Designing Accessible Games

[amazonv]

Designing Accessible Games

Type: Breakout

Track: Design

Designing accessible games covers a lot of the same principles as designing for the web. But as a highly interactive medium, there‚Äôs a lot to consider in how to make a game accessible to your users. In this session, we‚Äôll go over techniques for designing accessible games, including color-contrast, subtitles, and remappable controls. We‚Äôll also be talking about game difficulty and how to provide different levels of difficulty based on your users’ needs (while still being true to your intent). You‚Äôll walk away with a solid understanding of the principles of accessibility in games and how to design your games with accessibility in mind.

 

 

>> We're going to get started momentarily.

All right.  I think we're going to go ahead and get started here.  Thank you, everyone, so much for joining.  This has been an absolute thrill.  I'm Josh McClure from Deque.  I'm going to be moderating designing accessible games brought to you by Stephen Lambert.  Virtual round of applause please.  I'm going to take care of a few house keeping things.  Today's session is being recorded.  And it will be hosted on demand for registrants.  The slides are currently available if you look down under this video feed there's a link to download the slide to follow along.  We're also going to have live captions that is listed below.  Definitely stay tuned.  We're going to save the last ten minutes today for Q & A.  Most any questions that you may have in Slido's chat.  Definitely join in on the conversation.  Share your experiences and thoughts.  I would love to hear from you.  With that, we're going to go ahead and start.  Steven, all you.

>> Thank you for being willing to come.  Second to last presentation on the last day.  I know it's been a really long past couple of days.  I'm glad that you took the time to come to this one.  This is designing accessible games.  We're going to talk about techniques for color contrast, and controls.  We're talk about game difficulty and different levels of differenty based on the user needs and still being true to the games intent.  I'm Steven Lambert.  I'm a senior developer.  I love creating games.  My e-mail is  Steven@SKlambert.com.  You can go find me afterwards.  Connect.  I would love to hear from you.  Also if you would like not only are the slides downloadable in the PDF form, there's a Google Doc at the Bitly.  You can get to here any time.  So like I said I'm a developer.  I love developing in HTML5 and Java script are my primary tools.  As a side project I developed a couple of hobby and things like break out or ramp heart.  I did Pacman recently.  I'm working on my first commercial game called Keridwen.  There's a free puzzle that you can play.  So that's all about me.  Let's get into what you came for which is designing accessible games.  What does it mean to make a game accessible?  This goes beyond just adding keyword support or screen reader information.  What does it mean to the players to make a game accessible?  So that means that for the player we are allowing them to play your game in a way that works best for them.  There are four common problems that stop most players that playing a game that works best for them.  These are taken from something called a game accessibility guidelines.  There's also a favor topic which is game difficulty and accessibility.  That appears every time a very hard game like dark souls comes up.  And everyone talked about how difficulty settings is and is it true to what the difficulty game should be.  We'll go over that in the end and talk about the fun stuff there.  First we're going to talk about controls.  Remappable controls are one of the best value accessibility.  This is a direct quote.  It allows them to use whatever setup that works best for their needs.  Players can play with the sticks, one-handed, and Xbox accessibility and custom configurations with buttons and foot pedals.  They can play in a way that works best for them.  You should provide a way to remap all players actions.  Lets player map the actions in the most convenient position on whatever setup they have for them.  We have an example here is an image from the counterstrike global offensive.  They are controlling the map settings which allows every action the player can prefer can be remapped to the different control.  Things like walking and shooting and aiming can be remapped.  Going beyond just actions in the game if you have any hot keys in your game which is very common for realtime strategy games.  You should also provide a way to customize the hot keys as well.  In the example we have star craft two.  You have a screen of all of the different hot keys that can be used for the play person it allows you to remap each of the hot keys for the building actions or the unit actions to fit your needs.  Here we have a great example.  This is over watch.  There are many different heros that have their own play styles and abilities.  The overwatch allow you to remap the individual character settings and better suit the play styles of each character.  This also includes in the image not only actions but things like red cool and change what you want for each individual character.  It is also important not to forget to change the in-game prompts.  We have the Batman image of the letter A prompt showing him what he can do.  A game that didn't do this quite so was a Lego Ninjago.  We noticed when you switch to co-op and played single controller none of the tutorial prompts showed it changed position.  It was still vertical.  We had to figure out the right button and bottom button because the controller was different.  And now players can often switch between multiple inputs during the game.  Common between switching between keyboard or controller or game pad.  You can use both at the same time.  You should allow all actions to be remapped between the keyboard and controller as well as mouse inputs as well.  And in the game no man sky pictures here in the controller settings they have a column for keyboard and mouse as well as separate columns for all of their actions.  Part of the control settings is to also help with the sensitivity of those controls.  You should allow users to adjust sensitivity of mouse movement or controller configurations.  This includes not only the mouse movement and things like camera movement and dual stick controllers as well as controller rumble settings and juice effects.  If you are not familiar with the term juice effects, that's things that we add to the game for the feel.  Screen shake or camera bloom.  Those things should also have their own settings to help the user.  Lastly you should provide options.  If you can simplify it to maybe just a few buttons, that helps a lot of players.  You should allow to change between things like press and hold to toggle or skips quick time events with just a single button press.  This should include ways for a user to play with just a single, one-handed controller rather than having two dual stick controller setups.  You can just map things.  A great example of this was the new Spider-Man game.  This simpler control screens and being able to skip them can benefit users who experience fatigue or strain injury or other types of disability use that needs them in order to play comfortably.  To recap we want to allow players to map the controls and don't forget any end game prompts.  We want to allow them to change the sensitivity and allow for simpler control schemes or skipping for realtime events and toggle to press.  Next we want to talk about for face accessibility.  The first and most important key to interface accessibility is don't make your text so smell they can only read it when it was on the computer screen a foot away.  The new game had a problem.  Their text was pretty small.  It was hard for a lot of players to be able to read it.  Especially when they were sitting on their couch 10 feet away from their TV.  They came out with a patch to fix the problem and improve it.  It only helped a little bit.  So Amazon TV has a good recommend that they use for captions that we can apply to text in the game.  It is about 20 pickets font minimum for viewing 10 feet away at 1080P.  You should increase the spacing between the sentences as well so your text message is also important.  In conjunction with a legible font size you should also have an easy-to-read font that's sans-serif, mixed case.  That's not to say you always have to have an easy-to-read font.  If you allow your users to customize the font, that lets them decide what's legible to them.  You can keep a personality in your game with a nice unique font and provide an option to replace the font with a much simpler one, if the user so designs.  Another way to help is add options to increase the font size or interface or hud.  This includes things like font size and prompts and images used for the game and borderlands and the font size and everything in the game that you could interact to increase as well.  You can also add options to customize the UI style.  Capacity and color and you can go further and customize position of the UI elements.  They are common in games such as MMO and RPGs.  You have lots of information in the screen.  And this is in the hud for the fall out fort.  They have settings for the RBG scale and as well as the capacity.  To recap you want to use large, easy to read font in your game.  You want to design that from the beginning.  It is always harder to implement larger font if you didn't take it into account later.  You want to customize the font size and style for users.  You want to be able to provide options to customize the UI in the position or size or style or capacity.  Next we have color.  Let's first talk about color deficiency.  If you are unaware, a red, green color deficiency is the most common form and affects about 5% of the world population.  There's a high probability that someone in the call or watching the video has a form of color deficiency.  The key takeaways is colors tend to look similar if you have a color deficiencies.  Reds and greens and oranges could look yellowish or pinkish and really green could look blue.  The most important thing is all means of color is lost when you have a come already deficiency.  We have the example of the match three game.  If you have to match three squares of a similar color in order to clear the board.  In the bottom right corner it is full color.  You can make out the different colors like red, green, blue, yellow, purple.  In the top left it is shown in the same image but with a Deuternopia.  All of the shades look the same.  Good luck being able to match three colors if all you can see is go out of the five that are shown.  The important takeaway is don't use color alone to convey meaning.  All meaning is lost if you can't perceive the color.  How do we make that work for games?  Well, first we can add a non-color identifier.  Such as an icon or pattern to distinguish between the colors.  Here we have a couple of images.  We first have the game Hue.  If you are unfamiliar it uses a color wheel for the color of the game itself.  That will reveal different things.  Either a door blocks your way and change the color to make the background the same color as the door and the door vanishing and you can walk right through.  To help with color deficiencies, they added similarrables to each of the colors and all of the objects.  Instead of having to color match, all you have to do is symbol match.  We have the game faster than light.  When your ship is damaged in certain areas or not enough oxygen, it goes from light red and darker red shade.  Enemies health of people that can board your ship and you have the crews health and the crews health was green and the enemy's health was red.  They enabled color deficiencies instead of being a shade of red to a darker red they had patterns.  They had alternating colors of red vibes to help indicate the level that it was.  They applied a pattern to it.  They changed the enemy health to blue to help distinguish between a red/green color deficiency.  Not only do you have good colors, they contrast well against the backgrounds.  This includes the text colors.  The common recommendation was 4.5 to one.  They had the world that was dark tile and lava and volcano and part of the objects were spikes.  It was a dark black.  The background was light gray.  You could kind of make them out.  The harder part is when they are down.  There's a red square in the top right corner.  You can barely make it out there are some spikes that are sitting in the ground.  If you weren't aware of that, that can cause you problems in trying to solve the puzzle.  This is very important that you keep in mind the background to the game.  Something that you can do is provide an option to change the contrast.  This is epic Eric.  You you can add an black layer between the background and foreground elements.  You can adjust how the capacity of the layer.  You can also make it completely white.  That can allow your users to determine what looks best to them in the background to help contrast with the foreground objects.

Another example is to just remove the background completely and make it black.  And street fighter four they had the option where you could just disable the background.  Instead of showing the colorful background of whatever world or arena, it just become a black box.  To help remove the distractions from the background and make sure the foreground players contrasted well.  Another option is to add outlines.  Here we see eagle island.  There's an image of the player who has wings on the back of the air.  He's shooting out the eagle.  And the player and the eagle he throws and the bats all have a thick, white outline to help them contrast against the blacker background of the cave.  Lastly if you want you can also just allow full customization of colors in the game.  This is more common in games that have distinction colors or teammates or enemies.  You can customize them.  They allowed full RGB for the enemy player and neutral player color.  To recap for colors, you can first don't use color to convey the meaning.  Use icon or patterns to distinguish between the meaning and colors for the players.  You can provide an option to decrease the contrast and provide options to customize the color ifs that makes sense for your game.  Next we can talk about subtitles.  There's a chance more players play with subtitles than you think.  More 60% of the players, turned them on.  They were turned off by default.  60% went to turn them on.  Because of that, they turned them on for default.  95% of people left them on.  As the game industry, we don't always do well with subtitles.  Start with easy to read.  Otherwise you end up with something like this.  I can't remember the name of the game.  They have very tiny text that I can barely make out what it says.  I'm right in front of it.  It is whatever the caption the person is saying.  It is possible to read.  Or you can end up with problems of contrast.  In this game there's a room and a main lobby of the hotel.  Somebody is saying something about the staff.  It makes the white text completely disappear against the white windows from the outside light.  Those are very common problems we can encounter with the subtitles.  Instead we want to do better.  The best approach is to add a dark, transparent background behind the subtitles.  The other option is to add an outline to the white text.  Like the black outline.  It is more common in usually a better approach to add a black background.  Some players can't read the subtitle even with the background.  This is showing on the glass and the subtitles have a black background while the player is speaking.  Not only should you add the black background but a setting to change the opacity.  Letter players decide if they want it or they don't or how dark it is.  Also it is very important that we don't over run the screen with a bunch of text.  In the image it is one of the screens where the leader of the council is talking to your commander.  It is just a paragraph of texts that takes up the bottom third of the whole screen.  This not only makes it hard to read, but the scrolling text.  Instead use only two lines per subtitle.  About a max of 40 characters per line.  The game hit man did this really well and one of the hit man levels and the person talking about hit man's goal and objective is just two lines of subtitles and 40 characters we are line.  Then the next time they talk they will update the subtitles.  Also when a player is talking or character in the game is talking, you should show the characters name.  As they continue speaking, you can drop the name for future blocks.  It is assumed they are continuing to talk.  As soon as a new market starts talking, you'll have to show that characters name again.  That lets the person know that a new person is now talking in the subtitles.  Again a game that shows this is showing a police officer talking and his name is Redwater.  In the caption it says REDWATER:

It covers more than just spoken words.  They provide a lot of information through audio cues.  Things like enemies yelling they threw a grenade or player with a special ability or gunshots happening in a person direction.  They should be conveyed in subtitle.  The players can receive the same audio information that others received.  The game half-life two in the image did that really well.  In the image they are shooting a bunch of things in the ware house or garage.  And the captions not only show the person being talked to, but also shows things like shattering glass and pistol shot or they can't use sound so that someone knows the thing they are trying to interact with isn't useful.  That information should also be conveyed to the player.  Going further we can also add direction to our audio sources.  Here we have Minecraft.  If you are walking across the ground or swimming in the later or something else is swimming in the water, they will have a caption to the left or night.  Fortnite which takes the 360 around the player and shows the sound that it came from.  You know exactly about where it came from and they go further showing an icon and the color of what that sound was.  Whether it was gunfire or foot steps of things of that nature to help make sure if you don't have the sound on for whatever reason or you can't hear it, you get the same information that audio cues provide.  Of course when in doubt, TV standards have been doing captioning and subtitles for years.  They have lots of standards.  Go to the BBC.  Netflix has their own guidelines to go to read more about how TV handles the best practices to subtitles.  So to recap you want to use large, easy-to-read text.  You want to keep your subtitles to a few lines of short text each.  You want to show the speakers name and you want to caption the audio cues in your name.  Last we're going to talk about game difficulty.  Now game difficulty can be a controversial topic.  Some players like difficulty and don't think a project is less difficult.  Other players want to play difficult games, but they aren't able to, because it is too difficult.  The common argument is they shouldn't include the difficulty option because it keeps to the creators intended way to play.  I'm not going to talk about any of that.  We're going to try not to be controversial here.  We're going to focus on what difficulty in the game means and why it is important to a player to have it.  So first I'm going to misquote Keita who said games can be as difficult as they like so long as they are fun.  What exactly do we mean by game difficulty and being fun?  When we talk about game difficulty, what we're actually talking about is a single access of a graph of a players experience with the game.  So we have on one axis is the difficulty on that game.  On at the other is the skill or ability of that player.  So when compared to the players skill and ability if the game is too challenging for the player, they will experience frustration.  They will have a greater chance of just stopping or abandoning the game because it is too frustrating.  But if the player skill or ability is far greater than the difficulty, you'll experience boredom.  And they have a chance to stop playing at the game because it is not enjoying or difficult for them.  So what we have then is the very narrow channel in the middle between the difficulty and skill ability that we call the flow zone.  The flow zone is where the player is neither overly frustrated nor overly bored.  What we want is the player to remain in this flow zone.  When the game presents the difficulty that's just above their skill level.  They learn to meet that challenge and get a new difficulty that keeps them in the ebb and flow of the flow zone.  The flow zone is not just a straight line.  It is more of the curve up and down between thing that is are difficult and their difficult and difficulty in the game.  When we talk about game difficulty, what we really want to be talking about is the relative challenge to the players current skill level.  The reason for the challenge can be due for the physical or mental disability or for the player reaching the top of what their skill level is.  No amount of play or practice will get them beyond that ability.  If it is too difficult, they become frustrated.  They abandon your game.  The goal of any game should be to keep that player in the flow zone.  Present them challenges that they can over come no matter what their skill level is.  How do we keep players of varies skills in the flow zone to avoid challenges they can't over come.  One thing you can do is so some form of difficulty options in your game.  These are different settings that say easy, medium, hard, or some of the things that will cater to the skill level those players need.  We have an example of the old game Doom.  They have an option screen for skill level from the top down from easy to harder.  I'm too young to die.  Ultra violence.  And nightmare.  Don't make fun or belittle your players with your difficulty options.  It doesn't help and it is not funny.  It will only make the players upset who need to choose those options for them to enjoy the game.  You also want to give the players the right expectations for those different difficulty setting.  Don't just list it out.  What does hurt me plenty in terms of the meaning of the difficulty the game will provide.  I don't know.  I have to soon because it is at the top the bottom one is nightmare.  Nightmare sounds rough.  Top must be easier.  You should describe what difficulty option can change in the game.  Whether that's enemies get more health and do more damage or less damage.  In this example we have an imagine of the game.  When you start a new game it has four different options for difficulty, we'll say.  The first survival.  You can also have a game called freedom.  That removes the health and -- it removes the food and the water need and keeps you with just health and oxygen.  Then you have another one called hard core which adds all four and adds permadeath.  That's creative.  It has none of the options.  You don't have to worry about them.  It is very obviously what each of the settings will change to help you as a player decide what it is you want your play style to be.  You don't have to think of difficulty in terms of different settings like easy, normal, heart.  You can just have a group of settings.  In the game Celeste, there was an assist mode.  You can change the game speed and whether you have visibility or not.  These were amazing.  Because these four options alone for Celeste which is a very difficult platformer game would allow lots of different people that wouldn't play to play.  I'm going to play a video for a minute.  We're going to watch someone use voice control to play Celeste.  They are not using a keyboard or controller.  Just voice.

>> They have the ability to play quite a bit more quickly.  Yes.

>> Right.  Jump six.  Up.  Jump.  Jump.  Jump.  Up.  Front.  Dash.  Right.  Dash up and up.  Run and jump.  Okay.  In the video we saw the player going through the beginning of levels and it has them do a bunch of different long jumps and dashes.  There's strikes on the ground.  Because the player was able to turn on the invincible and because they could have infinite stamina, they were able to use the voice controls.  They weren't perfect.  They had a lot of spikes.  For the player that couldn't play the game as it was written for the normal controllers, this allows them to play.  It was hard for them.  This was their first time they were able to get in under five minutes.  They were trying to play as fast as they could on the level.  It took lots of tries.  I think it was to to 30 tries.  With these settings to do that.  Game difficulty settings allow players with all sorts of abilities to enjoy the game at a level that works for them.  And you can also not only just have individual settings, but customize different aspects of the difficulty and create their own experience through configurable settings.  This is called passive fist.  They have individual controls for the enemy strength and how much encounters that you'll have and how much -- the combo master that you need to get and resourcefulness.  Excuse me.  How much resources, I think it was that you can encounter.  Each of those can allow the player to choose the difficulty for them.  Of course difficulty settings don't have to be sliders or switches.  You can think outside of the box.  In the example is super giant game, their difficulty settings were the idols or the lenders and other games that you could enable at any time.  They increase @ difficulty of the game in the single aspect making enemies harder and making more health.  You could mix and match those different difficulties to create the experience that you had most fun with.  Of course doing that also then rewarded extra experience points for the users.  It gave them an incentive to try things that were harder to increase that difficulty.  Here are just kind of the short list noncomprehensive of different examples of difficulty settings.  You you could have a practice mode or allowing players to go and over and over and over.  Think about the road where you have to go many, many times in the first part just to get to the later parts.  If you keep dying at the later parts, then all you have to do is the beginning parts over and over and over again.  So your skill you can master those beginning parts really well.  You'll quickly become bored of them.  It is the end part that you need well.  20 minutes of things that you mastered can be really boring.  That can help someone.  You can have an exploration or story mode that removes all difficulty settings and just for them to have fun and explore the world.  Great for dialogue heavy where the action but more of the story progression is the theme.  Things manual save points allow them to save right before tricky things and be able to reset right to the point without having to go through all of the other stuff that they did.  World skips and sort of like a world save but allow players to skip to different parts quickly if they've gotten and done the beginning.  There's also adjust the game speed.  Make it faster or slower to help give people more reaction time to what they are doing.  We saw that in the  Celeste video to say their input.  Invisibility is a practice mode that lets players have fun without worrying about death.  You can increase their stats giving them more health, more endurance, stamina, or do the same for the enemies.  Give them less health.  Any of the numbers that your game has to determine what happens, you could make a difficulty setting.  It is great about difficulty settings is that players will naturally play at a difficulty above their skill level.  That's because that's where the fun is.  Players don't want to be bored.  They don't want to experience frustration.  They find what works best for them to experience the game in a way that's fun.  To recap there's a lot of information.  Provide difficulty options for your players.  Allow players to fine tune their experience.  You can -- through different difficulty settings or have more settings that expose different knobs.  Think outside of the box.  You don't have to do sliders or you don't have to do different settings.  You can have things like super giant games.  If you want more information, go to gameaccessibilityguidelines.com and accessible.game/accessible player-experiences.  If you haven't heard of him he does fantastic game design and taking current games and past games.  He did entire series on accessibility in games.  He can further get more information from.  All right.  Let's put that all in the practice.  Let's try to make it a game accessible with just a couple of minutes that we have left.  Here's Arkanoid.  It is like breakouts.  You have a ball on the bottom of your screen that you pass off to hit different bricks.  The bricks have different colors.  The colors represent the points that you'll get for knocking them down.  And sometimes those bricks can't be knocked down.  The color like the gray ones you can't use the ball.  They will bounce right off.  They don't break.  So what -- everything that we've learned, what are some things maybe we could do to make the game more accessible?  So first we could, you know, applying the color contrast and make sure that maybe that light blue brick color doesn't contrast really way.  We can change the color of the brick to make it contrast better.  Maybe we could have an option for the darker overlay to make the blue standout of the brick better.  Because the bricks have different colors that represent different points or whether you can or can't break them, we should also make sure those colors aren't their own way of conveying those meanings.  Maybe we add icons to each of the bricks or color pattern that help let the player know which bricks they can break and which bricks they can't break.  If we were talking about controls, maybe the game was designed to use WASD.  We want to make sure to allow them to do something that works best for them.  Things of the nature.  We can also make sure they have some enemies on the top of the screen.  It is hard to see as well.  They are multishaped circular blobs.  They don't stand out so well.  Maybe we add a white outline to the enemies to help them contrast.  This is a very old game.  There's lots of things we can do to help improve it.  Let's try a more modern game.  Breath of the wild.  Here they have a puzzle.  Where you have to make -- if you are familiar with the old Marvell game labyrinth.  You have to take the knobs through the game.  Zelda did this.  We'll make you familiar.  They had the player example the puzzle and then they have controls which are tilting the entire game itself.  The switch pad that you'll tilt that and that tilt motion is reflected in the labyrinth puzzle moving the marble and the blocks and the circular orb that you are trying to get to the end goal through the game.  There's lots of little holes and no walls on some of the edges that you can follow through.  So what could we do for this game to make it more accessible?  Well, for one because the game relies on the input to tilt to move the labyrinth.  We can make that better.  If that doesn't work, let's rematch the controls to the arrow keys or the controller key pad or thumb stick or whatever.  Make sure if the player isn't able to tilt, that means they can still play the puzzle.  Other things we can do is maybe the walls aren't exactly the most apparent.  Make sure they have good contrast against the background.  Make sure the player understands where the walls are.  Maybe we can help them again add an outline to the walls so that players understand where the boundaries are compared to the game and floor and the outside.  If the -- they did a pretty good job there.  The ball is a bright orange color.  You can see it against that background.  There's always something.  If we look a game, I'm sure there's something we could do.  Maybe the font size for the control captions is pretty small.  We could have an option.  There's all things we can do.  If we look at the game from the design point of view and keep all of what we learn in the session in mind, there are always ways to improve the accessibility for someone to help them play a game that works best for them.  We're going to end five minutes early.  If you have any questions, post them in the Q & A chat.  If you want to connect with me, there's my contact.

>> Excellent.  That was so good.

>> I developed the HTML elements that mimic what the game has itself.  If you are using unity or go dot or whatever the game frameworks, they may have their own tools.  You'll have to go investigate.  I'm not familiar with all of them.  Specifically for accessibility.

>> So what you are saying is this sounds like an opportunity for somebody out there, the community, to build some tools; right?

>> Probably.  I only development in a couple.  I know there's lots of tools.

>> I'm with you on that.  That's awesome.  So I think we are right at time, everyone.  I'm sorry we couldn't get to every single question here.  There were so many great questions.  Each out to Steven.  He has his social profiles linked there.  Do reach out.  We would love to hear from you.  Thank you so much, Steven.  That was great.  I really appreciate everyone joining today.  Thanks.

>> Thank you for having me.