[games_access] gameaccessibilityguidelines.com launched (Lynsey Graham)

[Ian Hamilton]

Loads more coverage too, some other bigs ones are Kotaku, BBC News and Game Informer.

http://kotaku.com/5940281/gaming-accessibility-project-hopes-to-help-more-developers-make-games-disabled-gamers-can-play
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19467181
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2012/09/04/game-accessibility-guidelines-published.aspx


Sounds like there are a couple more articles to come too. 

Off the back of all that coverage, even if not one single developer was to pay attention to the site, the number of gamers and even general members of the public who have now learned a bit more about accessibility has been worth everyone's time in itself, seems to have been a nice bit of awareness raising. 

It has been quite nice to see see via those articles how different attitudes are towards game accessibility now, the comments of support compared to the hate filled predjudice you used to get as standard a couple of years ago, certainly the work that  AbleGamers and SpecialEffect in particular have been doing seems to have changed attitudes quite a bit.

Sandra - 

Good question! 

Although it wasn't the initial intention we did actually end up with a couple of people being involved solely on the basis that they're disabled gamers.. one with very low vision and one quadriplegic. They weren't full contributors, but reviewed drafts. 

Some conditions were naturally present amongst the people contributing - Gareth from the BBC is strongly dyslexic and his son is an avid gamer with cerebral palsy, Brynley from Headstrong is completely red-green colourblind (and left handed, which is often forgotten about!) and so on, and also Jake from Aardman, myself, Gareth and Barrie all work directly with lots of disabled gamers as part of our day jobs.

There has been quite a large amount of feedback from disabled gamers since launch, on article comments and directly by email, all saying that the guidelines will help them personally if adopted. 

The one exception that has been suggested missing is quite an interesting one, a person with tunnel vision suggesting to avoid placing notifications along the edges of the screen, as he's unable to play games like God of War 2 with its screen-edge quick-time events, see the orange circle at the bottom-right here:

http://1.2.3.9/bmi/static.gamesradar.com/images/mb/GamesRadar/us/Games/G/God%20Of%20War%203/Everything%20Else/Super%20Review/quicktimeversus--article_image.jpg


Really though the knowledge of how to cater for disabled gamers is already there, the important thing to get right was how to communicate that effectively to developers, so getting the standards consultant and the various games studios involved was absolutely vital. 

As well as the contibutors themselves there have been several other developers (can't say who they are unfortunately due to NDAs having to be signed, but range from a one man indie all the way up to one of the top grossing AAAs) looking over drafts too, even adopting them early so they could start using them for upcoming games straight away, so hopefully what we've got is something that manages to convey the huge amount of information in a simple and clear enough way for time-starved developers to understand and be able to use as a quick reference.

Ian


> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2012 16:40:36 +0100
> From: Lynsey Graham <lgraham at blitzgamesstudios.com>
> Subject: Re: [games_access] gameaccessibilityguidelines.com launched
> To: 'IGDA Games Accessibility SIG Mailing List'
> 	<games_access at igda.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<57dba4e4-44b1-4474-99a2-96ddebdafb8d at blitzgamesstudios.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> It's getting some good press, in addition to the stuff from the BBC and Rock Paper Shotgun that Ian mentioned:
>  
> http://www.develop-online.net/news/41870/Accessibility-guidelines-help-devs-welcome-gamers-with-disabilities
>  
> I'm glad to be a part of it! J
>  
>  
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2012 19:09:44 +0200
> From: "Sandra Uhling" <sandra_uhling at web.de>
> Subject: [games_access] question about the new guidelines
> To: "'IGDA Games Accessibility SIG Mailing List'"
> 	<games_access at igda.org>
> Message-ID: <006001cd8b89$3f800f70$be802e50$@de>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I got the question if gamer with disability were included
> in this project.
> 
> Best regards,
> Sandra
> 
> 

 		 	   		  
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