Take the Message to School

This past weekend, I got to do just that.

The International Academy of Design and Technology in Detroit hosts an annual conference called Interfaces. The conference is about promoting game design, graphic design, and digital media industries.

I was invited to host a round table discussion about accessibility at this year Interfaces. Attendees last year included industry professionals, creative professionals, faculty from local and national colleges and universities, as well as students.

This was the first year for round tables at the event, and no one was completely sure how it was going to work out. The discussions were to be held during lunch, to help ensure a calm and relaxing atmosphere where the students wouldn’t be intimidated by talking to people in the industry one on one.

Part of me was petrified that no one was even going to show up to mine. Who’d want to listen to me?

In the end, it turned out really well. But, who came to my “Accessibility Basics- Guidelines to Building a Better Game” roundtable?

A diverse group of kids ended up sitting with me. All of them were students, which was exactly what I wanted. Some of them had actively sought out my table, and although they didn’t know much about accessibility, they came prepared with questions.

Others just happen to sit down with no clue what was happening, but ended up staying once they found out how important this conversation really is.

I had some students who were interested in working in the film industry, a UI artist, a game designer, a game artist and some people who just wanted to be in the game industry but weren’t sure where.

What did I learn about these students during my roundtable?

Most of them had no clue what accessibility was, or what it meant to be accessible. When I began preparing my outline for the round table discussion, I assumed that these kids would have little to no base knowledge on the subject.

It turned out I was exactly right.

They aren’t including accessibility features in their projects; not because they don’t want to, but because they simply don’t know any better. When they transitioned from school to work, their new projects would likely still lack accessibility because it wasn’t a habit they got into during school. This causes a major problem. While at a studio, their work, their projects may be the AAA game titles we all would love to be playing.

So, that’s all bad news right?

Not exactly. Yes, it is sort of sucky for the AbleGamers Community that these future developers didn’t know about accessibility, but there is some good news. These kids were really interested in learning about accessibility.

In fact, they let me run over a solid 15 minutes because they kept having questions to ask or examples they wanted to know about. Even the kids who couldn’t apply video game accessibility to their work, because they didn’t want to be in video games, stayed and listened to me.

I told them all the basics. Have remappable controls. Have subtitles, preferably closed captioning. Have the options for high contrast colors. Be red-green color blind friendly… so on and so forth.

They took notes. They listened. They asked for examples of popular AAA titles that had done things right and done things wrong.

One student asked me to be her mentor. Another asked if when a game he was working on was playable, if I would be able to do an accessibility review of it for him. These kids really wanted to learn.

It really gave me hope.

I firmly believe that the only way we can get good accessibility habits engrained in game developers is to teach it to them while they are young and learning, while still in school. If a teacher takes away points for you not having remappable controls on a project, you’re likely going to get in the habit of putting remappable controls in your projects.

It’s sort of the reverse of what’s happening with tables in web site design. Everyone knows that designing a website with tables isn’t a good thing to do. They aren’t accessible at all. Screen readers often have problems with them. So how did schools start changing this? Well, they simple didn’t teach tables in web design classes. If a student doesn’t know how to build a website using tables, they likely aren’t going to try to build a website using tables. I think we can apply the reverse to game accessibility.

If we start teaching students to make games accessible, they’re likely going to keep making games accessible because it’s what they know.

Overall, my round table was a real success. Students showed a thirst for knowledge. They wanted to learn, and accessibility was the topic. Like I said, it really gave me a lot of hope. I think that we can prep the next generation of game developers to do what we need them to do now. I think that teaching accessibility in school is one of the most important things we can do. I think that students may be the AbleGamers’ best ally.

Help me and the rest of the AbleGamers staff change the future and put accessibility on the forefront.

Our AbleGamers staff would love to talk to more students, so please, if you are a student, or you know one, or you’re a teacher looking for a lesson plan.  Feel free to email me, Tara, and the AG crew, any time at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . We’d love to lend our services.

Comments (2)

Carol Williams

June 01, 2010

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Excellent article, Tara!

John Bannick

June 16, 2010

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Provocative article, Tara.

I wonder how more kids could be exposed to this kind of insight.

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