Game Production Community Podcast

Accessibility as Success Criteria: Building accessibility from the ground up

• Juney Dijkstra, Ally McLean, Tabby Rose, Brannon Zahand, Jonas Lundqvist • Season 2 • Episode 13

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In this panel, host Juney invites four experienced accessibility professionals to guide us through the process of planning, budgeting, implementing and testing accessibility features from the ground up in both new and ongoing projects to make better and more welcoming experiences.

Our expert panellists:

  • Ally McLean: Senior Producer at Mighty Kingdom
  • Tabby Rose: UX Director at Mighty Yell
  • Brannon Zahand: Senior Gaming Accessibility Program Manager at Microsoft
  • Jonas Lundqvist: Senior Development Director at Respawn

Transcript can be found here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1055908/10019657

Please share with peers that could benefit from these expert insights & experiences!

Organised with the amazing support of Sergio Maldonado & our Supporters ♡

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Juney Dijkstra  0:00 
Hello and welcome to the game production community. Today we're hosting an expert panel on accessibility as success criteria building accessibility from the ground up. I'm fortunate to be joined by four game industry professionals with experience implementing accessibility functionality. They will guide us through the process of building team wide support for selecting, planning, budgeting, implementing and testing accessibility functionality for your games. The panel will be audio only and last roughly 45 minutes followed by a 15 minute live q&a, please use the event QA channel to post your questions and use the event chat channel to share your thoughts and perspective throughout the panel. As a first for the community, we also have an event transcript channel, which will feature a live transcript of what our panelists are sharing. The panel will be recorded and published on the game production podcast over the coming weeks. If you have a colleague or friend who couldn't make it to the event today, keep an eye on our announcements channel and make sure to forward the podcast episode to them when it's live. And now let's get started with a round of introductions, I will be kicking this off with a least interesting person talking today. I'm Juney legacy portfolio manager at Paradox Interactive and I'll be hosting the panel and we'll be minimizing the amount of talking I do as of now. And then onwards to the more interesting folks, Tabby, could you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Tabby Rose  1:19 
Hi, so I'm Tabby rose. I am the UX director of mighty yell. And formerly the creative director of axon interactive. So I'm probably the only person here who's not a producer. But I am an accessibility developer and advocate and I'm excited to talk a little bit about some of the work that we've done on our on our past games and upcoming games at mighty elf. Right, we're lucky to have you. Next up, Allie. Hi,

Ally McLean  1:55 
I'm Ally McLean. I am the Senior Producer at mighty kingdom in Australia. I've worked in small indie teams, I've worked in games for health in hearing rehabilitation, and I've worked in AAA, I do not consider myself an accessibility expert, unlike all the other people on the panel. So I'm really here to speak to the experience as kind of your standard producer type across many different projects who thinks that this stuff is important. I'm also the founder of the working lunch, which is a collection of initiatives to make working in the games industry a bit better. And we read a production newsletter. Recently, we wrote a newsletter about how producers can help make their games more accessible. So that's me.

Juney Dijkstra  2:38 
And that article was certainly shared around the discord. It was part of the inspiration for this panel, actually. All right, Brandon, how about you?

Brannon Zahand  2:47 
Hi, everyone. I am Brannon Zahand. I'm a gaming Accessibility Program Manager at Microsoft. I've been in the games industry since 2001. When I started in Xbox, I've been working with the disability community since 1995, when I was studying American Sign Language Interpreting, and I spent a number of years working at Seattle Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in their child life department. I have been a passionate advocate and enthusiast when it comes to accessibility, since I learned in 2006, that accessibility expanded beyond just productivity. And that people in our industry wanted to play games just as much as they wanted to do a spreadsheet or send an email. So I'm very excited to be here today.

Juney Dijkstra  3:38 
I'm very happy to have you. And last but certainly not least Jonas.

Jonas Lundqvist  3:43 
Hi, everyone. My name is Jonas Lundqvist. I'm a senior development director with respawn. And I'm currently overseeing UI UX teams, co themes and accessibility themes for one of our larger game themes. So very much facing a lot of the questions that that have been asked in the q&a channel and the topics that we have for this panel on a daily basis. Thanks for having me.

Juney Dijkstra  4:13 
Thank you for all being here as well as to the audience. This is a very important topic for all of us. So I'm very happy to have such a great set of panelists as well as a lot of listeners who will hopefully learn a lot over the coming 45 ish minutes. Let's start from the ideal situation. The the one situation that we know never happens in the industry, but that gives gives us a frame of reference a starting point. Say that you're starting fresh the ideal scenario. your stakeholders are on board, you've got time and there's even some budget available. How would you go about implementing accessibility into new and upcoming projects? For example, starting with what kind of accessibility features are even relevant to support I believe Tabby you had some thoughts that you were interested in sharing on that.

Tabby Rose  5:03 
Yeah, so I can speak a little to that. So I don't know if I mentioned, but the studio that I work at is, is indie. So we're less than 10 people around 10 people. So we're dealing with a smaller budget, but also, in terms of getting buy in from stakeholders, like from the other people at the studio there, it's easier, there's fewer of us and and we are all very like bought in to the idea that we have to make our games accessible. And in fact, I am coming on to a project now that I can't talk about too much. But we're starting more or less from this position where there is a prototype, and we are building out the full game. And I've been asked to, to like build our Accessibility Plan for this game. So at least in a small studio, sort of situation, the thing that we usually do, and this is the same as the UX process, kind of across the board, as we do research, we might do like some audience testing, even really early testing, just to see if some of the some of the ideas that we're having are like bearing out in real life. And then we create a prototype, and then we test some more, hopefully, with more people who are, you know, in the disability community. And in this case, I'm, I've just finished my research phase. So I've gone over a bunch of different articles, I looked at the game Accessibility Guidelines, which I look at for every project, made a big list of everything that I think that we should have in the game, and I'm starting to do like a risk analysis now. So I'm starting to say like, this is something that I think would be really good for this game, it's high risk, it's high reward, you know, this will cost a lot, or it won't cost a lot. I don't do budgeting myself, but I can at least like, give an idea of like, I think this is gonna take a long time to develop or not, and some time estimates, and we can begin to start to have those conversations. And we can narrow it down to like, what are our easy wins? What are our, you know, hard wins, but it's going to be really good for the game? And what are the things that maybe we're going to have to leave till future projects or see if we get r&d, you know, a grant or something like that, which we've talked about in the past as well. So I think that's kind of the process that I've gone through and am going through again.

Juney Dijkstra  7:18 
Very interesting. Thank you. And do any of you have other approaches to that, different kinds of experiences?

Brannon Zahand  7:26 
Yeah, I mean, I'll say I love the comment about the community, you know, all my ideal world is at concept, right? We're already bringing in folks from the gaming and disability community to talk about how the vision of what the title is shaping up to be fits with both the technical accessibility aspects and accessible design, but also inclusion of the community representation of the community in that content. So yeah, as you mentioned, Juney, it's it's pretty rare, we, we ever start with that ideal situation. But when we do, and we've had that opportunity, it's incredible to see how just very, very early engagement with the community can really shape a product. And ultimately, you know, drive a product to be really accessible with, surprisingly, less investment than you might think starting early. I try. I wish I could remember the advocate who came up with the same It was not me, but someone said, you know, it's easier to bake in accessibility than cake it on. So if you think about baking muffins, blueberry muffins, is it easier to blueberries in from the beginning? Or is it easier to try to cram them in after the things gone through the oven, obviously, it's the former. And the same applies with accessibility. If we can get people thinking about it early, and building from the ground up, they're not going to build themselves into situations where later on down the pipeline, it's going to be very hard for them to change those and fix them to make them accessible UI is a great example of that. If you want to do scalable UI, it's going to be really, really tough to patch that in halfway, you know, when you're when you're already deep in production, right? If you're thinking about that, from the get go, it's gonna be so much easier, and so much less costly.

Juney Dijkstra  9:27 
And that ties very neatly into another topic that that was part of this that we wanted to talk about. So say you are getting in that early, like how do you approach planning and budgeting? I believe Allie, you had some thoughts on that.

Ally McLean  9:40 
Yeah, I mean, anyone who has ever spoken to me will not be surprised that I'm going to bring up project chartering. I'm a really big advocate of values based project shattering. I think that values based decisions in our development are a real indicator of a mature organization and a team and sometimes as the producer or product manager Whoever you are, you're the one who really needs to push to make that a priority. And I think that it is particularly useful for understanding where accessibility sits in terms of priority in the eyes of your leadership team. So this could look like you know, running a workshop where you bring in your stakeholders and other key project people, you know, and some projects, depending on the nature of it. This could include, like Brannon, and Tabby mentioned, like external experts and consultants to be part of that workshop process. And he used that opportunity to discuss your studio and your team values and your project values. What are those values might be, you know, we want our game to be enjoyed by as many people as possible. And you connect those values to the actual features that you're implementing. So you're baking those values into your planning, so that you can point to them throughout development when hard decisions need to be made. I think that, in my experience, aligning on this early makes those hard decisions easy. So you're not having to backtrack, and agree retroactively on what you believe.

Juney Dijkstra  11:02 
And that also touches upon another topic that we wanted to discuss was making your team making sure that your team is ready for starting to implement. So for example, making sure that that your team understands exactly what they're they're trying to make. And I believe Jonas, you you had some thoughts on how you can prepare your team for that.

Jonas Lundqvist  11:26 
Yeah, I mean, I mean, the challenge I think I've faced over the previous years, this realizing and coming to that conclusion that, you know, we're not an accurate representation of the audience that we're building for. And that's something that we need to get the rest of the team on board with, as well, everyone has their own perception of what accessibility should be and can be. But yeah, deep diving into that, to make sure that we're all aligned has been really valuable. And I think, for my own parts, that's meant, you know, questioning my own understanding of how people play games, and just widening my view on that, which has been a journey that both I and the rest of my team have had to go through is super important to not only find the people that are talented and engaged in implementing the features, but also allowing them the time to kind of go on that journey and make a lot of those discoveries and help them to those discoveries as needed.

Juney Dijkstra  12:32 
Thank you. So when we were preparing for this panel, all of you collectively unanimously agreed that the ideal situation just doesn't happen, there is probably not a single situation where either budget or timeline or getting your stakeholders convinced all align level or, or even just individually. So we're going to spend a little bit more time actually going deeper into the situation that is not ideal. So first up, convincing your stakeholders, we all know that you need to have people on board to be able to effectively start doing anything. So some accessibility initiatives get stopped before they even make it to the backlog. You guys might have an n gap gals and everything in between making sure that we're inclusive. Do you have any negotiation tips and data we can point our stakeholders to to improve the chances of including accessibility features in a project? Brannon, I think you had some information to share there.

Brannon Zahand  13:33 
Yeah, you know, and I had a gentleman our team, he's, he's his name's John Henderson, he's my my skip level. And we were talking about this other day, and he broke it down in three, three categories of influence, that I think are, are really easy to think about. And it's a great place to start when you're thinking about trying to get people on boarded. The first is empathy. building empathy is absolutely critical in Indians, in my opinion, is the probably the most powerful way to get people on board. I want to be really clear that I'm not talking about sympathy, sympathy and empathy are two very different concepts. And generally speaking, the disability community is not looking for sympathy, but they're looking for empathy. They want people to try to understand where they're coming from. And so by introducing teens to the community, it's a great way to build that empathy. You know, people coming in telling their stories, their stories, putting faces to a problem, can be very, very helpful and very, very powerful. And it also then naturally helps. When once you get those stakeholders bought in, you've already made some of those connections to continue the conversation with the community during the development process. So I think empathy is absolutely critical. The second one is data. And you know, I think traditionally we thought about data is how many extra copies is this going to sell me. And the fact of the matter is, is that that's probably the wrong data to be going after. Because while accessibility certainly can, depending on the types of accessible features you're putting in, can increase your sales can be very hard to, to pull, to pull those exact numbers and make those cases in a compelling way. Instead, we look at information like what sort of numbers there are in terms of brand uplift in terms of bringing others beyond just individual the individual gamers to the platform. So for example, if a gamer with a disability buys a console, chances are someone in their family, someone else in their family who might not have a disability is playing right, they're going to be influencers for their friends, right? So we try to think about sphere of influence, right? Like, by helping these gamers, how many other people are we bringing into the fold, right, and trying to put numbers to that and try to show that, um, there are some, just to be clear, there are some numbers that can be very compelling. You know, you know, especially for certain types of disabilities that are very commonplace, you know, colorblindness, for example. It's a pretty large chunk of folks. So you might use some statistics and data there. But another great thing to do is to take telemetry both from your titles and other titles that show feature usage. And I think a great one. Ubisoft, for example, shared some amazing data, years ago, on on how many people were using subtitles and captions in their games. And that was really, really powerful. Turns out, there's a lot of people a way more people than just those who have who are deaf or hard of hearing. So I think that is another way, you know, making sure you're pulling the right data and using the data to tell the right stories. And then finally, and this is a, I saved this one for last, not because I'm saving the best for last, but it's the one I least like talking about. But it can be powerful. And that is regulation, right? There are laws in the United States that have an impact on game accessibility, there are laws coming in the European Union. So sometimes you can use that regulation to kind of start the conversation to bring it up. Generally, I found that if you mentioned legal concerns, people all of a sudden want to listen to you and make sure they hear what you have to say. So it's kind of a good way to maybe get it get a foot in the door to talk about some of those regulations, and then say, but yeah, we want to go way beyond that, right, we're not satisfied with what you know, meeting a certain requirement, in some certain governmental rule is going to get us we're really, we want to get something that's going to be useful for our gamers. So that's kind of how I think about it. When I think about influencing and getting people in the middle of a product cycle who might be just overloaded and barely have enough time to breathe, how to get them to build some empathy, get some understanding of the data and understand the potential ramifications for their their project if they don't invest in accessibility.

Juney Dijkstra  18:03 
Thanks, that's a wealth of information. And as a side note, I was sharing this earlier today, I'm one of those people that always turns the subtitles on for a variety of reasons. So totally with with everyone that does that. Opening the floor a little bit for that question for a convincing stakeholders. Do any of the others have thoughts to add on that a little bit of a different perspective?

Jonas Lundqvist  18:25 
I think randomness is spot on. And I mean, overall, there's a pattern that I mean, what's expected of games is shifting. And that needle is moving sometimes more rapidly than what we realize. So, you know, not only could it be an opportunity of goodwill to look at accessibility features, and implement them to make sure that your game can can reach as many as possible. But I wouldn't be surprised if we see the opposite as well, where, you know, games start to get negative feedback for not having expected accessibility features. And I think that's a fire reaction from the gaming community.

Ally McLean  19:10 
Yeah, I completely agree with what you both said. I think just thinking about this from the perspective of, you know, a producer on the floor as well. My advice for how to discuss accessibility and prioritizing accessibility with your stakeholders, I think is very similar to how I would approach any kind of negotiation with a stakeholder. I think in in some environments, I've seen production teams, thinking about accessibility as a very separate matter or almost a separate layer. That's not part of your regular development cycles and conversations. And I would encourage you to think about that, you know, add that to your list, add it to your agenda, every time you're checking in on the status of your development. Accessibility should be on the agenda. So you know, do your values based assessment of your priorities and use that framework to check in with your stakeholders regularly and understand if they are starting to shift away from prioritizing accessibility and have that conversation or dig into why is it the cost? Is it the perceived ROI? Do they worry that they're compromising on some kind of brand vision, which is a conversation that I'm sure lots of people have had, and then go away and use that information to build specific pragmatic cases around these arguments really understand where they're coming from, I spoke to a team called Accessibility unlocked, were here in Australia in New Zealand. And they recommended assigning a champion in your team who can flag accessibility issues in each design conversation as they come up. In the absence of influencing stakeholders, I think that this champion is also a helpful resource for you to draw upon, so that you can keep that continuous advocacy happening at the production layer, which Yeah, I think is crucial.

Juney Dijkstra  20:53 
And Brannon already touched on the community support part, but I know that Tabby actually also had something in mind to talk about with regards to community support. So I was actually going to ask you about that.

Tabby Rose  21:05 
Yes. Yeah, I was gonna say that, you know, if you are at a studio that has the ability to do a lot of outreach with your community, there's a lot of things that you can go to them and ask them, you know, you know, how do you feel about this particular feature? How do you feel about this kind of thing in games? And you can use that to come back to stakeholders, I think and say, like, look, you know, people have a lot of opinions about these things. One of the things that I went to Twitter with a little while ago was just asking people like whether they prefer the A button or the B button for, for cancel or select. Because I was wondering how to implement a particular like, control, remapping feature. And a lot of people answered me, it's not just people with disabilities, although it is also that too, there are people who need, you know, things to be a certain way for certain reasons. And for buttons to be able to be remapped for certain reasons. But like, a lot of people have opinions. And it has to do with what consoles they play on. It has to do with like, the kinds of games that they play, and what they're used to. And they're like, you know, their ability to cognitively switch and like, you don't really get that information unless you ask, but you can definitely go back and say, like, you know, not only was this the prevailing opinion, or is this something that we have to make sure is an option, but you can say, look, how many, you know, responses that we got just from this this one question. This is obviously something that people care about. And that's not the only thing that you can ask about, obviously. But I think that there's a lot of value in if you especially if you do have a community already, like you know, you have a discord community or something like that. I think you can raise a lot of discussion, and you'll find a lot of compassion within those audiences that you can then sort of like, reflect and bring back to stakeholders as well.

Juney Dijkstra  22:56 
Yeah, I can. I am not surprised to hear you say that. And just going out there and asking, can help developers and teams understand that there's actually a crowd out there that cares about this sort of stuff, it wouldn't be the first time that I've asked a community for their opinion. And suddenly, it no longer it was no longer Oh, the publisher wants this thing. It's Oh, like 10s, or hundreds of people want this thing. I guess that's important, then let's go and implement it. So I'm jumping, jumping to the next topic that we had already seen asked in the live q&a, but we'd already prepared for it as well. Outside of convincing stakeholders, you of course, also have to have the budget and the time. So let's let's zoom in on that a little bit. How should a team with a tighter budget approach determining which accessibility features would be the most relevant for their community? And how would they go about prioritizing among those features? Brannon, I think he also had some thoughts on that.

Brannon Zahand  24:02 
Actually, I would rather have someone else answer this one because you're my studio experience. Um, you know, I've been very fortunate that I, you know, I work at three for three, which I would say has a relatively speaking large, slightly larger budget, then I think a lot of the other studios, especially the smaller Mom and Pop Indies. But I'm happy to tag on at the end of, you know, maybe talking with Ali or Tabby or Jonas, on kind of how to make some of those cases, even when you are at a larger studio and some of the challenges you might have in those specific cases.

Ally McLean  24:36 
Yeah, I mean, I can speak to your from being on a very, very small Indian team of three people. In our tighter budget teams. We need to think smart about absolutely everything. If you're lucky or smart enough to have built a community that you can reach out to then keep reaching out to that community have those conversations with them, just like Tabby was saying, you know, throw those questions out or those surveys out. and get that direct feedback. And if you don't have that kind of community, there are a lot of free resources online that you can leverage. And those resources are growing all the time. I'm a big fan of accessibility unlocked, because they've really helped me and given me so much advice. They have a great digest of different resources for developers on their website that I refer to a lot. Some advice that I got from that team that I think about a lot in terms of talking to indie teams, is that accessibility doesn't necessarily need to be something that is actively enabled or disabled, it can be baked into your games design. You know, the classic example, you have a puzzle that has different colored tiles, you could add clearly visible symbols or other things so that you reduce the need for additional settings or additional features that you may not have the budget for. I think a lot of you know, Indian School team low budget decision making is just about how can we do this in an effective way? And that really requires you to, to think about it from day one.

Tabby Rose  26:02 
Yeah, I totally agree. And, yeah, I would say the compassion piece is big here, too. In terms of like thinking of the things which are going to sort of make the biggest impact, one of the things that I've said in the past to other small studios is that you don't have to implement absolutely everything that you can think of in order to be considered accessible, like accessibility comes in steps. And I think that audiences are aware that, you know, there's constraints and you can't, you're not going to be able to do absolutely everything, but you can pick a couple of really high value things, like you can decide really early on, like, we're gonna allow UI scaling, so we're gonna, you know, we're gonna allow text to be able to become larger or smaller. And that means that we have to build our entire UI to be able to scroll, it can't be like fixed into a position, okay, well, that's a tech decision that you can then bring forward. And it's gonna make a big impact. Or say, with control Remapping. We can say, control remapping is like one of the most important, you know, accessibility features to have in your game, because it covers such a wide range of cases and people. And so and so that's something that we're going to plan for from the start, I am also going to second that there are a lot of resources, I use the game accessibility guidelines of most of the platforms that we work with have published guidelines that Microsoft certainly has, which, you know, even if you're not working directly with them, you can have access to and use those as a baseline to decide what's really, you know, valuable for your particular game. And then I would say, to pick a couple of easy wins, like, you know, pick a couple of features that you can definitely that that are going to fit in with the the gameplay that you have planned for your game that are easy to turn on and off. So in our case, we had a mechanic that required like kind of a precise button push to happen at a precise time, it was like a bar that's moving back and forth and getting smaller and smaller. And we wanted to make an accessible version of that. And so we decided to make just like a one button when Well, that's easy. All we have to do is turn the game off, make it so that when you press a button, it just finishes and you succeed. I'm assuming you already have plans to put an options menu in your game, which presumably you do, then this is just going to be like one more toggle in those options, right? So maybe there's like two or three things that you can choose to, to to sort of get an easy win that way, that's just like a day of death time. Yeah, so that's, that's sort of what we've done in the past to sort of pick and choose our battles.

Jonas Lundqvist  28:37 
And those solutions are so easily overlooked when it comes to the stuff that we're already doing. And approaching that with an accessibility mindset. So you know, we can do a bit of an extra effort on controller remapping or inputs, as you mentioned, or Ailee, for that matter, the design to accommodate for color blindness. You know, that's super helpful. I think, sooner or later, you're going to get into a discussion around well, if you remove that, that puzzle element of the puzzle or, you know, have that auto completion element of it. Well, how much is actually left of the game. I saw a while back, someone criticizing I think it was one of the Forza racing games for having an auto steering feature. But I mean, the way that I look at it is if those features enable people to get to the end goal, or they get to experience the game, when they otherwise wouldn't have been able to I mean, that's still a win. That's what we're trying to achieve. So yeah, I think there's a lot that development teams can do to kind of reevaluate how they view technical solutions like that but might be viewed us as game breaking by some but that will, in reality, just enable more people to experience the game in a better way.

Brannon Zahand  29:58 
Yeah, I totally agree with that. also, you know, as an aside, and just to kind of go back to what I had mentioned earlier, you know, you can kind of have an opposite sort of problem when you are at a studio that does have a lot of money, right? Because it's funny, I'll see teams drop tons of money on these really crazy features, or this one very particular thing in a game. And I can't, you know, and the question is, well, if we can spend that much money on this thing, why aren't we spending any money or very, very relatively little money on accessibility? Right? So I think another thing to kind of think about if you're in if you do happen to be in a situation where you are at a larger studio, and you're still having problems, you know, really try to do some comparisons really try to show like, and this is often if you have access to a user research team, this can be really valuable whatnot, but try to show impact, and demonstrate impact per dollar, right? You know, especially for those low hanging accessibility, some, you know, we call them the low hanging fruit of accessibility, those basic things input remapping, full controller input remapping, right, um, you know, why access inversion on a controller, you know, things that are, you know, relatively speaking cheaper than doing some of these big things, that they're willing to throw a lot of money that, but sometimes by kind of demonstrating, you know, visually, you know, in a in a PowerPoint presentation or equivalent, some, you know, the type of impact you can have for the for the dollar investment, and then show that comparison to other features that might be coming along, I have noticed that every now and then that can be useful in kind of convincing people to go, oh, maybe we should take a little bit of that money, and maybe kind of pull it away and put it into something that's, that's maybe more has a greater impact for our gaming and disability community.

Juney Dijkstra 31:58
Great, thank you all for those insights. So this is a question that our community raised as we were preparing for the panel. And and the answer is going to not be as great as we would hope it for it to be. But that's exactly why I want to bring it up. So the community wanted to know if there any cost effective ways, for example, in popular engines to achieve certain accessibility options, such as, for example, post production effects for colors, etc. So I wanted to hear what what items that you found that do exist, and then what you wish would exist.

Brannon Zahand 32:39
I'll just take a quick stab at it and say, there is not enough. It is one of the I think biggest problems we have in the industry right now. We have platforms building accessible features. And at the platform level, we have at least two of the three major manufacturers of consoles now have their own versions of adaptive controllers, Nintendo's haori controller, the Xbox adaptive controller for Xbox. And then stadia, of course supports the adaptive controller, the Xbox adaptive controller, so hardware, we're doing good there, we're making some improvements. But the middleware level, that's where I feel like we just so much room for improvement, because I get my team gets pinged constantly by developers asking what tools are out there that will help us make our products more accessible? What plugins what add ins, what features are in this engine or that engine? And the fact of the matter is, is it is literally a handful, at best across all middleware. And so you know, one thing we're doing at Microsoft right now is we're we've been reaching out quite a bit to these middleware, publish our manufacture manufacturers and asking them, hey, what can you do to help? But I will tell you, and I will suggest to everybody on this call that us asking does not nearly have the weight of impact as say, somebody who's actually making games with that middleware? So the I have heard from at least two major middleware companies that they just don't get asked for this, they will no, no one's coming to us saying Help us make some titles easier. No one's coming to us saying Help us make input remapping easier, so we're not doing it. So I would just encourage everyone on this call to reach out to your middleware developers and and I wouldn't say demand, but strongly ask for features that can make your lives simpler from an accessibility development and accessible title standpoint, development standpoint, but also makes those experiences more consistent for gamers with disabilities.

Juney Dijkstra 34:47
So basically, we want to use the opportunity of the panel to make a sort of broad community wide call to action. So ask your middleware, middleware providers for support. But also, if you have or know of any plugins, that sort of thing, feel free to share those in the event chat. And if you have best practices of your own, if you have something that you've developed for your team internally, try to share that with the developers around you that might be working on something similar. So just making sure to put that plug in here. Alright, we are actually already racing through the amount of time that we have. So let's move on a little bit to the final topics we have before we move to the q&a. So practically speaking, people are always developed in the middle of development of something. We often see that accessibility features get implemented later on, they get added on to a project. But we also know that there's a bunch of them that really benefit from being implemented earlier in the process. We already briefly touched, touched on that Brandon mentioned it, a couple others did as well. Are there specific accessibility features that you would highlight that really benefit from earlier or even benefit from later implementation into the project?

Jonas Lundqvist 36:06
I can jump on that one. I think, you know, there's obviously wide range of accessibility features. And what I found is that the features where we rely on other team members that aren't dedicated to accessibility to implement something, that's where I find that we benefit the most from engaging early so that they get the opportunity to design a level or design a puzzle that is accessible from the start when they get that task rather than having to tack it on to their workload after the fact. Whereas other features audio descriptions, just as an example, you know, obviously hard to do that before the actual narrative of a scene is written then you can start working on the audio descriptions for a cutscene as an example.

Tabby Rose 36:53
I was going to mention that certainly there are features that we have only at least changed. Usually we're not starting from scratch, but at least changed after having done testing with the disability community. So we use AbleGamers player panels to basically gather play testers from the disability community to come in and play our game. And give us a variety of feedback. And we always get feedback that we're not expecting, because of course, we're we, most of us who are working there don't have the same disabilities as as the people who are playing. And so there are going to be some things that will come up that you just won't have thought of until you test and sometimes you can't test some of these features until pretty late in because it's really frustrating to play test something that's already kind of like, not quite working. So we need those features to be, you know, in a in a place of enough completion, that they can be tested, but then with enough flexibility that it can be changed later. And the other thing I was going to mention is that we do our communication piece later. So So part of accessibility for us is the marketing and the outreach and making sure that our website and our game page and all of our marketing materials are both also accessible and mentioned our accessibility features. And those things obviously can't be done until you have the full list until you know what they all are. So that happens quite late.

Ally McLean 38:20
I mean, I think it's it seems obvious, but just so that we say it, you know, learning for me, when I started out in games in small indie teams, we all knew each other and we knew each other's needs, because there were like two other people in the room. But what I've moved to much larger teams for practice, and it took me a while to learn to prioritize is talking to the whole wider team about their own accessibility needs. When it comes to developing and testing the game. It's pretty rare that a team is able to implement, like we've said all of the accessibility features that they want to early in development. But I think as producers, the minimum that we can do is make sure we're prioritizing solutions that enable disabled developers to do their jobs in the same way as everyone else on the team. So like one project that I'm working on at the moment, for example, we just have a really standard policy that requires artists to do checks for epilepsy triggers before committing something. It's really not that hard to do. But it's not something I've ever had a policy for before. So it's definitely something that producers can take responsibility for.

Juney Dijkstra 39:26
That's great. I hadn't thought of that at all that that makes so much sense. tying into that topic, is there any specific any particular learning that really stood out to you from implementation of accessibility features in prior projects, something that just always resonated, kept resonating with you?

Ally McLean 39:49
I would say from an indie point of view, like starting out, we definitely thought that we would be able to use plugins and an off the shelf solutions for a lot of like, what we perceived as the standard accessibility features. And we quickly learned that, as has been discussed on this panel, a lot of them did not work, a lot of them broke our project. And we ended up having to create bespoke solutions. So from my first project, that was a huge learning that we need to budget real time for this. We're saying for anyone who might be working on your first project.

Tabby Rose 40:32
My piece would just be that the disability community is ready and willing to help you. And you should pay them to help you. But that there are there are services and people out there who can definitely do the testing work for you and give you a lot of insight. And we lean on that a lot.

Juney Dijkstra 41:06
Quickly to tie into that, I see that questions come in. If we could repeat the service that was mentioned for getting playtesters with accessibility needs. I used AbleGamers player panels. Great, thank you.

Brannon Zahand 41:09
I can also chime in here and say that Microsoft now offers gaming accessibility testing service, that if you ship on PC or Xbox, you can submit your product to have it tested by a group of subject matter experts in accessibility, including gamers with disabilities. We provide a very thorough report that includes things like what you've done well, whether it was intentional or not, because often a lot of people put in accessibility and they don't even realize they did it. So we try to always be real positive there. We will talk about concerns that came up. We test by the way against the Xbox accessibility guidelines. So we'll go through and give some kind of concerns we found. We will provide information in a more freeform section as well for our gamers with disabilities they can you know even if it's not Technically a failure of a test case or whatnot, they can kind of give their impressions and what was rough for them, and maybe how things can be improved. We also let you know which Microsoft Game accessibility feature tags you're eligible for. If you want to use those on our platform, as well as what you can do to change your game to make them eligible for those tags, and we provided a list, it's I think it's like a three page list now of resources that can be used to help you further along during the development, testing and release process. So I'll put a link to it in the chat. But it's a it's an awesome service. I'm really proud of it. We've We've just received some fantastic feedback from the community on that. The other thing I'll say too, is also if you're part of Xbox, we have something called the Xbox accessibility insiders League. It's basically people who have identified themselves as folks who benefit from accessible technologies. And they, we can flight games, both pre release and post release to that group for accessibility feedback, and I believe right now, the numbers over 80,000 people have signed up for that group. So if you're on Xbox, we're or PC, I should say, using the X or the Microsoft Store, we have those services as well.

Juney Dijkstra 43:10
Sounds like something I should get myself signed up for. I've currently got to build in private audience. Mm hmm. I see opportunities. Alright, let's move on to the final question for the panel. Before we move into live q&a, we've already touched on this from from from the AbleGamers angle for the Xbox review. But is there any other advice that you can give on how you can effectively and accurately test your accessibility features from from the entirety of the production perspective, planning for it, making space for it time for that sort of thing?

Jonas Lundqvist 43:53
I'm going to point out the obvious and that, you know, don't just rely on the testing, you're able to do with your in house resources that aren't dedicated to this. Test it multiple times tested with different audiences to make sure that you get representative results of what you're trying to achieve.

Juney Dijkstra 44:18
Tabby, I believe you also made a comment about standardized test.

Tabby Rose 44:23
Oh, I did. I had mentioned the hoarding tests, which I think Ellie had touched on as well, in that there are tests that you can pay for for epilepsy and flashing in your game called the hoarding test. It's not very expensive. But that is something that you can you can check out. My big my big piece I already said, but it's that you should test with the with the community early and often if you can, because they realize you have a lot of insight.

Juney Dijkstra 44:57
Right, great. In that case, let's move on. We did already gather a bunch of questions. I'm just going to go from the top down right now. So Kimberly asked, Do you think that language support or ratings are also part of accessibility?

Tabby Rose 45:19
I wouldn't personally put it in that category. But I do think that overall localization is something that you might want to wrap into the same strategy because it's going to affect your UI in similar ways. So from like a development programming standpoint, some accessibility features, and some localization features, at least are going to be related to one another in terms of text sizing, and that sort of thing. So just keep that in mind.

Juney Dijkstra 45:49
And then I'll just hop onto my little eight ratings soapbox, because while perhaps Perhaps not necessarily from an accessibility standpoint, but definitely from a diversity and inclusion standpoint, I feel that making sure that you get accurate age ratings, especially for the descriptors is going to help with people that possibly have some forms of anxiety that have certain content triggers. Those are things that that your age ratings can really help inform not just parents, but also individuals that have specific needs or preferences. So maybe not the accessibility angle, but for my part, still very, very important. Let's see, what else do we have? Dan asks, Can you name any surprising solutions to accessibility issues that you've encountered?

Brannon Zahand 46:44
Um, I have not tried this, but I will say again, the research that I saw about drawing a virtual nose in VR to help prevent nausea for people who get motion sick easily. It was really fascinating. It's definitely something I would love to try out myself because I have trigeminal neuralgia, which has impacted my vestibular function. So that that was a real interesting one like, Hey, could you have an option to turn on a virtual nose? Because, you know, we all use our nose when we're walking around like our noses in our line of sight. In fact, you're all thinking about it right now, now that I've mentioned it, you can all see your nose, but you weren't thinking about it, or even noticing it before I mentioned it, right. We use it as a kind of a point of fixed point of reference, apparently. And there's some studies that are kind of suggested that by drawing a virtual nose since your real nose is hidden during a VR experience, that can help you potentially fixate on that fixate, you know, unconsciously fix on that point, and help provide a feeling of less motion sickness. So like I said, I haven't tried it yet. But that's what I've heard. And that was pretty unexpected.

Juney Dijkstra 47:59
Any other surprising solutions?

Tabby Rose 48:03
I wouldn't say it's surprising per se, but I think a common thing, I think Ali might have mentioned this before, too, but one of the common things that comes up is like you know, having colorblind modes or you know, at least making sure that you're testing with colorblind filters on and things so that you can you can make sure that everything reads properly. But the best thing to do is just to design your like to employ some graphic design, in order to make your icons and things not require color as a primary sort of like source of information. And that'll come up a lot. I suppose it's probably not actually surprising. But I do think that for some people, it's maybe not the first thing that they think of when I think of designing for color blindness is just to not use color that way. And Brandon, actually already that something went wrong there when and actually already brought up the topic of nausea. But more specifically for VR. Nausea also happens a lot in other types of games, especially first person I've had that a lot myself.

Juney Dijkstra 48:55
Are there any other recommendations that you have for motion sickness for that those kinds of problems that people might have?

Jonas Lundqvist 49:20
I'd recommend looking at additional camera settings, whether that's scaling camera shake, or actually allowing the player a range to move the camera. And you know, if it's not a first person game that has and effect the player experience, that way it can be really helpful. I also know that we've seen positive results with some players from introducing just a fixed center screen dots to help minimize motion sickness. Yeah, those are a few of the things that I would recommend.

Tabby Rose 49:55
I've actually just been doing research about this I know that there's comfort modes in games where you can create like heavy vignetting when you're moving so basically you just have a circle in the middle that's your your visual spot and then around that is all black kind of like tunnel vision. Specifically for when you're moving the camera apparently that helps reduce things and also things like having always a fixed horizon. Yeah, having a crosshair or some way to focus in on I imagine having a nose probably does help with that as well. I actually do get really motion sick in VR so it's been an area of interest to me too.

Brannon Zahand 50:34
Yeah, and I've seen I've seen people in chat here mentioning FPS definitely I've noticed higher frames per second. I will turn that on and reduce my my my screen my graphic fidelity and that can be helpful Field of View being able to adjust field of view to be wider or narrower. We've seen some positive impacts there removing weapons sway especially in a first person shooter so when you're walking in your cameras, are your weapons kind of jogging left and right as your mimic you know, the movement you would have if you were walking? Yeah, camera shake all of those have been really we found have been useful if you can give people the option to turn those those off or adjust that.

Juney Dijkstra 51:21
Great feedback. Okay, let's see Phillip asked. The web has a bunch of standards and specifications which search engines factor into the rankings. This incentivize what developers to improve their accessibility to stay competitive should platforms like Steam Xbox PSN. Consider the accessibility of a game to influence how much visibility a game receives. Now, I happen to know and Brandon, you already touched upon it earlier. There are the visibility tags that that Xbox has recently announced and introduced. So for me, like I'm biased, I have been wanting this for a very long time and I definitely agree. But let's Let's turn this a bit bigger. What are the benefits from showcasing that kind of thing in the store?

Brannon Zahand 52:09
Well, I mean, I guess what I would say is, I think it's important to us that if people invest in accessibility, that they get recognized for that, right. And so one of the, the ideas behind the tags was to help gamers discover content that was more likely to be accessible for them want to be very clear, it's not that it will be accessible for them. Because we, we know everyone is different. But by setting criteria for these these types of feature tags that people can say, for example, you know, input remapping, or know quicktime events or things like that, by having these criteria, people know, you know, it can give them a higher degree of probability of that product may work well for them. But the other thing we wanted to do was, like I said, we want to recognize people and let and make sure that there there is, they're getting a greater as great of a return on investment and as possible when they develop games with these features. So on the Xbox, we have an accessibility spotlight. And that allows games that have four or more tabs to show up in a list, and we order them by number of tags from the most of the least. And that's another way to help support that we're using. We're investigating the use of tags in kind of programmatic marketing beats. So you can imagine like having programmatic collections, you know, hey, it's global accessibility awareness. Today, let's today we're gonna showcase games that have these types of features, right? Or it's blind Awareness Day, we're going to showcase these types of games, right, again, with the idea of getting more visibility to those products, from gamers with disabilities, and hopefully more purchases. And then also we are going to be adding, coming up here very, very soon. Search functionality. So you know, users can go in and say I need games with these types of features. And again, just to help kind of narrow down give them an extra set of content they can explore. And hopefully that only not only makes experience better for them, and let them find games that he can play. But then for developers, those are extra sales, right? So you've definitely tried to make it a win win for both the community and the community of developers in the community of gamers with disabilities.

Juney Dijkstra 54:16
I can certainly vouch for it having influenced me positively in the priorities that I've been setting for my development. So you know, and it's having an effect. Oh, that's one tip that I sort of wanted to add on this that I picked up along the way over the years is that I also saw what you're talking about, about finding what kind of games might be suitable for you is, is very challenging for people with various various disabilities, you could consider adding a screenshot of your in game options menu, even in stores that don't necessarily have tags. Just finding an overt complete overview of what kind of options you have, will make it much easier for people with different disabilities to already see before they purchase, if a game could potentially even be suitable for them, because the refund option also doesn't necessarily exist for everyone. And even then, it might take a couple hours to install. And then you have to face the disappointment that after you open up the game, you basically can can refund it again, because it doesn't have the options that you're looking for. So that's one that I wanted to add on to that. We are almost out of time. So let's see if we had any final questions come in. Angelica asks, What tips do you recommend to avoid making the screen too busy with icons or patterns when trying to be colorblind friendly?

Tabby Rose 55:45
I mean, I think it kind of depends on the kind of game that you're making. I mean, if you're making an MMO, this is obviously going to be a lot more challenging than if you're making a puzzle game or something like that. But just following. You know, like it's all principles and principles of design. And hopefully, there's somebody on your team that is like well acquainted with, like sort of graphic design best practices can be able to help you with that, I would say, advocating for my own job here, consider hiring a UX or UI specialist as opposed to having your artist be the one doing that work necessarily. Because, like a an artist, in other roles might not have the specific knowledge and skills to be able to do more like UI design heavy role where they have to be thinking about those things. But yeah, yeah, doesn't write my brief thoughts about that.

Jonas Lundqvist 56:39
I also think a lot of games are stuck in making what's what's shown on screen static when it doesn't necessarily have to be. So if you're not already evaluating whether or not your UI elements need to be static. That might be an avenue to see if that's a way to reduce clutter and just remove this stuff. But isn't needed at every particular time and in your game.

Juney Dijkstra 57:06
Then James asked a great question to wrap all of this up with asking middleware providers to implement accessibility tools has previously been mentioned as an action point we can all do to push the industry towards better accessibility. What other actions can we as individuals do to further push the industry towards bettering accessibility?

Brannon Zahand 57:26
Jonas, you want to go first?

Jonas Lundqvist 57:33
Yeah, sure. Engaging, is I think the owner on a personal level, one of the most important things that we can all do, dare to ask those uncomfortable questions in whatever meeting you're attending. To make it top of mind, if there isn't already an employee resource group, active at the studio that you're working, that, you know, maybe consider finding one and working together with people because I'm sure you're fine, you're going to find that more people than you think are interested and invested in making sure that we have as successful games as we possibly can.

Brannon Zahand 58:09
I'm just going to quickly say encourage inclusive hiring, you know, encourage your HR teams to reach out to the gaming and disability community, there are so many great subject matter experts out there. And, and and and hire people from those groups, to to across a broad spectrum of types of disciplines development design test. It's just it's a great way to to quickly advance accessibility in your products and change culture within a studio.

Ally McLean 58:45
Yeah, I completely agree. I think also just really reiterating what I said earlier, you know, as producers, as people in production, we influence agendas, we influence the kind of conversations that are normal. And so I think, making sure that those accessibility questions are on your agenda, make it normal, make it something that is discussed all the time, and it won't be a difficult question, it will just become part of your process, it'll become part of your culture, I think really take responsibility for the role that producers can play in normalizing conversations that may not currently be normal within your organization.

Tabby Rose 59:24
Yeah, and I guess I'll just add, I love making compassion part of the conversation. And the same way that you're posing questions to your audience about, you know, certain preferences that they may have, pose it to the rest of your team members, there are like, if you can get the rest of your team to all be advocates for this, like, it will be a normal conversation, it will be a fun conversation. And you'll probably learn a lot about yourselves and each other and your, you know, like your various preferences and games, like I bet a lot of us here you subtitles, maybe not all of us need them. But maybe all of us do a little and like, you know, that's a good argument to include them. Right? So, so I'm sure that just having those conversations with your team is gonna is going to help bring you in that direction.

Juney Dijkstra 1:00:13
And then I'm just going to toss in my absolutely non expert, dirty business opinion on this as well, like, market it, show it off what you've got be vocal about it. So it's 100% positive buzz, it helps draw attention and it inspires others as well. So if you have some kick ass functionality, show it off on your socials, make sure that people know about it, because it's not just going to help your community, it's going to help your sales and it's going to help other developers see what's possible that it doesn't have to be hard. And that you know, it can also help just build your your community, your audience and your sales. So you know, I mean, want to make sure that I have that set. And with that we are out of time for this panel. I would like to warmly thank our panelists for sharing their experience and insights, our event producer, Sergio our recording and proof listening supporters and I also want to thank Ian Hamilton and jamesburg for their advice. And of course, I want to thank everyone who tuned in. As mentioned, the panel recording and transcript will be made available via the game production podcast over the coming weeks. Make sure to forward it to anyone who's interested who couldn't make it today. And lastly, make sure to register for the free virtual games accessibility conference Europe which will be taking place April 11 and 12th via gaconf.com. As always, if you have any feedback do let us know!