Accessibility Design:
Making choices that mean more people can play games.
Accessibility has been important to me throughout my life. I was home-schooled for my primary school years and a lot of the home school community were doing so because their children experienced barriers in traditional education; from learning difficulties to physical disabilities. Home Education gave me the opportunity to find out how I best learn, and to gain an understanding of how my peers learnt differently to me. It was natural to be surrounded by diversity and for each parent to be teaching their kids in different ways.
In 2021 I began a mentorship with Robert Macdonald, who was Head of UI & Accessibility at Splash Damage. He encouraged me to look into accessibility in videogames and how I could help more people to play and enjoy Skye Tales, the project I was currently working on. This mentorship helped to show me that accessibility in videogames was a thing and it was growing! By the time my first GAConf talk was live, I’d started a new, dedicated Accessibility role – one of the first in-house roles in a UK studio, Rebellion.
My adventures in accessibility have allowed me to speak at industry events, participate in podcasts and pen articles (which you can read about on the log). Knowledge sharing is a core principle of mine, and this also connects me back to education. I work with Abertay University to provide guidance to students researching accessibility, act as a mentor and judge for DARE Academy, and advise on how accessibility can be integrated into each module by design.
In my university honours project I brought back this interest in different learning methods and focused on accessibility in origami kits, reducing the motor complexity by introducing a cut in the paper and using multiple sensory methods to convey instructions. I didn’t know of accessibility in games at this point, and my honours project was an opportunity for me to explore this interest and develop my UX design skills.
At Rebellion I lead the accessibility initiative across the company and my role became made up of accessibility practice, education and advocacy. One of the biggest parts of my job is education, as Xbox famously said “Accessibility takes an Army” as we are all responsible for making decisions that impact the way players experience our game. My passion for tabletop games led me to infiltrate Rebellion Unplugged, the board game arm of the company. This led to Rebellion Unplugged publishing an Easy Read / Screen Reader accessible version of our TTRPG adventure, Tiny in the Tower, and to them providing accessibility support for their tabletop games.
So far in my short career in accessibility, I have had the honour of learning from and working with so many amazing and talented people like SightlessKombat, The Wobbly Gamer and Antonio Martinez. These people are experts in their experience and without them I wouldn’t be able to have anywhere near as much impact on our game accessibility. Lived experience and subject matter experts are the pillars of good accessibility design.