A Developer’s Experience—Designing for Accessibility
In general, being in a creative field, like game design, has some strong ups and downs. One day you can be thrilled about a new feature you were able to add that will greatly increase your players’ enjoyment, and the next you can be having a crisis about how you just spent 6 months on a mechanic that you love, and now you have to cut it.
These emotions get even more complicated when you add a specialty like accessibility that is highly based on empathy. Now when you add a new feature that helps your player, you get the pleasure of seeing players get to experience something that they wouldn’t have been able to without it. However, you can also experience more negative emotions when a feature that you created for your players has to get cut.
Even if I am not working on accessibility features specifically I strive to make all of my projects as accessible to audiences as possible. I had to learn the hard way though that trying to make a project that works for everyone is an impossible task. You can never make a product that is accessible to everyone, and striving for that perfection will only make everything weaker for it. This can lead to the feeling that you aren’t doing enough for your audience, not to mention some wicked cases of empathy burnout.
I have found myself self-doubting my UX abilities more than I would like to admit because of my passion for accessibility…
