Last week we saw how the video game industry has taken up accessibility issues in recent years to meet the needs of players with disabilities. In this second episode, we are going to take a closer look at concrete actions implemented by video game manufacturers, publishers and developers.
Read also :
Episode 1 - From Xbox Adaptive Controler to Ratchet & Clank: 6 years of accessibility evolution
Episode 3 - Overcoming and making disability visible
Episode 2: Manufacturers, publishers: what projects are underway?
At the end of August 2021, the publisher Electronic Arts announced that it would make public certain patents and accessibility-oriented technologies used by the company in its games. A stated objective: to allow competitors and developers from all walks of life to benefit from the advances made by the company in the field of accessibility in video games. "The opening of these patents will encourage them to create new features that will make video games even more inclusive" can be read on their site.
The news was, to begin with, about five specific patents developed to help gamers with vision, speech, hearing and cognitive impairments. We find at the head of the gondola the now famous Ping system used in Apex Legends which allows you to give indications on the map to other players with a simple press of a button, without having to speak. Also included are systems and methods for automated image and contrast processing as well as real-time personalized audio generation systems.
For the older ones, lead the way
Obviously, these technologies have been developed thanks to the large portfolio of the publisher and the smallest players in the industry cannot afford to do this today. This is why the biggest players have an important role to play in the development and transmission of these accessibility-oriented technologies.
"It's up to the biggest to show the way. When you're talking to millions of people, you have to carry this kind of message."
Ina Gelbert, director of Xbox Spagne.
“The Xbox Accessibility Guidelines go in this direction. We make our resources available for the smallest studios. It's a real investment by the company (which has a team dedicated to accessibility), we go all out and not just to look pretty”.
Launched in 2020, the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines consist of a large open web page, developed in collaboration with insiders with disabilities, centralizing best practices, accessibility development tips and resources available to anyone who wants them. At the same time, Xbox makes it a point of honor to develop specifications for its internal studios in order to respect a minimum of instructions for accessibility options and thus offer better experiences for players with disabilities.
At Sony Interactive Entertainment, work on accessibility is also in full swing. The video game giant also has a division dedicated to the development of accessibility options within the PlayStation Studios User Research team. As at Xbox, SIE designed accessibility guidelines internally in 2015 for its first-party studios, which are invited to improve their base and develop new solutions. As Mark Friend, Lead User Reserchear at SIE, explains:
"There's more to accessibility in game development than just following suggested guidelines. These provide a superb knowledge base, but we also want to make sure that studios are free to explore new and innovative ways to make their games more accessible."
In addition to this new knowledge made available to studios and developers in general, the big players do not forget their other mission: to inform the people concerned. In this, whether Xbox, Sony, Electronic Arts or Ubisoft, everyone is now setting up information portals for their upcoming games. Unlike several years ago, it is now possible to obtain information very easily on the accessibility options of the game that interests us by going to the sites of the publishers or developers. It also happens more and more frequently that, when you launch a game, it offers you as soon as it starts to customize your accessibility options before even arriving on the main menu. A welcome comfort for everyone.
On the side of development software, to directly help people who work on a video game, the options and support on their part are unfortunately still too few. Unity offers a very limited selection of assets, paid and free, geared towards accessibility, but developed and shared directly by the community. Unreal Engine, for its part, had set up a series of free courses on accessibility last year, unfortunately not found on the company's site at the time of this writing.
Listening directly to the people concerned
But is all this enough? A large number of the people questioned for the writing of this file, and even if the advances are very real, do not however feel sufficiently consulted or listened to in spite of increasingly visible speeches. “Indeed, there are so many people to hear that it is very complicated to get all the feedback, which leads, yes, logically to frustration for some people,” admits Ina Gelbert. Add to this the enormous diversity of existing disabilities and their variants and we realize that even with the greatest efforts in the world, it is very difficult to satisfy everyone, especially given the backlog accumulated in recent years. But this does not mean that these companies only work in their corner.
Xbox has set up the Xbox Accessibility Insiders League program which allows anyone to register so that they can test accessibility options and provide feedback to the company. Sony Interactive Entertainment works regularly with specialized consultants and each company, at a more local level (on the scale of a country where they are established), follows and listens to personalities and influencers with disabilities, who have a larger community. wide.
Some smaller companies have decided to work directly with the people concerned. This is the case of Evil Empire, the studio that took over the development of Dead Cells after Motion Twin decided to focus on new projects. The studio posted a tweet last January asking the gaming community if they had any recommendations to help make the famous rogue-lite more accessible.
" Finally ! would you be tempted to answer and, indeed, the development teams of Dead Cells could not look into the question before. According to Bérenger Dupré, Brand manager at Evil Empire, it was due to a lack of time and resources that Dead Cells had not yet received an accessibility update, despite its millions of players worldwide. “Accessibility has always been a subject for us, but we were fully in the work of the three DLCs planned for the game. Now, with the paid DLCs released and their success, we have been able to enlarge the team and save time man so that he can finally start working seriously on it".
For the game teams, if they are working with consultants on the issue, developing such features when no one is directly involved makes the task more difficult. "Without the expertise of the people concerned, there is no interest, no question of copying, we want to do everything correctly" adds the brand manager. An Alpha version of the game was also deployed on April 12 with a long list of accessibility options (color customization, automatic attacks, continuous mode rather than final death).
Next week, you will find the very last part of this great dossier. Finally, we will focus on players with disabilities, their way of overcoming shortcomings in terms of accessibility and the role of associations.
