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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

And it should be. Games are played by people with poor eye-sight, or with coordination problems, too.

"Game Maker's Toolkit" does an overview of accessibility in games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWQcuBigOj0

It really depends on the game. Too many games rely on visuals as the primary form of output in a way that simply cannot be made particularly accessible, outside of the obvious things, which many newer games at least seem to address, to various extents, as shown in the GMTK: colorblind modes, large text[1], on-screen icons for sounds, no quick-time events or other twitch controls.

Having said that, I think The Last of Us 2 needs to be studied more as they appear to have done an amazing job with accessibility, given that a blind player was able to complete it. Maybe other developers can learn from that.

[1] And a personal pet peeve of mine: pixel art games using pixellated fonts. I find most pixel fonts extremely difficult to read. When I posted about that on r/gamedev once I just got yelled at because "artistic vision", but your artistic vision is useless if I can't play the game. At least give me the option to use a normal, crisp font.

I don't know why you are downvoted, while you state correct viewpoint IMHO. The accessibility is not just about screen-reading but also options that make our contact with the virtual product be more pleasant (e.g. resizeable UI, non-transparent background under subtitles). There are also many indie, slow-paced games that do not have any kind of voice-acting (well, most of tycoons), where even Windows Narrator will be enough. Please note, you don't have to be a blind person to use assistive software - there are a lot of people wearing a corrective glasses, who might use some screen reader.

Will I get scolded for not having implemented accessibility features into my yet-to-be-released game? Pull requests implementing those will be welcome though.

No, you won't. All I'm saying is, games are apps, and they should also acquire accessibility features. Many games do, and we can do better than the current status quo.

"mostly for video games, so not really a concern" should be downvoted, not the people who say that games should think about accessibility.

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