Accessibility in games
How the industry delivers inclusive gaming experience, and what we could learn from it
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In the early 2000s, purchasing a copy of a PC game was an adventure. You would head down to the shop with friends, pick a DVD (or a fat box of CDs: looking at you, Fable: The Lost Chapters), and flip the box to check the system requirements. To me, nothing was quite as disappointing as realising that my old laptop with 256Mb of RAM won’t be able to run a game everyone else in my class was obsessed with. Nevertheless, minimum requirements, printed on the box in bold, not only caused a multitude of heartbreaks, but saved me from many more, making sure I could enjoy the rare game I would end up purchasing.
Standardised labels make it easier for people to discover products that meet their requirements, be it software compatibility or accessibility adjustments. The latter, by the way, is finally coming to life: in March 2025, Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and others announced the formation of the Accessible Games Initiative: a project designed to help users identify accessibility features in video games with a series of unified tags, like “text-to-speech” or “playable with mouse only”. The tags, available for all to use, are intended, among other things, to inspire developers to keep accessibility in mind while working on their games.
This announcement made me feel excited and curious: I may not be an avid gamer, but even I can see how these labels can benefit any user, even those who don’t rely on assistive tech. How does accessibility work in games? How do game designers create inclusive titles, and what can we possibly learn from them?
Who is in control?
When I was 5 years old, Microsoft Word was my favourite game: mum showed me how to type, and was consumed by the vast possibilities it had opened, from writing my own name over and over in different fonts to drawing figures and tables (nerd).
One of my first proper games was the Freddi Fish series, cute interactive whodunnits that followed Freddi (the yellow one) and Luther (small, green, adorable) solving mysteries all over the ocean. The first game in the series was released in 1994 and was only playable with mouse.
Another weird game I would discover as a child was titled “Ace Lightning”, an adaptation of a live action series on BBC. “Ace Lightning” told the story of a legendary magical warrior, Ace, and his friends fighting Lord Fear (obviously, the baddie) for the Amulet of Zoar. The game didn’t feature any mouse control, not even to tilt the camera or navigate the menu, so to play it, you only needed a keyboard.
Knowing the game’s mode of input is important, especially to someone who uses assistive tech of any kind, and the games that allow the player to choose input format will certainly attract larger audiences. To us, web and mobile designers and developers, the same logic applies in a similar fashion: websites that allow mouse-only and keyboard-only navigation retain more users than those that force a certain mode.
As close to text as possible
We talked about closed captions in great detail about a year ago in the context of videos on the web. Similarly, closed captions play an important role in helping gamers — with and without troubles hearing — to understand the context, grasp the details, and follow the story.
Sound design is an important aspect of every game — from a bloody shooter to the most immersive RPG. It creates the lived-in universe for the characters, forms the environment, sends signals to the player. Gamers, however, are not always able to enjoy every delicious note of it. Some live with hearing disabilities, others drop the volume to avoid waking up the baby or pump it all the way up only to hear bits and pieces over the sound of the neighbour’s drill. Closed captions are designed to create immersive experience for the player, and allowing users to control them — from changing the size and weight of text to choosing typeface, opacity, position, and colour — means making your game (your product) accessible to more users.
Note the important difference between subtitles and closed captions: the former contains spoken words only, whereas the latter describes sounds, music, and effects, essentially translating the entire sound experience into text. In a perfect world, these would not only be synced with sounds in the game, but interpreted for the player in their preferred language on the go, somewhat similar to how browsers translate website live today. We might still be far from the future where this technology is advanced enough to be usable, but thinking ahead is the best favour we can do to our future selves.
But wait, there is more.
A game accessibility guidelines collective, a website produced by “a group of studios, specialists and academics, to produce a straightforward developer friendly reference for ways to avoid unnecessarily excluding players”, features a long list of recommendations that are yet to become standards, but will certainly come in handy for anyone working on a video game.
The guidelines break all considerations into three levels: Basic (simple things that apply to all), Intermediate (features that may need some planning), and Advanced (complex adaptations, “aiming for specific niche audiences”). Inside each level, there are several categories: Motor (control and mobility), Cognitive (Thought / memory / processing information), Vision, Hearing, Speech, and General.
Unlike the notoriously hard to understand web accessibility guidelines, these recommendations are not overly formal: they exist to inspire, not scare the developers away, to guide and support, to remind that considering every player’s experience is the game designer’s primary job.
Take, for instance, a recommendation to allow players to “progress through text prompts at their own pace”: it is easy to imagine how this simple suggestion can create a significantly better gaming experience for all players without exception. The website presents a list of games that follow this principle and even quotes the gamer saying:
It sometimes takes me 3 times longer to read something than other people. I’ve got no problem understanding it, no issue of intelligence, it’s a specific learning disability. it’s so incredibly frustrating when there is no button prompt and they take the message off so quickly.
Is accessibility always behind?
Accessibility in the world of video games is gaining traction, and yet, we are far from the world, where each title and gaming device are shipped with every consumer’s needs carefully considered. As Mira Shin at DO-IT writes, the many efforts by various advocacy groups have traditionally “largely been ignored by major developers”. Shin brings up Celeste, a 2018 platformer game by an independent studio Maddy Makes Games as the turning point, the moment that brought accessibility into the spotlight.
Celeste features Assist Mode, a built-in special mode that changes the game mechanics, making it easier to play (for instance, by lowering the game speed), but also, allowing the user to tailor the controls to their needs. A platformer, designed to be hard, choosing to make a mode that granted users things like infinite stamina, was an unusual, but conscious and welcome choice that users absolutely loved.
The decision to ship the Assist Mode, as Celeste designer Matt Thorson told in the interview to Vice, was “to include even more people who couldn’t usually play hardcore platformers”, and after the initial release, the team worked closely with accessibility advocates and gamers with disabilities to make sure that the very way the mode is presented and described in the game makes every player feel included and welcome. As a result, the text from the screenshot above changed to a more inclusive version:
Assist Mode allows you to modify the game’s rules to fit your specific needs. This includes options such as slowing the game speed, granting yourself invincibility or infinite stamina, and skipping chapters entirely. Celeste is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience. If the default game proves inaccessible to you, we hope that you can still find that experience with Assist Mode.
Celeste’s Assist Mode transformed the industry, inspiring big studios and small production houses alike to pay more attention to their games’ accessibility. Can I Play That, a collection of accessible titles and related stories, continues to grow, and although an overwhelming majority of gamers with disabilties still face challenges and limitations, the improvements made in the past 20 years are apparent and impressive.
I believe in the power of inspiration. It is possible that regulations will force big players to think about accessibility (or turn to accessibility overlays instead), but I doubt that we can reach any significant progress without inspiring examples that prove: inclusion benefits everyone, from an indi studio to a large number of players with disabilities who happily part ways with their money to enjoy an accessible gaming experience.