Leveling the Playing Field: The Importance of Accessibility in Video Games

There are well over three billion video game players in the world, and more than 400 million have some form of disability. For players with vision, hearing, or motor issues, the gaming experience can be less than enjoyable, if not completely inaccessible. At TransPerfect Gaming, we believe all players deserve a rich and immersive experience. We specialize in helping video game creators like you ensure your games have accessibility features that make gameplay more user-friendly, which ultimately helps you expand your audience and increase gamer involvement.

A Brief History of Accessibility in Gaming

Until the last five to 10 years, gaming accessibility features were few and far between. For example, the original Nintendo Entertainment System had a hands-free controller, but it was pricey and difficult to find. Before that, there was a smattering of features, such as alternate game modes, control remapping, and graphics options like field of view (FOV) sliders. However, these were not introduced as accessibility features. Players who needed these types of features were the ones who discovered they could help. 

The Xbox adaptive controller in 2018 was one of the first big changes to the accessibility landscape. Within the last three years, features like full game-assist modes (enabling access by 100% blind players), colorblind modes, and even great options for subtitles (such as customizations on what is captioned and styling options) have become available and even expected with more popular titles. 

Accessibility features have also become part of a cultural discussion around gaming. Some streamers and reviewers have been known to judge a game more harshly if it fails to feature key accessibility options. It’s up to each player to decide whether or not these criticisms should impact the overall reception of a game, but more discussion surrounding these features is definitely a good thing.

Innovations for Visually Impaired Players

Visual accessibility options can make a world of difference for players with a loss of visual acuity or color vision. Consider color blindness. Many people who are color blind have trouble seeing red and green or difficulty differentiating between certain colors. In-game options can alter the color of certain objects to make them more discernible to color-blind players. This can be seen in the Call of Duty games, where objective markers that would normally appear in shades of red and green can be customized to colors of the player’s choosing. 

Another form of visual accessibility is the zoom function. The Nintendo Switch has a version of this feature that enables players to zoom in as closely as they need with a double tap of the home button. Players can even lock the screen in place, allowing them to remain zoomed in for the duration of gameplay.

Enhancements for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Players

In the world of gaming, audio cues can make a life-or-death difference. Being able to hear an attack coming is important when you’re going for that victory royale. But what happens if a player can’t hear the warning signs? With features like subtitles, live and offline closed captioning, and alternate audio feedback, gameplay becomes more accessible for players who are deaf or hard of hearing. These features help players with things they might have missed, such as a line of dialogue that may have been obscured by some poorly mixed audio or a crucial detail that’s needed for plot progression. 

With live subtitles for events and captions during gaming, players are kept in the loop about the audio cues happening in a game. Additionally, games like Fortnite have options to display sounds as visual cues, telling the player where, for example, a shot may have been fired from. These features, while primarily meant for players who are deaf or hard of hearing, can also benefit other players. For example, Fortnite streamers will often play with the previously mentioned option to display sounds visually, as it may help them know exactly where an enemy player fired from instead of having to gauge it from sound alone. These features are also used when speed-running games, since missing critical information by even just a few seconds could cost someone a world record-pace run.

Sign Language Adds Context

You may wonder about the necessity of integrating American Sign Language (ASL) alongside subtitles or closed captions. Adding ASL can help deaf and hard-of-hearing players interpret the tone of dialogue a lot better than just reading it. Many people also consider sign language as their primary language, and from their testimonies, many subtle differences can make reading the standard English subtitles quite challenging. 

For now, the availability of ASL in games has been fairly limited, with the only notable example being found in Forza Horizon 5, where a sign language interpreter appears in the bottom corner during sections in which dialogue is read aloud. At TransPerfect, we are working to further integrate sign language into more games.

Game Assist: Built-in Accessibility Features

Game assist encompasses features that are built into a game. An example is difficulty options, which allow players to tailor the intensity of a game to their liking. If they want a challenge, they can set the game to hard or even nightmare mode. If they want a more relaxing experience or want to focus on the storyline vs. gameplay, they can play on an easier difficulty setting. 

One of the most hot-button debates in the gaming space revolves around difficulty options in games that are engineered to be difficult such as FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series. Some feel as though allowing players to play through the game on an easier difficulty cheapens the experience, as the main draw of Dark Souls is dying over and over again until you’ve learned the bosses’ patterns well enough to defeat them. While these players’ points are valid, the addition of difficulty options in games like these shouldn’t take away from the main experience. The game is still designed with the base difficulty in mind, so including an easy mode shouldn’t dampen the game any more than including a super-hard mode would. 

In addition, these options have a secondary purpose in that they make games more accessible to people with decreased motor function. By allowing them to play on lower-difficulty settings, they can still experience the story and world that the developers crafted. Some games even provide features such as auto-combat, in which the game will essentially play itself during more intense sequences. This enables disabled players to play through the game at their own pace, rather than needing to rely on watching somebody else play it. 

Other features such as pathing and snap-to-objective navigation assistance help players better understand their current objective and guide them straight to it, while alternative control schemes allow players to customize the game’s controls to their preference. Games such as Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2 have such in-depth accessibility features that multiple completely blind gamers have been able to make their way through the game—on the hardest difficulty setting. Thanks to the game’s many accessibility features, such as text-to-speech, lock-on aim/auto-targeting, and audio cues for traversal and combat, players who were not able to play the 2013 original due to the lack of accessibility features can now experience the whole story. Even just a decade ago, something like this would have seemed completely unthinkable, but that just shows how rapidly accessibility in gaming is truly evolving.

Final Thoughts

At TransPerfect Gaming, we are passionate about making video games accessible to everyone. Having worked alongside companies such as OliveX, Blizzard, and Xbox, we have the experience to bring your game to as wide of an audience as possible. We offer game design consultation, and we’ll test your game using certified accessibility experts—people who actively use and need the features you are implementing. Gaming accessibility has come a long way, and we continue to look for new ways to ensure that no gamer is left behind.

Ready to start a project? Check out our page to learn more.