mode or feature. Accessibility by design where we can means we only have to design features once, without needing to save time and budget for additional features.
Laura Dale: From personal experience, as someone who has been doing consulting work with studios, I’ve not seen a reduction personally in the number of studios reaching out with paid work opportunities for external consultants, or a reduction in their willingness to pay common consulting rates. The sense I get is that as much as companies are cutting jobs broadly across the industry right now, anyone in a dedicated accessibility focused job role seems to be pretty safe. I don’t know how much of that is to do with the fact that it would from your studio if that’s an established role you created, as it would appear like your company was backing down from accessibility initiatives, and actively letting down disabled players. It might in part be because there is passion for accessibility initiatives internally, and a recognition that increased accessibility does seem to have an impact on game sales.
SightlessKombat: I haven’t seen or heard any evidence directly, but I do wonder whether might have an impact in terms of getting people involved either internally or externally. Accessibility can be hard enough to get moving
as it is - here’s hoping the current situation doesn’t create even further pushback. I think it’s often overlooked how inexpensive accessibility can be to implement if you start early enough, with initiatives like RNIB’s Design For Every Gamer (DFEG) Player Panel being one example of a resource in the form of end users with lived experience. Utilisation of such resources could help keep accessibility on track for growth even in this challenging time for the industry.
Laura Dale: What I do worry about, outside of direct accessibility job roles being axed, is more general loss of talent. A lot of the work done developing accessibility features is done by people whose job isn’t dedicated create innovative features, and those features are not well documented, you’ll likely see studios struggle to replicate features they were easily transferred between projects. Thankfully, most of the big companies right now we think of in terms of gaming accessibility, PlayStation, Xbox, Ubisoft, they all seem to have structures in place to knowledge spread wide across studios. My hope is that will be enough to see at least these companies maintaining their current levels of accessibility, maintaining their own standards rather than noticeably sliding back.
24 | MCV/DEVELOP April/May 2024
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