The hybrid edition of #GAconf Europe 2024 was held on 22nd-23rd April across Zoom, Discord and the Pullman St Pancras hotel in London.
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This talk explores the subtle difference between ability, capability and capacity. Join Jamie + Lion as they guide you through these useful concepts and how to harness them to create great experiences.
Accessibility helps more people play our games, but it also takes an army! So how can you take your passion, and train people across disciplines to make more inclusive choices? This talk will enable you to run your own workshops to boost accessibility in your studio.
Accessibility Designer, Cari Watterton, created Inclusive Design Workshops, inspired by Xbox’s Inclusive Design Sprints, to train developers at Rebellion to consider accessibility throughout development in a way that is cost effective but still impactful. This awareness across disciplines helps to foster an inclusive design mindset and avoid unintentional barriers in our games.
Cari’s talk covers the creation and content of the cross-discipline workshops, the feedback and development that Rebellion went through to create an engaging and fun learning experience, and the result and impacts that the training has had on our staff and our workflows.
Four disabled and/or neurodivergent gamers discuss their experiences playing online games with and against friends and strangers. Live service games in particular have a unique opportunity to continuously integrate disabled players’ feedback into updates. At the same time, they have to navigate the perception that accessibility features may impede competitiveness. This discussion aims to offer an alternative perspective on this and highlights some solutions that have worked for the speakers.
A look into IRIS and Fonttik, EA’s open-source accessibility tools. In this talk, Blanca and Carolina will show how IRIS, a photosensitivity analysis tool, and Fonttik, a solution for contrast ratio and font size, work and came to be. They will also give a demonstration on how anyone can use these tools and influence videogame development, while highlighting their ease of use and capabilities.
Sea of Thieves is 6 years young, and we’re still shipping accessibility improvements on a regular basis. Learn about how we developed Audio Aim Assist into Sea of Thieves, it’s origin story, and lessons we learned on the way.
People cheat in games for many reasons, including for better accessibility. But is cheating now doing more harm than good for Disabled gamers?
With hustle culture, and inaccessibility being prominent within content creation, there are so many barriers for disabled people to “make it” in content creation. With it being a dream job for many, there is so much more that can and should be done by companies to make this space an equitable one.
Join Anna Waismeyer, the Accessibility Research lead from the Xbox Research team, as she shares learnings from a series of inclusive design workshops held last year. These workshops, conducted with Xbox Game Studios and accessibility advisors from the disability community, have been a cornerstone in weaving accessibility into the fabric of game development from the get-go. By learning and growing together as a community, we can get another step closer to growing a forest of accessible experiences for all.
The hero’s journey path of being an accessibility champion.
In this talk, Jozef details the Accessibility Champions Programme at Splash Damage. The talk initially establishes the need for a Champions Programme at Splash Damage before exploring the range of forms that Champions Programmes can take, the specifics of our Champions Programme and how this sits inside of wider cultural change initiatives around accessibility. The talk is aimed at providing developers with the What, Why and How of Accessibility Champions, and developers should leave with an understanding of both their value and how they can approach starting a Programme at their own studio.
A talk about my gaming life with wobbly eyes and how accessibility changed my life!
This talk explores game accessibility preferences of players with visual disabilities collected through a survey in Spain. Results unveil participants’ gaming habits, accessibility’s impact on their preferences and the potential of gameplay audio description as an accessibility feature.
How do you plan the accessibility of a game, prioritise efforts, and share info with your players? As an indie developer do you even have the time or resources to do so? This panel will share the best practices we can all put in place to answer these questions.
With games like Diablo 4 being released with an integrated screen reader, it’s more important than ever that the use of synthetic speech amplifies the gaming experience.
On April 19, 2023, Guerrilla released a patch that added several Accessibility options to Horizon Forbidden West, including a Thalassophobia mode. This was a brand-new undertaking for the studio. In this presentation, you will learn what prompted Guerrilla to release this feature, and which difficulties the studio ran into during development.
It’s hard being the only one in your organisation or team responsible for accessibility. If that sounds familiar, I salute you, and this one’s for you.
Cut into the layers of Blind Bake, a dough-lightful puzzle game where one player takes on the role of a blind croissant, while another strategically deploys chorusing confections to guide the way! This experimental game, cooked up at the Global Game Jam and rising to victory as the proud recipient of ReadSpeaker’s accessibility prize, serves up a unique experience that aims to showcase and teach effective audio navigation through 3D levels. In this talk we’ll roll out the core gameplay, exploring the ingredients that make effective audio navigation, sprinkled with developer insights and feedback from gamers without sight.
Metroidvania isn’t typically known for its accessibility. So, when the Prince of Persia team decided to delve into this genre while also integrating intricate combat mechanics and intense platforming sections, we anticipated a daunting challenge.
Working with a smaller team than usual for a Ubisoft production and without prior experience in accessibility, we risked overlooking this critical aspect. However, against the odds, the game shipped with a strong focus on accessibility, praised by both players and reviewers.
In this talk, Rémi Boutin will delve into the philosophy and process the team employed to design and ensure the game was as accessible as possible, despite facing production and resource constraints.
The project Gaming ohne Grenzen was launched at the beginning of 2020. The aim was to test games for accessibility in mixed-abled youth groups as part of media education work outside of schools. The pandemic made it difficult to get started, but it also opened up opportunities for other focal points. In addition to youth work, Gaming ohne Grenzen became an important player in raising awareness of accessibility in digital games in the German gaming industry.