Game Accessibility Guidelines

In this day and age I expect every game to allow control remapping, certainly on PC but even on console I feel it’s warranted, to the point where I get mildly annoyed when they’re not remappable, even if I don’t intend on actually doing it.

I think a big part of that is I use colemak, so if a game uses layout-aware controls (rather that physical key location scan codes or whatever), then I can’t play with a keyboard unless I can remap it. I won’t change my layout just for a game, too much hassle (and I’ve always had weird issues about default layout when having multiple layouts setup for quick switching).

Most PC games do allow remapping these days, thankfully. Browser game’s usually don’t but I don’t tend to play them anyway.

Also, pass that on to Mozilla, which still doesn't allow Firefox extensions to remap controls (until a given tab has loaded).

There's an annoying manifestation of this where some games only partially allow remapping controls. For example, when Cyberpunk 2077 was released, it was not possible to rebind to some keys or rebind some actions.

Another pattern I've noticed is some games do not respect Windows' mouse button settings. If other left handed mousers are like me and swap the primary and secondary mouse buttons, they'll probably have noticed that some games ignore this setting and seemingly hard code primary and secondary mouse buttons to be left and right click respectively. The key bindings are understandable to me because nowhere in Windows does it let me set IJKL as my WASD. But I know it's possible to get the primary and secondary mouse button config from the OS but some games ignore or are ignorant of this fact.

Wherever I rebind my keys, I usually start with movement from WASD to IJKL. For everything else, I basically mirror what the default setting is to the right side of the keyboard.

F > H E > U R > Y Q > O C > N L Tab > any of P, Colon, Apostrophe, L square bracket L Shift> any of whatever I didn't use for L Tab X > Comma or M (though comma makes more sense because my right middle finger would type that so it matches developer intention for default setting)

There's actually more keys to choose from on the right side of the keyboard that you can reach with your pinky. This is significant because in some games being able to press buttons while maintaining movement can be advantageous.

Nothing is worse than hard-coded controls in general. Completely screws up my muscle memory. It's also disrespectful because the game designers think they know my preferences better than I do.

> I'd love to support screen readers / do real-time text to speech transcription. Will have to research the meat and potatoes of what's involved there.

I'd be happy to guide you in the right direction with that. What engine or GUI toolkit are you using?

Do you have a couple accessibility experiences from engines you thought were good? Maybe not "compare" to avoid flame wars, but maybe some highlights.

One big gaming disappointment for me as a low vision gamer is Inkle. It's all mostly text based and yet they manage to make their games 100% inaccessible.

I think Inform 7 is a good example of a very accessible text engine. Twine is pretty accessible in some contexts / exports, but not in others,unless things have changed recently. Chioce of Games is also notably accessible, kudos to them.

How does a video game engine add support for accessibility? Is there some kind of interface they have to implement?

I think you'd need to decide whether the game is the equivalent of art, or if it's a product designed to reach as many people as possible. That's the one thing I really disagree with GMTK about; not having a ton of accessibility features doesn't necessarily mean the developer doesn't care about disabled people, it could just be that the game wants to elicit a specific emotion that doesn't translate well if the game is made more accessible. He said in one of his videos that Doom Eternal being difficult makes it innaccessible to people who aren't good at video games or have other disabilities, and implied that it isn't fair that people with accessibility issues don't get to experience the same power fantasy that everyone else does.

For example, FromSoft games (Dark Souls, Sekiro, etc.) don't have difficulty options because the developers want you to struggle and feel triumphant when you eventually succeed. People have complained for a long time about how the game is inaccessible, but FromSoft hasn't budged because that feeling of mastering the combat and beating overwhelming odds is the point of the game. If they had an easy mode where you could just run through without a care in the world, it would just be another crappy open world game.

No, that's accurate. Often making your game accessible on mobile just means not going offroad and doing your own weird thing, apps are accessible by default and you often just have to make sure to use labels correctly. At least this is true in menu or text-based games, which is more games than you would think on mobile.