[DoctorEldritch]

Hello Legion Gamers!

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day!



Accessibility is an important element in games and the one that we talked about a bit last year in this thread. And to get a better understanding of just how vital accessibility is in games, with @Saka's permission, I am quoting her post from that thread below:

Sometimes the developers make mechanics in the games unintentionally hard by using some colour combinations that are okay for people with normal sight, but really bad for those with colour blindness. Altering the colours is still not offered in enough games & on the level that actually helps. I have normal sight, but visual clutter also bothers and distracts me a lot, so I am joining my friends with colourblindness on the rant "what he heck is this?!".

I am profoundly deaf, I can't understand any speech through speakers and even non-speech sound cues can be a huge miss. So I often play without any sound at all. Sometimes in games the biggest cue for something specific is sound only and I find that unfair. Like fishing in many games. It's not even anything competitive, why is it made so inaccessible?!

I use captions for everything. If something doesn't have captions where it matters then well, I don't play or watch it. Reminds me when a friend wanted me to play Spyro Reignited on PS4, but there didn't seem to be any way of enabling captions. Really soured my experience, even though most of the game is just running around, very little talk. But the PC version does have captions, although they look terrible (seriously, what's wrong with the font and why the black background box? there SHOULD be options for captions, so that people can choose what font they like or the size).

There is also a fairly big attitude problem too. I've gotten comments that I am "not entitled to do any content" when I made a post about some accessibility issues in m+. Funnily enough, the mechanic I complained about got nuked not that long later. So maybe it was an actual issue not just for me. I used to be a mythic raider with several Cutting Edge achievements and hm, not necessarily people could believe that I could pull it off without being a burden for my team. Consensus: people can suck.

I am a moderator in a Discord for Cochlear Implant recipients. Recently a CM of a game developer joined the community. In a conversation about difficulties with speech they confessed that they are afraid of streams, because she got some harassment over their speech impediment. Basically someone wrote all over the forums that "X sucks, speaks like they are too stupid to wrap the words around their mouth". That's really uncool. There can be many reasons for unclear speech that have nothing in common with intelligence. Not hearing oneself properly when talking is one of the reasons. There can be reasons unrelated to hearing too, such as facial paresis, being a stroke victim or such.

Oh and I also would like to bonk people whenever I get asked to hop on voice chat despite them *theoretically* being aware of my deafness. Happens quite a lot.

***

I remembered about this topic a while ago, then forgot again. When there were the Game Awards, God of War: Ragnarok won for innovative accessibility.

This article tells a bit about them, but in a nutshell there are lots of options to compensate for vision, hearing and reaction time/fine control difficulties. I found it great that the developers tried to make the game accessible for a wide audience and hope that there would be more following the trend.

Making games more accessible so that more people could play and enjoy them is a complex and multifaceted process. Thankfully, as @Saka mentioned, games like God of War: Ragnarok set a standard that game developers can aspire to.

And there are other success stories, too! For example, there are review sites like Can I Play That? that are dedicated to reviewing games through how accessible they are and educating gamers and developers about accessibility challenges.

And though AI became a hot topic recently with many developers trying to explore what it can do, there is a discussion of using AI to make games more accessible. Although some strategies that they propose, like Dynamic Difficulty, may be debatable, it is well worth exploring how AIs can help.

And Lenovo is taking part in making devices and games more accessible. For example, last year Lenovo Turkey partnered with BlindLook charity to develop solutions for the visually impaired. And by 2025, Lenovo aims to insure that 75% of Lenovo’s products have inclusive design ensure they work for everyone, regardless of physical attributes or abilities.

There is still a way to go, but it is good to see more solutions being developed and people and gamers becoming more aware of accessibility challenges. This is particularly important because to solve the challenges of accessibility, we not only need to develop technical solutions but also to change attitudes and how we treat each other in the gaming world.

Do you have any thoughts on what changes you'd want to see in gaming, and in the Legion community, to make them more accessible?

[Saka]

There have been some interesting announcements this year, for example Google's Project Gameface. It is open-source software enabling steering the mouse using head movement and facial gestures.

The inspiration for this project was the story of a quadriplegic gaming enthusiast, Lance Carr. Unfortunately, in 2021 his house caught fire, which was even partly captured during a livestream. As the result of fire, he lost all the expensive equipment responsible for providing accessibility to his gaming hobby. Prior to that he had a mouse that was tracking head movement and it was his main key for playing games. Google decided to work together with him to design a new mouse working in a similar way. The announcement from the Global Accessibility Awareness Day is a result of the collaboration. According to early tests by DAGERS, it has some issues tracking non-standard heads, but the existing sensitivity options at least partially mitigate it. Some additional training for the software would resolve the issue, but even in its current state it could be helpful for many people without the ability to use their hands.

Sony revealed the official name for their accessible controller, Access controller. It was known before as Project Leonardo and it is basically a special controller with large tactile buttons and adjustable joysticks. It can be freely rotated and there are many options for button mapping. There arew a few 3.5mm jacks allowing the use of other input devices, similarly to what Xbox Adaptive Controller does.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Lance Carr's is an inspiring story of something good coming out of a bad situation (literally rising from the ashes. And we only just recently talked about phoenixes, curious...). It is a good initiative for sure, though I got a bit concerned by the phrasing they used when they wrote "non-standard heads". Made me think about what is it about a head that may make it standard or non-standard...

Access controller and adjustable joysticks are all good, though for me, in addition to tackling the issue of accessibility, I see them as examples of innovation in data input devices that has been staggering for a while. When you think about it, the keyboard, for example, did not have any significant changes in design since its invention in 1868. Imagine, that's more than 150 years ago, and even now the QWERTY layout on modern keyboards is almost the same as the one introduced on that early typewriter back then.



Sure, the keyboard had some changes in design since then, take, for instance, the one you showed recently. But even with changes in size or form or key sensitivity, fundamentally, it remained the same. Joystick and controller had more innovation over the years, but even they had little major design changes.

So those innovative products that aim to increase functionality, to me, not only do that but also help developers think outside the box and try to invent new different devices with familiar functions. And chances are, some of those new devices would actually be more convenient to use for everyone and be better than those we're used to just because we've always been using them.

[Saka]

Originally Posted by DoctorEldritch

I got a bit concerned by the phrasing they used when they wrote "non-standard heads". Made me think about what is it about a head that may make it standard or non-standard...

@DoctorEldritch

Using a personal example, I have a dent on my right side due to the bone missing. Thankfully, it's not very noticable and it's on the side, not my face. But someone else could have something similar in a place where it would be messing with the facial recognition algorithms more. Muscle spasms could affect that too.

Regarding keyboards, there are ergonomic keyboards floating around some spaces. The keys would form a wave rather than a straight line. There are non-qwerty layouts too, but I'd hate having to relearn where my keys are.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Personal examples are illustrative, I, for example, have some birthmarks on my face. Not to brag, but two of them are almost at the exact same places where Marilyn Monroe had her famous moles (interestingly, she had 2 of them, but not at the same time):



I have more, though, not sure if having them would affect how those systems read your face. And then there are people with vitiligo, for example. This is exactly the point: there may not be a "standard" head, everyone is different.

Yes, there are some ergonomic and non-qwerty layouts out there, but not at the level where one would expect them to be after 150 years of product existence. Besides, language evolves, and so does the need to record it (we even invented emojis and acronyms now). QWERTY may have been a good design 150 years ago (though it would be interesting to look into how they came up with it back then), but it may need reexamining how well it fits current needs. Not to mention that keyboard was not designed with gaming in mind at all, so we had to adapt it to games as we went, hence wasd.

There may be better design ideas out there. And yeah, re-learning the layout may be hard, but ultimately worth it if there is a quantifiable advantage in doing so. And it can be a gradual process, too. The point is, by now there should be more options.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Nothing is stopping you from changing the layout in the system and if the mismatch bothers you, rearrage the keycaps on the physical keyboard. Even most rubberdomes allow you to pull the keys out and put back in.

I don't think that using letter keys for skills in games is a bad thing. Typically when playing I can only reach the left half of the layout. Most likely someone already tried making a vertical keyboard but if we are not seeing any, it probably didn't work out very well.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka That is true, and I do not mind the current design, actually. I just want to get to the bottom of how it came to be and if the better options were explored.

Maybe it's like a bicycle where the ideal design was achieved by now and all tweaks are minor improvements. Or it could be like a scooter where the addition of an electric motor invigorated it and brought it from a kid's toy and skate park zone all the way to the streets. Maybe a change in design for better accessibility is exactly what keyboards need.

[itsMahdy]

very thoughtful there should be more campaigns to spread awareness about helping the disabled to have better gaming experience

[Saka]

@itsMahdy Definitely it is a topic that should be talked about more often. The biggest hurdle is lack of awareness. People don't think that one can play games with disabilities or be interested in doing so. Often just seeing real examples in the world can make them change their minds.

I found this article about the importance of accessibility in games, which also brings up some examples of playing with disabilities. Someone went from being a denier to an advocate for accessibility in games after witnessing some disabled kids having fun with a jury rigged setup allowing them to play a bunch of games with a single button.

"[...] A decade ago, Hamilton thought accessibility was all hogwash.

"I started out with no interest at all — negative even — with the same misconceptions that so many people have," he says. "Despite having close family with disabilities, I assumed that accessibility is a wasted effort, lots of time-consuming, difficult work just to water down your idea to a lowest common denominator for a tiny minority who wouldn't even want to play games anyway."

Hamilton's view — and to some extent also his life — changed in an instant roughly eight years ago. Then a designer at the BBC, he saw playtest footage of preschool games that had been adapted for a single button. "This meant that external hardware such as a button on a wheelchair headrest, a sip-puff tube or a blink detector could be hooked up to it," he says. "Exactly the same technology that Stephen Hawking uses. So what I was seeing was video footage of very young, profoundly disabled children who not too long ago would just have been lying there being cared for, now independently laughing, playing, doing the same things as their classmates."

The ability of playing games - maybe something not so critical for many people - was a huge change to these kids, as it brought them some happiness in their difficult lives. The same effect can be applied to adults too.

[j7schultz]

I just have a tiny correction for you @Saka:


That is why I love cats so much...


Ok, ok. That was a bit extreme. Now it is better:


Of course that does NOT apply to Legion. In fact, it is the opposite.