Game Accessibility:
Low Vision

Virtual Reality is really exciting these days. I have not got VR at home, but I have been lucky to try it out a few times, and the promise in terms of storytelling and fun is tantalising. Here's a trailer for an upcoming game from a well-respected developer that looks and sounds very compelling.

Microsoft has been doing some research into accessibility in VR environments, with very interesting results. The SeeingVR toolkit is a set of Unity (a very popular game engine and development environment) plugins that provide assistive features for VR environments.

Some of these are post-processing filters that require no intervention from the developer (e.g. contrast and edge enhancement). Others are parameterised and require some input (e.g. highlighting important objects). The possibilities for improving access in games and other scenarios are tantalising.

One really interesting idea about accessibility in VR—alas I'm no longer sure where I picked this up—is that the virtual world could provide things like magnifying glasses to act as assistive technologies in-keeping with the world. I find this idea fascinating, though I would rather somehow have the world adapt to my needs. It did make me think that maybe these sorts of experiences could be used to show people without disabilities what it's like having one, but I digress.

There are some good features in this environment and in the game: the signage in this facility has quite large type, and the game's mini-map uses shape as well as colour to indicate what it's indicating (though a bit of manual zoom is required to read the head-up display, or "HUD").

However, the e-books and similar interfaces, like the computer terminal pictured below, have a fixed and not too big font size, and perhaps some contrast issues too.

But this is an eminently solvable problem. The original Unreal Tournament game (a wildly popular and venerated multiplayer-focused first-person shooter), released in 1999, provided an option in its user interface to double the size of fonts and all UI elements.

This was super-helpful for me, even though I only ran the game at relatively low resolutions, as it enabled me to access the interface quite easily. (In fact I use the same technique on my Mac these days to make its UI a bit easier to read, but not rely on screen magnification.)

Incidentally, Unreal Tournament's GUI was quite sophisticated—to the point that one popular modification for the game was not actually a change to the way the main game worked, but a re-recreation of the classic puzzler Tetris, which ran in the in-game GUI. Generally, interfaces have got simpler since thing, and that's a good thing, but if a twenty-year-old game can provide such a sophisticated user interface, with a scaling option, then more games should!

Being able to scale text and the UI is becoming even more important for developers, too. Nowadays the industry is starting to consider cross-platform games, and even streaming games across multiple devices. This means games may be presented on a wide range of displays, of wildly different sizes. Techniques to make these accessible could be very useful—and there's a great example of adaptive user interfaces that tailor themselves to the user and device's needs from the world of research.

Games have generally got considerably more detailed over time—from the resolution of the overall display, and the number of colours and textures simultaneously displayed, to the level of detail in the characters, objects and locales in the game world.

Because earlier games were limited quite significantly by display resolution and palette, they often employed styles and techniques that made them more accessible, such as large text and high-contrast colours. When coupled with original gameplay and well-made storytelling or solid action, some early games are still favourites.

The Descent series was a pioneering six-degrees-of-freedom robotic first-person-shooter, with low-res graphics and enticing bright colours.

Overload is a modern rekindling of the elements that made Descent so special. It has a retro look, but is considerably higher-resolution. It's also quite colourful, which makes a pleasant change from the muted palettes of greys and browns that pervade modern "realistic" games.

A scene from the original and rather low-res seminal first-person-shooter Doom. The resolution is low, so fairly bright colours are used to distinguish the walls, floor and radioactive pools from the enemies.

Here's a scene from Doom 3, which has massive amounts of detail in the scene geometry and the model of the Revenant enemy that the player is facing. But there is a more realistic look, with a detailed but rather muted palette, which can make it hard to take in all that detail.

An even more detailed scene from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which has incredibly high resolution details of a blossoming tree as the centrepiece of an ornate atrium within a building that appears to have middle-eastern architecture.

Adventure games have changed in visual fidelity a great deal too. Here's a cult classic called "Beneath A Steel Sky". The scene is limited by its low resolution, but this has encouraged a lot of creativity from the designers, who've successfully evoked a compelling world. The colours are reasonably bright, and the text that shows what the characters are saying is quite large.

Incidentally, the text is mainly there because the floppy-disk version of the game couldn't accommodate voice recordings for all the dialogue, but they did still include the text in the version with the spoken words, so they kind-of acted like subtitles, and were nice and big and easy to read.

Here's the more modern and beautifully-realised Machinarium, which again has much more detail and a more muted palette. Whilst I found some aspects that were important for the game hard to see, I did have fun playing it.

One genre I've found much harder to play these days is racing games. Classic early-'90s games like Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 (the original Amiga release of which has some absolutely awesome opening music) had high contrast between the road, other terrain and the cars.

Modern games such as Forza Horizon 4, which look so realistic that I almost thought this screengrab was a photograph at first, provide a pretty fantastic experience to the player, but I struggle with taking in the important detail out of all the detail that is available there.

It should be noted however that, as with many other game developers, the team behind Forza is putting much work into accessibility features. Some examples of existing features include the extensive array of driver assists that are on offer in the game. These include: showing the optimal driving line in the form of blue chevrons on the track/road surface; automated braking, shifting and steering, and other features.

Generally I find that games that are more cartoony can be easier to see, as they tend to use bright colours. Mario Kart 64 is a classic mid-'90s example of such a game, on which I spent many hours and got pretty good!

I recently tried the latest entry in the Mario Kart series, which has a similar style, but much higher resolution and level of detail. I am perhaps a bit out of practice, though I felt that playing this one was quite a bit more difficult due to the combination of the speed and much more visual complexity to take in.

Dungeon Keeper—a masterpiece of a game in which you are the overlord of an evil dungeon and its denizens, hell-bent on destroying any pesky heroes that try to come in and vanquish you—has a user interface that is very-much tailored to its low-resolution nature, which results in very clear text and iconography. So even though the colour palette is somewhat muted, it's usually not to hard for me to figure out what's going on. The highly variable zoom levels help a bit there, too.

Again, this reinforces the main reasons why more "classic" games are generally more accessible to me—they're designed with my hardware limitations in mind :-).

Sometimes the aesthetics of a game actually make it more accessible. Two popular styles at the moment are really enticing for me: retro-style pixel art and synthwave. These involve low-res graphics and/or bright colours, which are pretty ace for me.

VVVVVV is a retro-style platformer from 2010, which has very sparse and high-contrast graphics.

Here's the opening scene from Sonic the Hedgehog, which also has relatively low-res and bright graphics, but I generally found it so vast-paced that I couldn't keep up—mind, Adi in his talk pointed out that the sound design is great, and can really help the player pick up on what's going on.

The immersive action-parkour game Mirror's Edge tasks the player as a "runner"—someone who can courier sensitive information between people, across the rooftops, away from the prying network-monitoring eyes of the dodgy city-state. The player must negotiate many different and varied obstacles, and the game feels like it is very free-roaming. But in order to help the player know where to go, they're imbued with "runner-vision", which causes objects they need to traverse to stay on-track to appear bright red.

Runner-vision is great because of its high-contrast nature, which fits well with the overall aesthetic of the game, which is generally white surroundings on the rooftops with occasional splashes of colour, beneath a clear blue sky. Because of that I find it fairly accessible. But also it gives the player the ability to keep moving and really get into the flow of the parkour, which makes the whole game compelling and immersive.

The mobile game Chameleon Run is a platformer that uses only one button (so it could be more accessible to people with motor control or dexterity difficulties, too—there's an excellent site about one-switch games if you'd like more information). The idea is to jump between platforms of alternating colour, being sure to flip the player's colour to match the platform they're about to land on. Aesthetically it's very bold, clear and bright, which makes it quite clear to see.

The hugely popular contemporary game Minecraft, an open-world sandbox game where players mine blocks from the landscape to collect material to build various structures, adopts a purposely simplified approach, where almost everything is delineated into cubes. This makes learning the tools for creation simple, but has by no means stifled creativity (constraints are well-known to inspire creativity). It creates another rather clear and retro-looking atmosphere visually, too.

Matching the Minecraft aesthetic, the procedurally-generated first-person rogue-like (i.e. you only get one life) dungeon-crawler Eldritch casts the player into a Lovecraftian world of slightly pixellated horrors. Its relatively simple geometry has I gather helped make it much easier to code up the dynamically-generated levels—no two playthroughs are the same—and it, as with the other games above, to keep the visuals simple and easy to follow.

Here it is in action…

I've always enjoyed platformers, and games that only need one button are also great (there's an excellent site about one-switch games if you'd like more information). illi is another high-contrast and attractive, but clear-looking platformer, which has a simple gameplay mechanic—jumping when the user presses the button—that's built up over several levels into something that can be quite challenging.

Here it is in action…

The Nightjar (and a its predecessor and sister game, Papa Sangre, sadly no longer available in the App Store) use audio not only as the main source of output, but the only source of output. They're set in environments that are completely dark, forcing the player to rely on sound alone. The sound is very sophisticated and creates a visceral and scary 3D atmosphere.

Games that use audio primarily, or entirely, are often called "audio games" to contrast with the more conventional "video games". Check out AudioGames.net for some great info, reviews and community discussion about audio games.

Half-Life was a landmark in first-person shooters, as it brought the narrative right into the game. One of the most popular ways of conveying the story to players previously was by having video cutscenes between levels. In Half-Life, though, the player is fully immersed in the story because set-piece events simply happen right there whilst you're exploring the level. This is now the standard for the industry.

Incidentally, when Valve software created their own in-house engine for Half-Life's sequels and other projects, they added closed caption support. This was a massive boon for accessibility at the time, but also enabled Valve to market the game in languages for which they had recorded voice acting—a win for everyone. More details on this in the GamesCC project's interview with Marc Laidlaw from Valve.

Unreal, a contemporary of Half-Life, used a more traditional means to provide the story—the player could pick up books, diaries and computer pads left by people (and aliens), and read them. The story was pretty cool—and that game too is a classic, full of huge, diverse, but exceptionally well-themed and vibrant environments, so it always grabbed my attention—but this way of storytelling is less accessible, particularly due to the lack of variable font size (Unreal predates the awesome efforts done on Unreal Tournament).

As it happens, Unreal was one of the first games to support 3D and environmental sound effects—so being inside a cave vs out in the open would really sound how it should—so it provided many other successful ways to immerse the player.

Around the time the Apple Watch first came out (which was a really interesting device for accessibility—I loved the haptic direction-giving feature, but always found general text too small to read) a new type of game emerged. Lifeline is a casual game that takes place over several days. You receive a notification (on your watch or phone) from a desperate traveller who crashed on an alien planet, and needs your help to survive.

Gameplay usually consists of getting a notification (or two), making a decision and sending back a canned response to the stranded traveller. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure book, but having the experience as if this person is really sending messages to you, and having to do things like searching the web for answers to really unusual questions. It can also be quite accessible, as you can use at least some traditional assistive technologies to access the content, and you can take it at your own pace. A really novel fun time!

One thing that the developers of Machinarium did to address the language barrier was to not use any spoken words, but rather present pictrograms in speech bubbles for the characters. This was overall quite clear and gave the game an endearing and different feel, though I would've liked to the bubbles to stay on-screen for longer, and maybe have a replay button in them.

We discussed Chameleon Run earlier, and how accessible it can be. However, as with many games—even those that are bright, clear and only require one switch to operate—I often find a point where things just happen too fast on-screen for me to react. It would be great to see the developers offer an option to slow things down.

One really popular activity with gamers is to make "speedruns" of their favourite levels or games. These involve them completing the game as quickly as possible without cheating—though they often use odd glitches in the game that are researched and discovered over time. People like racing, even digitally :-). Anyway, here's a speedrun of the first level of Chameleon Run. Whilst no casual gamer would play it this fast, it simulates how it feels to be overwhelmed by the speed of things.

I mentioned that racing games can be tough for me because there's so much to look at, and things happen so fast. One helpful feature for this can be found in rally games, where your navigator tells you directions as you go. Below you can find an example from Dirt 2.0

This is a really great example of an assistive feature, because it is fully centred in the game world, so using it feels normal, immersive and not even like an assistive feature at all.

Getting oriented in the game world can be a challenge for anyone. There are various devices and approaches that have been used to help players understand where they are, and where they need to go. These vary from the very un-subtle (e.g. the use of massive floating arrows to guide the player to their destination, not necessarily in-keeeping with the game universe, but quite easy to see) to the more immersive, such as the guide-bot in Descent II.

The guide-bot is a companion you can find to help you guide your six-degrees-of-freedom flying ship around varied and twisted mines on far-flung planets. It can be programmed to take you to a range of objectives, from keys to shield power-ups, and really helps if you get lost.

Maps are another popular means of providing directions in games. Grand Theft Auto 4 provides a map that doesn't rely on colour, and uses symbols to indicate the types of places available to visit. This is really helpful, though I always find myself doing the manual zoom in order to be able to read it.

Some games even came with real, physical maps! This was really popular with flight sims, and also with space exploration/trading/pirating/mining sandbox games, such as the epic Elite and its sequel Frontier

Different colours, but not different shapes, are used to identify different systems. I can't actually remember the significance of the colours!

Augmented Reality (AR) is going to be very cool, and has such potential for accessibility. I wanted to mention an app that used to be on the App Store that helped people navigate to their nearest tube station in London by overlaying the station signs onto a real view of the real world, via the phone's camera. This is similar to the techniques used in games, but applied to the real world.

Mirror's Edge and its runner-vision came up earlier. The technique of highlighting things to help the player proceed, often done with the nifty idea of "as you're highly trained in doing this job [whatever it is], you can see what you need to do naturally" to aid immersion, is a really cool orientation technique. Here's an example of runner-vision.

Real-world and online communities are also a huge part of gaming. Various means of communication are used, including the ever-popular web fora, which can bring their own accessibility barriers.

Another once-very-popular way of playing games communally was a "LAN party" which involves physically getting together with other games. With the rise of gaming over the Internet, this is less popular now, but still warrants a mention.

Some multiplayer games have very fast-paced gameplay. This can be rewarding when mastered, but can very easily present insurmountable barriers to some gamers. Quake 3 is notoriously fast, fluid and fun—but only if you've got near-perfect timing and accuracy. I do think that playing games has helped me hone my hand-eye co-ordination, but equally I doubt I'd be so great at playing against fellow humans.

Some games, however, are designed for co-operative play, and that can be very rewarding, as you can get help from your co-player, ranging from normal in-game stuff to accessibility assistance, like reading out small text or describing the environment.

As much as people may enjoy playing games, they often enjoy creating them just as much, if not more. Mapping—i.e. making levels, or "maps", for games—is very popular. Nowadays games often come with mapping tools built-in.

Maps and their editors can range from relatively simple, tile-based 2D environments (used in top-down games such as real-time strategy or some adventure or side-scrolling platform games)…

…to full-blown 3D CAD-style environments. Game engines, and the tools they provide (which are often the same tools that the developers used to create the game itself) are so sophisticated that they are often also used for other purposes, including academic research.

Many moons ago I worked on a proof-of-concept tool for mapping that used structured-text descriptions of the levels to be created, rather than a visual interface. Here is an example of a map for the ancient but venerable Quake in a traditional graphical 3D editor…

This is what it looks like in-game…

Another way people can get creative with games is modifying the way the game behaves, rather than the environment in which the player plays (or, even, as well as the environment). A very popular class-based capture-the-flag game called Team Fortress started out as a modification, or "mod" for Quake. Later it was re-implemented in Half-Life and then it eventually was given its own separate release, with a quite highly tweaked graphical style, as a stand-alone game called Team Fortress 2.

This all came about due to the original effort of people in the community. It's actually happened several times now that a fan-made mod ends up turning into a major stand-alone gaming title, often with the fans who developed it getting hired as developers in the process.

Providing access to modding games, much as with mapping, can be a really great educational and creative experience.

For making modifications, one of the main tools needed is a code editor. It could be one that comes with the game, thus requiring that accessibility was considered in the development of its UI, or it could be any standard editor.