[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?

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka, your recent comment about relaxing music in the games list in Brain games: games and mental health thread made me think of a question. We often talk about music here in the community, cheer-up tunes, and @galadrielmt Metal thread, for example.

And in your post, you talked about the usefulness of captions. But what about music, in games or otherwise? It is an important element in many games, and a key element in some, even. But can be hard to experience if you have a hearing impairment. Is there a way to make music more accessible?

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Music with hearing loss is highly individual. Some people are partial to bass music due to its tactile element - standing close to a speaker you can feel the low frequencies, which to some extent can compensate for reduced hearing. Then there are people who still can hear most sounds in a normal hearing range but have issues interpreting speech or audio cues - for example these with Auditory Processing Disorder - they might be able to enjoy music just fine. There isn't really a way to make music specifically accessible as hearing loss is a whole wide spectrum. I will say though, if someone decides to put captions for music, don't do it like this: [MUSIC]. That is considered very offensive by some people. A proper caption would've been for example [Soft piano tunes going in crescendo].

In the Polish community a user brought to my attention the existence of Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controller. I went and watched LTT's review on it and it seems like a really neat device. It can be used in conjunction with a regular Xbox controller as well. There's software that allows you to control how the merged functionality works on both PC and the Xbox. It can support basically any input devices that use a 3.5mm jack, so for example proximity sensors, various flavours of button, pedals and so on. It has some flaws and limitations, but it still offers a lot of possibilities.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Personally, I am more impressed more often than not how detailed some captions in TV shows are these days. I remember them using like you said, just something like [MUSIC], but I have not actually seen that in a while.

I see sometimes what you called [Soft piano tunes going in crescendo], but more often, I see the name of the piece mentioned in captions now in addition to that. Or, in a case of a song, lyrics are shown too, in cursive to differ from character speech. I really like when creators make this extra effort, particularly because, if I like the music piece, it is easy to look it up later. The only issue with that is with lyrics and speech combined, it can take a chunk of screen space.

Though that being said, this reminds me of a quote from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (Sould Music to be exact) about how Lord Vetinari enjoys music:

"Besides, Lord Vetinari, the supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, rather liked music.

People wondered what sort of music would appeal to such a man. Highly formalized chamber music, possibly, or thunder-and-lightning opera scores.

In fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat, and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crotchets all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit dribbling out of the end of their oboe… well, the idea made him shudder. Although not much, because he never did anything to extremes."

I partially agree with this, I think it would benefit humanity if music notes were better taught in schools, to the extent that everyone with high-school education could be expected to grasp the music note grammar. We teach math formulas and language grammar, but not as much when it comes to music, I think If we did, then captions could give a note score of whatever music is playing, and people could, hopefully, understand exactly what the sounds are. I understand it is not practical, hard to do, and unrealistic for pieces of more than a couple of instruments, but still, I wish more people knew the universal written language of music as well as they know that of math...

As for the video, I liked it, it is useful functionality, but I especially especially the pedal. In my mind, it was more connected to racing and simulators, and it is interesting how it can be used in addition to more standard controllers by both people with accessibility problems and people without, too.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Unfortunately, when I was at school, there was very little focus on music accuracy and more of an expectation of everyone being able to sing. Which, obviously, didn't work well with me. Back then I had pretty much no pitch perception.

Lyrics being added to the captions are good. My example was focusing more on a case where no song or particular music is recognized.

Microsoft posted an article about accessibility functions in Windows 11, mostly from the classroom angle, but they can be useful for many other users as well. Some of them, such as live captions, I am using myself.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Ah, I feel your pain, I had the same thing in my school. Maybe it is a cultural thing, I am not sure, but it was always so focused on singing. I mean, come on, music is much, much more than just vocals.

Many roads in life start in the classroom, so it is good that it receives attention, but you're right, new functions should be used in as many areas as possible.

[Saka]

Back to the topic of gaming:

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka I am all for more customizable options to tailor the gaming experience to your personal needs or preferences, though it seems that with difficulty options it is still coming down to the solution you did not like - reducing difficulty. It really is good that more games, like Diablo IV that you mentioned, start to go much further than just difficulty tinkering.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch I just hope that one day that can become the standard in the industry. That every game will come with several built-in accessibility features.

I watched a clip on YT where Mila Pavlin, Lead UX Designer for God of War Ragnarok picked up the award for innovative accessibility at the Game Awards. At the end, she said: "Let's go out there and make all games have no limits".

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka I want to think that it just needs time for organic change at this point. Hopefully, virtual places will change faster than actual places

It took a while for actual places to adapt to people with accessibility issues, but now most cities have disabled access in offices as a standard, paved pedestrian ways and traffic lights with sounds for people with visual impediments, and hearing aid connectivity function in banks or shops, to name a few of these. Took some time to get there, but now it is a standard (in many places, at least).

And technology is there, and it is very clear that using it is worthwhile. Now it comes down to how easy and, well, accessible is the accessibility functionality. It would be great if it were made as available as, say, Unreal Engine. Then many game developers, even small ones, could easily afford to include such elements in their games. God of War Ragnarok has done a great job, but it is a big game from a massive developer. It would be good for the next step to be making these solutions easily available for small and indie studios.