[games_access] gameaccessibilityguidelines.com launched

[Brannon Zahand]

This is a fantastic site; what a great resource! I've already passed this along to a number of individuals within our organization.

Great work.

Take care,

Brannon Zahand | LIVE Business Operations | brannonz at microsoft.com<mailto:brannonz at microsoft.com> | Gamertag: Tenchi

From: games_access-bounces at igda.org [mailto:games_access-bounces at igda.org] On Behalf Of Ian Hamilton
Sent: Monday, September 3, 2012 6:32 AM
To: games_access at igda.org
Subject: [games_access] gameaccessibilityguidelines.com launched

Hi all

I'm very happy to be able to announce a site launch -  http://www.gameaccessibilityguidelines.com<http://www.gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/> .

It is intended to be a simple but extensive accessibility checklist for game studios to work from, covering as wide a range of considerations as possible while still remaining a simple to follow checklist - of real value from the accessibility side, but also practical and usable from the developer side.

The guidelines are categorised into basic/intermediate/advanced, based on a few factors but most importantly taking into account cost to develop, something crucial when dealing with any commercial organisation but rarely seen in accessibility guidelines for any industry.

There have been quite a few really nice extensive guideline projects in the past (Sandra has a great archive of them), but for a few reasons this is quite different to other approaches that have been taken in the past, it builds upon them very nicely and should also be quite complimentary to existing advice like GASIG/SE's top tens and another developer accessibility project that's due to be released soon.

It has been a collaborative project between a mix of game studios, specialists and academics. They're quite purposefully unaffiliated, so that the way is paved for them in future to be combined with other efforts and ideally one day taken on by an industry body/consortium.

Although it's not an IGDA-GASIG project, the contributors include several GASIG members - myself, Barrie, Lynsey, Thomas and Dimitris.

As well as the studios that helped to develop the guidelines we've spoken to quite a few others, from small indies to large AAAs, with lots of great support, and several games already in development that are using the guidelines. All of the people working on the project have given up their time for free, so it has been great to see that their efforts are already bearing fruit.

The next step is awareness raising so if you like the project please do pass on word via Twitter etc, either to the site itself or to the press release that Dimoso have put out about it:

http://www.gameaccessibilityguidelines.com<http://www.gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/>

http://www.realwire.com/releases/Making-video-gaming-accessible-to-all-guidelines-to-help-game-developers-meet-the-needs-of-the-20-of-gamers-who-have-disabilities-published-today

Ian
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