I went to a games accessibility conference and came back with an alarming number of notes about education. Not because I’m planning to sneak Call of Duty into Blackboard, tempting though that is. It was because GA Conf kept returning to exactly the same questions we grapple with in digital learning:
- Who are we designing for?
- What barriers are we accidentally creating?
- And why are we still trying to fix accessibility afterwards when we could design it in from the start?
Accessibility is bigger than the disability box
One of the figures that really stuck with me came from research discussed during the opening news update. The conference presentation described 20-year-old research involving 15,000 working-age people, recently repeated with another 5,000. In both groups, 23% identified as disabled, 60% reported some or significant difficulty with everyday activities because of impairment.
The newer research also found 72% had used zoom functionality in the previous month and 50% had changed font sizes. Whatever the technology, there is a useful lesson here.
If we design accessibility only for people who have disclosed a disability, we are designing for far too narrow a group.
People enlarge text. They use captions. They change colours. They slow things down. They switch input methods. Their needs change when they are tired, stressed, injured, unwell or simply working in a less-than-ideal environment.
Accessibility is about human variation. Humans are annoyingly varied. I consider this one of their better features.
Good accessibility looks suspiciously like good design
Life Below, an accessible reef-building game created by a team of around 12 people, was one of my favourite examples. The team considered accessibility from the beginning and developed around 20 accessibility settings, including interface scaling, reduced motion, flexible controls, adjustable pacing and automatic pausing.
But here’s the interesting bit. Quite a lot of this sounds less like specialist accessibility and more like really good user experience. Clear language. Flexible interaction. Enough time to understand what’s happening. Control over how information is presented. One of the comments following the session captured it beautifully:
“Good UX design becomes great accessibility.”
That translates very easily into education. Clear structure, meaningful headings and links, captions, readable documents, predictable navigation, flexible ways to participate and enough time to process information are not niche additions. They’re good learning design.
Retrofit is an expensive hobby
Another session explored a deceptively simple idea: sometimes accessibility isn’t primarily a budget problem. It’s a timing problem. The Outer Worlds was used as an example. The presentation described fixing its small text after release as taking around three months.
The alternative? Decide before designing the interface that you’re simply not going to use tiny text. That’s not really an accessibility feature you have to add. It’s a design decision you don’t have to repair later.
Anyone who has tried to remediate a complicated Word document, PDF or learning resource may be experiencing a small shudder of recognition about now. This is exactly why I’ve become rather fond of the idea of content being born accessible. Start with good structure and accessible choices and much of the later repair work simply disappears. Accessibility works much better as part of the workflow than as the clean-up operation at the end.
XR needs us to stop imagining an ‘average’ body
The XR sessions particularly grabbed me because the lessons translate so directly into immersive learning. Developers described what happened when their experiences met actual human bodies.
- Height mattered.
- Reach mattered.
- Shoulder width mattered.
- Balance, tremor, fatigue and mobility mattered.
- Pregnancy mattered.
- Even hand tracking doesn’t magically become accessible if the system expects a particular range of hand or finger movement.
Motion sickness was another substantial theme. The Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 team presented research into different visual approaches designed to reduce motion sickness, testing them with players rather than simply assuming they worked.
For me, this changes the question we should ask when considering XR in learning. Not simply: ‘Can the learner use the XR experience?’ But: What are we asking their body, senses and brain to do, and is there another way to achieve the learning if that doesn’t work for them?
That’s a much more useful starting point.
Don’t make the learner do the accessibility work
Possibly the line that stayed with me most came from a panel of gamers who use assistive technology. They described an ‘accessibility tax’: the extra money, equipment, configuration, learning and problem-solving required before they can even begin doing what everybody else is doing. (A clone of the long standing ‘Disability tax’ term common in disabled circles).
One QuadStick user described making 30 to 35 different control scripts for a single game because different parts of it required different combinations of input. That’s a lot of work before you’ve even had any fun. There was a rather lovely local example in Ian’s opening news update too: Playable, a recently opened accessible gaming centre in Gloucester where disabled and neurodivergent people can come together for barrier-free gaming and try adaptive and accessible gaming equipment.
That caught my attention. Gloucester isn’t exactly a million miles from UWE, and having somewhere people can explore different ways of accessing technology is a useful reminder that accessibility isn’t only about what we design into software. Access to the technology, the opportunity to try it, and support to find what works for you matter too.
And this absolutely isn’t just about games. Think about the student who has to reconfigure assistive technology, convert our file, decipher an inaccessible document, learn an unexpected interface, ask for another format or find a workaround before they can start the actual learning activity. The barrier hasn’t disappeared. We’ve simply handed the work of dealing with it to the learner. There is an important difference between something being technically possible to access and something being equitable to use.
Mental health is part of the experience too
AbleToPlay‘s Headspace project pushed the definition of accessibility further. Working with the games mental-health charity Safe In Our World, the team described starting with more than 80 mental-health considerations, narrowing these to 22, researching them across 120 games, and finally creating 10 standards. These look beyond conventional accessibility features to things such as gentle experiences, social connection, routine, creative expression and mental-health themes.
The interesting part for learning design isn’t that we should start rating Blackboard modules as ‘relaxing’. Although some modules might appreciate the challenge. It’s the underlying idea that how an experience feels to use matters. Cognitive load, uncertainty, sensory overload, confusing navigation and lack of control won’t necessarily appear in an automated accessibility report. They can still determine whether somebody can participate successfully.
Representation matters as well as access
One of the loveliest sessions was about Find Your Words, a free game centred on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The playable character is non-speaking but crucially isn’t a ‘silent protagonist’. Communication is central to the game. What I particularly liked was what happened when the developers realised their own lived experience wasn’t enough. Two children who used AAC communicated quite differently. One used it predominantly for requesting things; another used it much more conversationally for chatting and joking. The developers realised their original design reflected only one experience and changed it.
There’s another lesson for education hiding in there: One disabled person cannot tell us what disabled people need. Lived experience is essential, but it isn’t uniform. We need to involve people, listen, test our assumptions and be prepared to change what we’ve designed.
So, what am I bringing back to digital learning?
Quite a lot, it turns out.
- Design for variation rather than an imaginary average learner.
- Build accessibility in early.
- Give people meaningful choices in how they interact.
- Consider bodies, senses, cognition and wellbeing when we’re designing XR and other emerging technologies.
- Don’t confuse passing an accessibility check with providing a good experience.
- Test with the people who actually encounter the barriers.
And whenever somebody needs an elaborate workaround to use something we’ve designed, perhaps ask whether we could remove the barrier instead.
The technology isn’t really the important bit. Whether it’s a game, a Blackboard course, an assessment, a PDF, a video, a form, a 360° environment, an XR simulation or whatever shiny thing appears next, the question is remarkably similar:
Have we designed this around the range of humans who might actually use it?
I went to GA Conf for the games accessibility. I appear to have come back with a learning-design manifesto. Oops.
References and resources
- #GAconf SCHEDULE (Times are in PST timezone)
- IGDA GASIG YouTube Channel live streams GA conference simultaneously. The recordings will go up once they have been edited, you can also access previous conference recordings. Brilliantly, you can access their edited recordings to suit your preferences:
- Closed Captions (CC) human edited
- American Sign Language (ASL)
- British Sign Language (BSL)
- Audio Described (AD)
- AbleToPlay publicly confirms its personalised accessibility matching model and states that its service covers thousands of games and creators.
- Can I play that? – For disabled gamers, by disabled gamers
- Playable gaming Gloucester
- Ubisoft launched the Accessible Games Initiative which helps players find games that fit their accessibility needs based on tags and storefronts. This is being adopted more widely across major game development companies.
- Metaverse Standards Forum MSF Accessibility Guidelines