Spotlight: Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Jasmin Ali and Emilio Jéldrez

18th May 2023

This month I’ve chosen to discuss accessibility and I’ve been building my knowledge around the barriers and how we as a collective can help to break those down and learn more about digital access and inclusion. Ultimately, I think it should be a core requirement as in the UK alone there are 14.1 million disabled people which is around 1 in 5 people. So being able bodied doesn’t mean this shouldn’t be a priority for us all. With the most common impairments being Visual, Hearing, Motor and Cognitive. So, with information access being a basic human right all the barriers surrounding these subjects should be an integral part of any creative process.

Everyone should be able to have the same experience, regardless of the adjustments they need. This isn’t only a personal view, but one Emilio Jéldrez has too. Being the Associate UX/UI Craft Development Director accessibility is at the forefront of his mind and something he regularly discusses with his team. Which is why this month he graced me with his presence to talk all things inclusive gaming.

Question 1: Where did your interest in accessibility spring from?

Answer: For me, it started in 2020 just before the pandemic, our Global UX Director at the time brought the topic to me as she was looking for someone to champion accessibility at King and wanted 3 people who were interested in this space. I thought straight away that this was something I’d be interested in. At the same time, there was a talk organised in the London office about accessibility within games, from Ian Hamilton, a well-known accessibility consultant, and I instantly knew this was something I wanted to push at King. I’ve always been very focused on social as I started my career in Graphic Design, where my expertise was. A lot of the things brought up in this talk resonated with me. On the other side, my wife is a human rights lawyer and she is a great advocate in that area. Personally, I felt for me I was lacking in giving back to others, especially our players. In gaming, human rights aren’t brought up very often so this was a chance for me to give back and I think all the work towards accessibility within gaming is about enablement.

When you’re gaming behind a screen, nobody is aware of others' disabilities. If you’re playing with someone else, you’re just having fun and unwinding, and I love the concept there, which shows you have the same opportunities as everyone. The reality is there are some barriers in gaming, and people may need text-to-speech, mono audio or need subtitles. Whatever it is. The point is to try and remove those barriers and create truly inclusive game design. So, inclusive game design is taking a step back from accessibility and not adding features to remove the barriers, but designing with everyone in mind from the beginning and this is the goal. But when we have games running for 10 years is really hard to make this happen and starting with accessibility features is more easy going.

We try to adapt to everyone and there is no quick solution. We’ve been working on settings within our game so each player can configure their own experience to their individual requirements. In an ideal world, all settings would already be in the device and we are working towards those automatically transferring into the game when you first open it up. Game engines are also working in this area, and that’s where I see the industry going now. For smaller teams, this could be a game changer, because it would mean they don’t require much hard work than connecting the ‘cables’. Instead of setting up every game, the device would detect the OS accessibility features enabled, and the experience will be tailored. I feel accessibility is still not a priority for everyone just yet but it’s the way the industry will move forward, because is the more natural organic growth.

Question 2: How do you define digital accessibility? Why do you think it’s import for people to start viewing it as a priority?

Answer: We are digital now, life is digital. It’s our second nature. Most of our time is spent on some type of screen. So, it gives us an opportunity, it’s not all black and white. With the internet, things become easier and easier to update processes. Mobile devices are very spread across the world, it’s very common and that’s why mobile gaming is so big. Not everyone had money or access to consoles or PC’s to play, but there’s a new generation of gamers where they meet video games for the first time on mobile first.

This is, for some people, the only entry point so there must be a focus on accessibility at this level to support new gamers. On mobile devices, the OS now has integrated automatic close captions for videos and audio, so even if you’re deaf or hard of hearing, you will understand most of the content that is delivered only via audio, even if the captions are not perfect. Is the same with colour features for colour-blind people or light-sensitive users. It’s changing a lot of people’s lives. Voice commands are a huge win for people with disabilities too, it opens up another level for our games to become more inclusive. There are of course other concerns about privacy, but it’s a great start to remove some of the barriers user has.

There’s a really good book called Capitalism & Disability, which is a selection of Marta Russell's writings. And she talks plenty about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and how some employers have workarounds to not complain with ADA, which is terrible. The last chapter was very intense, and she shared some historical references on poorly disabled people were treated in the past. It was incredibly moving, and as a person who is very interested in working within this space, I feel it’s so important to learn more and do more to allow those who need inclusive features to be able to have the same experiences as me and you.

Question 3: What advice would you give to start ups or smaller teams on accessibility best practices?

Answer: I think it changes a lot based on the product. One of the things I’ve been working on here in Soda is surveying players and gathering live feedback on their experiences. One huge importance is the audience. When you have a game like ours which has been running for years, you need to understand who is playing our games, and that is key for us to work on from there. For Candy Crush Soda, a large amount of our players identifies as having a disability which is higher than the average from World Health Organization (WHO). We also have a high percentage of senior players, and we know the older you get the probability to have some type of disability gets higher. So, I think if you have these kinds of players accessibility needs to be at the forefront of your mind when developing the game, and learning about their barriers, so, you can improve players' experiences in your game.

To track and measure our progress in this area, we use analytics to delve into our features and how they are performing. I’ve also seen with some other games they ask accessibility questions within the first few levels to amend the experience. I think this is a great idea. Within Soda, there is around 2.5% of the daily active users who use the accessibility feature to change the background colours to grey. That helps a lot with contrast, especially for colour-blind players. I know 2.5% sounds small but when you have millions of players, it’s a big figure. So that’s something we are very conscious of, as even a small percentage means a lot of players being affected positively.

Question 4: How did you educate yourself and improve your own knowledge on accessibility?

Answer: For me it was mentors. I have a couple of people here in ABK who support me and teach me a lot. They are Nikki Crenshaw at Blizzard and Adrian Ledda at Activision, we are a great accessibility trio, and we have monthly syncs to align on what are we working accessibility-wise across ABK. We also do early career talks, for ABK interns to increase accessibility awareness early in game development. For me, it’s a learning curve too, there’s a lot of resources online but it’s focused quite a lot on web. There’s a great website called gameaccessibility.com which has some accessibility guidelines and loads of other content but is still focused on console and PC. Mobile is a territory that needs a lot of work, so it is a great space for King to be the leader here.

One of the big conferences is actually this month, where I’ll join. It’s a two day conference here in London, covering diverse topics on gaming accessibility, from mobile, new features, research and speakers from different crafts that are accessibility advocates. One of the big highlights this year was Mila Pavlin, who was the Lead UX Designer on God of War: Ragnarok. A great game, that got a lot of recognition for the accessibility features on it. We have an industry full of passionate people and a small but tight community, that grows every year. Accessibility isn’t something you get into for the money, you do it because of passion for it. So, whenever new insights you have to share with the community, we make the whole industry better. I’m not really into Discord much but there are a few growing channels which can be a good source of information too.

AbleGamers also do a certification for our industry, and we took part in that too. The helped us to keep momentum three years ago, and then is when we created our advocacy group called A11ygators. Which now we expanded to Accessibility Ambassadors and we have over 40 people pushing for accessibility internally, from features for our games that will have impact in our players to internal things to make Kingsters life accessible too.

Question 5: Other than ABK Games, are there any other games which stand out to us for having inclusive accessibility features?

Answer: On of my favourite is The Last of Us 2 accessibility options. They included this mode whether the textures turn plain, and the colour scheme is simplified. It makes it easier to focus and less intense overall. It had such an easy shortcut too, so you don’t have to search through the settings. It made a huge impact on the gameplay for me. I also play Blind Drive on mobile, where you are driving a car blindfolded and is it all about hearing. The approach to the game is really interesting and well thought out. It also has text-to-speech and it has a PC version too.

My focus is mobile, so I have a lot of screenshots of other mobile games and how they work in settings and accessibility features. I’m constantly learning, and I see games evolving.

My Thoughts

Games and life, in general, should be inclusive by design! Meaning if we have a team of creatives working on a project, accessibility should always be part of the conversation. If you aren’t around people who have disabilities, it’s like a blindside. Completely unaware of others' needs. As always have 4 tips to help you on your accessibility journey and some information that educated me!

· https://accessibility.day/resources/ - Some amazing starter resources especially for indie companies to provide a starting point.

· https://ablegamers.org/impact/ - This is such an amazing cause and one we partner with but even just hearing the case studies and seeing how much games have changed people lives will you will hope and the drive to do more!

· https://business.scope.org.uk/article/swap-the-corporate-jargon-for-these-accessible-alternatives - This article was super helpful in switching up wording within my emails and social posts. It signposts simpler alternatives to jargon and limits confusion.

· https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/ - Great guidelines covering a lot of things to consider when designing video games.