What Accessibility Means to Me

Growing up I never felt like a gamer. I would watch countless hours of gameplay and lore videos on YouTube, so I would know more than almost anyone around me about video games. However, I found that many games I would try to play weren’t built for me. I had a hard time with games that needed me to be exact with my movements, games with lots of words, or games that were particularly punishing.

Daily life as a kid was hard for me. I have dyslexia and ADHD, so it was a daily battle to get any assignments done. Everything around me, including myself, told me that I wasn’t as smart as everyone else. I wanted to escape to a world where that didn’t matter, where I could just be myself and not be punished for how my brain worked. Yet, many of the available games focused on punishing the player until they were a master.

I am now at a point where I play hundreds of hours on games, but I only got here thanks to some wonderful game designers who focused on making experiences for players like me. I now feel like there are games that I can fully escape to. This has inspired me to make other experiences for people like me, people that many games just aren’t made for.

“Nothing About Us Without Us”

Disability in Game Development

Being “an outcast” has been part of video game culture from the beginning. Video games have been a way for anyone to connect, no matter their outward features or background. It has been a way for millions of people to find an escape from their daily life.

Then why do people in the disability community still have to fight tooth and nail to be heard?

As of 2022, more than 1 in 4 adults in the United States were reported to have one or more disabilities. These rates are even higher in minority groups, the same ones that have taken solace in the escape and community found in video games.

While those numbers may seem high, consider that almost everyone will develop a disability at one point or another in their lifetime. Whether that be our natural aging process, an accidental injury, or an illness. Everyone deserves to be able to pick up their favorite game, and it is our responsibility to ensure they get that chance.

Why Community Input is Necessary

The phrase “nothing about us without us” has been a mantra picked up by many communities over the years. Originally it was created to express that no policies should be decided by a representative without the input and participation of the group’s members. The disability community has adopted this mantra for policies, physical and mental accommodations, and representation.

Media has always had a bad habit of having the majority group write and create for minority groups. This has created numerous assumptions for the greater population about what being a minority means. This has created many problems for the disability community. Only a few are what it means to have a disability, what that looks like, and how to accommodate them.

The only way to fight against these assumptions when it comes to representation and creating an accessible experience is to include people in the disability community in the production process. This could include consultation, writing, designing, producing, or engineering.

The important part is to listen, don’t just assume.

Accessibility Affects Everyone

Many features that are created with disability in mind are wildly used by the average population.

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.