicating with others who speak a different language or simply do not want to talk. PATCH NOTES AUDIO 16-17 MOTOR ALLOW CONTROL REMAPPING Remappable controls are one of the best value accessibility features. Many people with motor impairments, whether permanent (eg. stroke), temporary (eg. broken arm) or situational (talking on a phone while playing) benefit greatly from being able to move essential controls into positions that they are able to reach more easily, for example with a single hand, or resting on a table-top using only the top buttons. JaCkz playing with arrow keys rather than WASD (2019) PATCH NOTES MOTOR 20-21 Joe McClusky performing Akuma's Raging Demon, only possible through control remapping. PATCH NOTES MOTOR 22-23 PROVIDE ADJUSTABLE SENSITIVITY Dishonoured 2 (2016) Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015) Although PC/Mac operating systems There is no one-size-fits-all sensitivity offer sensitivity controls, these are level. As well as personal preference, within system settings which are only some gamers have a restricted range seen by advanced users, and consoles of movement so require very high do not offer a system-wide setting sensitivity, others have difficulty with at all. Different games also require precision so require very low sensitivity, different levels of sensitivity. Allow more still use alternative input devices players to set it at game level, and offer (such as a head mouse) that have a wide range of sensitivity. This applies different sensitivity requirements to all types of input – mouse, touch, to regular controllers. The option to tilt, analogue stick, ideally gesture too. reduce sensitivity can also reduce the impact of simulation sickness. PATCH NOTES MOTOR 24-25 SUPPORT Different input devices involve different types of motor ability. Some are more MULTIPLE suited to gross motor movement, some to fine. Some have complex INPUT motor-cognitive metaphors (eg. pushing a mouse away from you to move an on-screen cursor upwards), DEVICES some are direct. Accessibility specific input devices also map to different mainstream devices, for example accessibility switches map to digital buttons, and eye tracking maps to mouse cursor movement. So there is no more or less accessible input device, different devices work better for different people. PATCH NOTES MOTOR 26-27 AVOID REPEATED INPUTS The Wolf Among Us (2013) Button mashing and Quick Time Events, these require rapid precision, which for gamers with a wide range of strength, fatigue, pain, speed or accuracy related impairments can be a huge barrier or even exclude completely, especially in the case of QTEs where the level of accurate timing required is increased dramatically. If you can’t avoid QTEs or button mashing actions, include a setting to simplify or skip/disable them. If you can’t avoid QTEs or button mashing actions, include a setting to simplify or skip/disable them. PATCH NOTES MOTOR 28-29 Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator (2014) ENSURE More complex control schemes require higher degrees of both motor and SIMPLE cognitive skill, so avoid using buttons/ keys just because they’re there. Having CONTROLS to remember complex combinations of controls, being required to reach every single button on a controller or even just having to press multiple buttons at the same time can all easily result in unnecessary exclusion. Sometimes complex controls are required or desirable. If your game really does require complex controls, that is fine. It becomes an issue is when controls are more complex than they need to be. PATCH NOTES MOTOR 30-31 VISION 'Blind Warrior Sven' playing Street Fighter V (2018) DO NOT 1 in 12 men and 1 in 100 women are colour blind, with the most common RELY ON form affecting Red/Green perception, turning into a muddy brown. COLOUR Do not rely on colour alone to convey ALONE information, instead use symbols or patterns to distinguish elements. Allow users to change the colours of UI elements and menus, and provide presets for Protanopia, Deuteranopia and Tritanopia. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) Colour reliant puzzle Normal Vision Protanopia Tritanopia. Deuteranopia PATCH NOTES VISION 34-35 The Outer Worlds (2019)small menu text USE AN EASILY Small text size is a very common complaint amongst people with vision READABLE impairments, whether medical (such as long sightedness) or situational DEFAULT (such as small mobile screen, or a living room that does not physically FONT SIZE allow for a large TV close to a couch). For short passages of text, just an easy to read font over an unfussy background makes a big difference to readability, ideally a clean sans serif font with distinct letter shapes and prominent ascenders and descenders. PATCH NOTES VISION 36-37 PATCH NOTES VISION 38-39 ENSURE A GOOD LEVEL OF CONTRAST After text size, contrast is one of the most common UI complaints, There are common vision impairments that specifically result in a loss of contrast sensitivity, and others such as colorblindness that can be affected by contrast too. Ensuring a good level of contrast also benefits many other gamers who have situational impairments, such as playing on a mobile device, in direct sunlight, or on a poor quality display. Ideally place your text and UI elements on a plain high contrast background, or where that is not possible, use prominent outlines and shadows to separate them from the background. The web industry has an established testable limit for what constitutes adequate contrast for screens, which can be applied to games – a foreground/background contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1. For Honor (2017) PATCH NOTES VISION 40-41 USE Even just stereo panning makes a huge difference, but surround sound rather SURROUND than stereo allows for much more effective identification again of where SOUND sounds are coming from, particularly important for people with impaired vision who rely on sound cues either as reinforcement or as a sole means of understanding gameplay. 'Blind Warrior Sven' playing Street Fighter V (2018) Hand book PATCH NOTES Title VISION 42-43 ALLOW INTERFACE RESIZING As well as being an important way to cater for people who have different screen sizes, manually resizeable interfaces are also useful for people who either have difficulty seeing small elements or who don’t have the fine motor ability required to tap/click on them. Although ensuring a good default size should always be the first port of call, some people prefer smaller UI elements that obscure less of the gameplay, so allowing it to be configurable means that both ends of the scale can be met. MADDEN '17 (2018) PATCH NOTES VISION 44-45 ENSURE SCREENREADER SUPPORT A screenreader is an external piece of software that reads out all text in an application. Although compatibility can be technically difficult to achieve, either this or self voicing are essential for use by players with little to no residual vision, and screen-reader support doesn’t carry the high production cost of self voicing recordings. Many game mechanics aren’t suited to being made screenreader accessible, but anything text-based in particular is an ideal candidate. Or interface based games such as Football Manager or Hearthstone would be perfectly suited to being made accessible through screenreader support, speaking out the labels of UI elements that receive focus. Football Manager 2021 (2020) PATCH NOTES VISION 46-47 PROVIDE Audio description aims to communicate as much as possible AUDIO of the information that is conveyed through sound; actions, facial DESCRIPTIONS expressions, character appearances, environments, on-screen text. Not all of this can be communicated at all times, so it is prioritised according to how much can fit into any particular gap. Audio description presents obvious challenges with dynamic real-time content. However cut-scenes may be a good place to start, particularly where gameplay is already accessible to blind gamers through sound design or text-to-speech. The Last of Us Part 2 (2020) PATCH NOTES VISION 48-49 GAME ACCESSIBILITY GUIDELINES.COM FOR THE FULL LIST VISIT gameaccessibilityguidelines.com Guidelines are a good start, but to get the best results you also need to test your prototypes with disabled players, research and seek advice when needed. Just including some disabled players in existing play-testing sessions makes a huge difference, and you’re likely to have some people with impairments in your studio too, colour- blindness in particular. Use them, they’re a great asset. As you’ve put the work in, make sure that people know about it. List key accessibility considerations in the features list on your site. As well as more customers you’ll gain SEO goodness too. Don’t hide accessibility options away in settings menus, also talk about them in tutorials, loading screen tips etc. Also let accessible gaming review sites such as CanIPlayThat, DAGERS, GameAccessibilityNexus and GameCritics know what you’ve been doing, accessibility features can net you good review scores and awards. PATCH NOTES
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