Q.
What’s at the top of your wishlist of accessibility wins - big or small - for the year ahead?
“I’d love to see more accessibility roles across the industry and for it to be recognised as its own discipline. We can’t get the work done without investing in the people that make
it happen” Stacey Jenkins
Let’s hope the next crop of Star Wars games are as accessible as Jedi Survivor
Laura Dale: I am a big believer that 2024 is going to be the year where High Contrast Mode becomes something of an industry standard, crossing the threshold where more AAA publishers have implemented it into one of their games than those who have not. It’s a hugely with vision and cognitive disabilities, and I am frequency.
I hope this year we see a big budget game attempt to include audio descriptions not just during cutscenes, but during gameplay too, in a 3D game. It’s obviously a hugely challenging hurdle to overcome - providing audio descriptions in a non-static medium, outside of controlled and scripted sequences - but I believe it’s a step we need to see. Even if that audio description support is small, something like describing changes in weather or the appearance of new locations introduced outside of cutscenes, seeing audio descriptions a necessary step toward true implementation of them.
Ian Hamilton: There are some things that I think are a given for the year ahead, like the spread of high contrast modes and audio description. But what I’d really love to see is meaningful progress on what is by far the most commonly complained about accessibility issue - text size. It’s such an issue because of the played. a 40” TV at 10 feet is still a common setup, but games aren’t made or tested like that. Some studios have ‘living room’ setups, but even those are typically the biggest TV that company money can buy crammed into a small room. The way that game UIs are currently even for typical use let alone people with low vision or playing on devices like Steam Deck,
Switch, or streaming consoles to smartphones. UIs are pretty much, in the same way that websites were in the early 2000s, a single static design. That changed when mobile browsing began to have an impact: the web shifted to responsive design frameworks that rearrange space is available. Game UI needs to go through frameworks that are capable of supporting the environmental and physical variance that players encompass. We’ve already seen a little bit of it in will spread rapidly once there are some good examples out there. So I hope that 2024 will be the year that those start to appear.
Laura Dale: I hope we see more developers recognise cognitive accessibility as a pillar of accessibility alongside motor, hearing, and vision. In particular, I’d love to see innovation in supporting autistic players in understanding non verbal subtext.
Cari Watterton: I would like to see more games looking at multi-sensory feedback; the possibility through innovations in audio and haptics is really exciting. It would also be great to see more instances of accessibility by design. By this, I mean developers doing more to make their features more intrinsically accessible without the need for particular settings to be switched on to run during gameplay (as opposed to keeping to inclusion.
Laura Dale: I hope, perhaps foolishly, that Nintendo addresses accessibility in regard to the Switch 2 in some small way. Even if that
30 | MCV/DEVELOP April/May 2024
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