Accessibility is for Everyone, Even You
“Disability is the only minority group that you can join at anytime”
Many features that are created for the disability community are used by the wider population. Sometimes features like captions are used by a wide variety of people, from people with hardware issues, to people with auditory processing issues, to the actual deaf community. (Read more about caption data for games) While others, like control mapping, have become such a standard for games, that without it there can be riots.
Here are just some ways that accessibility barriers can be relevant for multiple audiences:
Blindness / Low Vision: Including features like haptic feedback, audio cues, and brightness adjustment can help someone with a visual impairment but are also often used by everyday gamers to improve their experience.
Deafness / Hard of Hearing: Visual cues for audio, multiple types of captioning, and having specific audio adjustments all help when audio may be an issue. This includes people with audio-specific disabilities, or just the average person with shoddy audio equipment.
Low Mobility: Custom control mapping, supporting different types of input devices, and controller sensitivity adjustment. These make players with low mobility able to play your game, but they also help anyone who struggles with controller drift, or someone who has a specific key preference when playing with their keyboard.
The Curb Cut Effect:
“Laws and programs designed to benefit vulnerable groups, such as the disabled or people of color, often end up benefiting all of society” - Stanford Social Innovation Review
It is important to bring up ‘The Curb-Cut Effect’ when talking about things created for the disability community, but marketed towards the abled community. To get many accessibility features funded, developers often have to market their features for a wider audience. This has the unfortunate side effect of people forgetting the origin of these features. Like the mapped controls that I mentioned before. The same people who get mad at developers for not allowing remapped/custom controls can also be the same people who feel that games shouldn’t have accessibility features, as it takes away from the game itself.
It is important not to let your disabled players be forgotten
