You make a game. You want the world to play it. So you, being a smart game dev, ask around and are told to think about accessibility early and often. But why.
First, it is difficult to re-do mechanics and features after time and resources have been poured into them. It’s smarter to design accessibility into your game from the start. I did a lot of research for Call Me Cera to see what makes sense for my game and what is realistic on my shoestring budget.
I started by thinking of the player experience. Call me Cera is a visual novel so the question that immediately came to mind was how do blind and visually impaired people play text games? Twitter is a wonderful tool when you’re lost and I’m grateful that when I asked my followers, I was flooded with generous explanations. I spent a few days researching NVDA, Jaws, large font options that don’t disrupt the aesthetic of the game, text to speech plugins, and fonts that are autistic/dyslectic friendly. All this from asking those affected by the issue.
Then I realized there are music cues. So I brainstormed a way to visually show what I hope the player feels when the music is played so that deaf and hearing impaired people can get the same sensation and not miss out on that part of the experience. All of this before a line of code was written.
Beyond that I was lost, so I visited a highly recommended website: http://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/
During my research, I noticed many developers saying that if certain gamers can’t play their game, it isn’t their fault. Putting aside the insensitivity of this statement and the flawed reasoning (after all, we already agreed we want the world to play the game you worked so hard on…), this mindset says that the player, the human, is broken. Here’s the reality: Your game is broken, not the player. The player needs to play the game. If they can’t, that means there’s something wrong with your game. To not at least make an attempt to build an accessible game is to say that the person is broken. That there is something wrong with them so this is off limits to them. In this time where we constantly strive to improve our lives via technology, this mindset is archaic and discriminatory. It is more than a concept of equality. It is creating a game with your player in mind. And if you want your player to be as many people as possible, make sure you build it so everyone can enjoy it.
Nobody is perfect. But if you planted a beautiful garden in the middle of a thick forest on top of a mountain, don’t blame the player for not visiting your garden. No amount of marketing will help if your audience can’t access it. Don’t expect your audience to show up with a machete and brave the forest for your game, especially in a saturated indie market. Want people to play your game? Stop treating accessibility like a thoughtful addition and start respecting it for what it is: good game design.