Accessibility

Making a game accessible means ensuring that it is playable and enjoyable by people with a variety of disabilities or control preferences. A great many guides and sets of standards exist online to help you with this process. One such guide is Game Accessibility Guidelines.

Common Accessibility Concerns

Vision

• Color should not be the only way that essential information is communicated.
• Create a strong contrast between text and the background.
• Use a readable & accessible font and font size.
• Space GUI elements well.
• Provide customization features like allowing the player to change the font and font size size.

Movement

• Allow users the option to toggle flashing images or effects on or off in the settings.
• Allow users to adjust the intensity or turn off camera shakes.
• Making sure that moving images or videos do not flash more than three times a second.

Mobility & Reaction Time

• Allow users a way to continue through the game without playing minigames.
• Allow remapping of controls.
• Allow all functions to be accessed using either mouse or keyboard, to the extent possible.
• Provide alternatives for holding down buttons.
• Some of the stuff in the vision might also help with mobility, since bigger buttons might be easier to click or tap than smaller ones.

Hearing

• Provide subtitles or visual representations of sound effects and music changes.
• Allow users to change the volume of different components (such as music, sound effects, and voice acting) independently of each other.
• When voice acting conveys a character's mood in other ways than just through words, make the same information understandable from visual cues, such as expression changes.

Other

• Provide history and/or rollback options. This might help people who accidentally advance the dialogue before they meant to.
• Put icons on buttons so that people with dyslexia can see what they are without having to read them or rely on audio to tell them apart.
• Use side images or highlight the speaking character: when there's several characters on screen and the only thing telling you who's speaking is a name, people might not know which name is which character. Mouth animations can also help with this.