No Barriers to Fun!

We met our friend Giddeon at the AbleGamers Accessibility Arcade in Atlantic City, New Jersey. When he first sat down with the AbleGamers crew, Giddeon didn't want to play any games. He told us that with his disability gaming was difficult. Giddeon has a rare disease that caused the growth of his arms .. Read More
A Window to the World

Shepherd University invited the AbleGamers Foundation to come on campus and do one of our Accessibility Arcades for the students and local disabled community. The event was a roaring success with hundreds of children and adults coming out to see the technology and in some cases experience gaming the first time. Read More

Celebrities are Beginning to Join the Cause

Written by Steve Spohn

Published on 15 December 2009

stevie_wonder {sidebar id=1}At the Video Game Awards hosted by Spike TV, companies are awarded for coming up with the latest and greatest in the fun, thrilling, and exciting digital entertainment products. But, something entirely different happened at the 2009 VGAs.

Stevie Wonder presented this year's award for video game of the year to The Beatles Rock Band Edition and although the game may very well have deserved that honor but that was not what caught our attention. Mr. Wonder then pleaded with the video game industry to help make games more accessible “to people like him” - the disabled gamers.

He would like the adaptation of Braille being placed on controller buttons, as well as, other easy to do peripheral adaptations. So far, video gamers have supported his idea based on the comments we are seeing across a dozen video game magazine websites.

AbleGamers has been attempting to push the industry in that direction for many years but with the help of celebrities like Mr. Wonder, it is only a matter of time before they will have to include accessibility without the prodding of organizations such as ours.

The sooner video game designers realize that they are leaving out a potential 9-20% of potential customers; the sooner we will all be able to play our favorite titles.

Bravo, Stevie Wonder! And if you happen to be his agent reading this, we would love to talk to you about what video games mean to you.