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This is how you take care of accessibility in modern gaming - IOI's Joshua Flitcroft DevGAMM Interview
Joshua is the technical accessibility designer at IO Interactive and before his talk in Lisbon we learned a lot more on how devs keep accessibility in mind when making their games nowadays, and also about the biggest challenges, hurdles, and limitations for both them and players.
Audio transcription
"Good, we are in Lisbon for the DevGAMM 2024 and I'm here joined by Joshua.
Thank you so much for joining us. This is interesting because your panel is tomorrow.
But you can give us a bit of a tease, you can share a little bit of what you're sharing tomorrow with devs."
"And this is very interesting because it's all about accessibility.
So which would you say is the main takeaway you're going to share tomorrow?
Hopefully just letting more people know about what accessibility is and why it's important.
And giving them some tips on how to hopefully make their games more accessible as well."
"This has changed a lot. Accessibility got a lot of visibility as of late.
It got specific awards, which is good of course.
And it changed how you guys design games.
So what would you say about this whole evolution of accessibility in gaming in the past decade?
Yeah, I think it's interesting, right?
Because in the past, even older games, we've still had a lot of accessibility by design."
"So if you think of something like the original Pokemon, maybe on the Game Boy Advance, that just had basic input of a couple of directions and then one or two buttons.
So it's actually really accessible for games with motor disabilities just through its core design.
And I think maybe what's more changed now in the past decade is just more people are aware of accessibility."
"And sort of getting more of a focus on it.
So we have now dedicated hardware being built by Sony and Xbox to help gamers play.
We now have more focus on actually how we can make more games more accessible for maybe gamers who are fully blind.
So those without sight."
"We have The Last of Us Part II.
And then a lot of indie games as well, who are sort of making sure that all gamers really are able to play.
And I think the sort of bigger focus is just more being in the past decade, just more kind of in the mainstream in some sense of sort of more people are at least aware that it's there, even if they're not sure how to actually make their games more accessible."
"Which would you say is the main, you mentioned some disabilities, or the main limitation nowadays for you guys to try and understand and implement something as a solution in gaming for those limitations?
What's the biggest challenge, sorry?
Yeah, the biggest challenge, the biggest limitation for players that you are trying to figure out how to fix in gaming."
"I think probably the, maybe the biggest one is sort of, again, gamers without sight.
I think because we're so used to building games so visually, sort of especially like with level design of how we can try and give players hints in the direction that they should go, that now if we're trying to do the same for gamers that don't have, can't see the screen, can't see the levels, I think that's the biggest challenge and I think that's something that we're still probably going to be working on and working out how we can do, especially like with open world games, so that we can still give players the freedom of approach and let them choose where they want to go and what they want to do, as opposed to just telling them and showing them like, no, you're going to go this way."
"How do you guys work with this at IOI?
Both at a technical level and also, you know, in the timeline of development, where do you enter? Where are you kept in mind?
Where do you have to say, hey, perhaps it's on the base where you are, as you mentioned, doing the level design or the first conceptual things or then you're in the middle and then you say, okay, let's tweak this or let's modify this so that it's more inclusive, more accessible."
"Yeah, so I think in the past, the approach we've kind of maybe been taking is just sort of, we've had a couple of people who have just been passionate about accessibility, so they've just been trying to sneak their things in or sort of try and get it in under the radar.
I think the focus more nowadays has sort of been trying to make more people at the company aware."
"It's like, because we know that in the past, you know, some of our titles weren't accessible in the ways that maybe we'd hope, or, you know, there's people still facing a lot of barriers with our games.
So what we try to do now is sort of more increase the awareness of people that have and know what about accessibility is, so we can try and have more people thinking about it."
"Because we never want to make our games inaccessible. It's not intentional.
No, no, no.
It's just people don't know about it.
And so I think that's sort of been our biggest push at the moment is sort of just, you know, having presentations, bringing in consultants, people with lived experiences to talk about what gaming is to them and why it's important and really try and look at accessibility through that way of sort of, at least at the moment, sort of focusing on getting more people aware of it and thinking about it in their sort of day to day as well."
"Can you give me a couple of examples of what you guys have been doing with, for example, Hitman, or at IOI with accessibility as of late?
So for Hitman, I think the main focus we had there was like with the subtitles, and then on PC we still had sort of input remapping with keyboard, but there was still a lot of barriers that we didn't address, and it was still very inaccessible in a lot of ways."
"Right now I can't share what the feature's working on just because things could still change at any point, but I think we're hopefully just, again, focusing on trying to look at how we can make accessibility more of a thought for people while still building on some cool tech that we can hopefully share at some point.
For the many young devs that we have here and indie devs, how does one become an accessibility champion?
What sort of background did you have before becoming like the guy in charge of this?
Yeah, so I kind of sort of fell into this a little bit in the sense that I had my own biases that I wasn't aware of, so I didn't really realize accessibility was such a big thing until The Last of Us Part II came out, and that sort of showed me like, oh, wow, okay, things have accessibility, and then I saw some streamers like Sightless Combat, who's a gamer fully blind without sight, playing The Last of Us Part II, and it was that seeing him play and sort of realizing at that point, oh, right, the things that's stopping everyone from being able to play the games is me, the developer."
"It's those things that I've not been aware of and not thinking about, and so it's from that that I was like, okay, I want to learn more.
What can I do to help make our games more accessible?
And that was then when we started pushing more presentations, sort of raising awareness, trying to get more people involved, creating like a little circle or sort of having people talking about accessibility, and so for people now that are looking at it and want to become more of a champion, the best places to start is looking at guidelines, so they have like the Xbox accessibility guidelines and the game accessibility guidelines, which are great places to start information of things to think about, examples, things to consider."
"They're probably the easiest way if you want to get started looking at it, and then the next approach from that is probably looking at something, how we can make our games accessible through their core design, and so through that it could be looking at something like accessible player experiences by the AbleGamers charity, so that one they have created different patterns to help when you're thinking about accessibility, you're thinking about the individual experiences and making those a little bit successful rather than just looking at your entire game, trying to make that accessible, which can just feel like such a scary task, so that really helps breaking it down more and thinking of it more as piecemeal."
"When you're coming in, as we were saying before, all right, what about VR?
I've been discussing VR with Eduard from IOI Barcelona a lot of times, and of course Hitman is big on VR as well, so where do you think we could be heading in terms of accessibility in VR, where the environment is different, the signals, the things players deal with are much more different?
Yeah, I think it's sort of just being more aware of it, I think, so again, there's still going to be challenges, especially gamers without sight, because this is now very much a visual thing, but VR can still be very accessible for certain types of gamers, so I know some people that have chronic pain, it's easier if they're playing games when they're lying down, so if you have a VR headset, you can still have the screen right in front of you, you can be lying down, and so I think it's sort of, at least at the moment, being more accommodating to allowing people to play how they want, because even having something like playing standing versus playing seated, that's an accessibility feature, an option right there, and so I think just being more aware of not seeing VR as a scary thing that we can never make accessible, but sort of more talking with gamers with disabilities about how they play VR, what they kind of need from their games, and sort of learning from them, and also learning from other studios that have already tackled it as well, can sort of really help us sort of learn and develop more for accessibility."
"Perhaps to a therapeutical point, in that, for example, my dad suffers from vertigo, from heights, right, and the other day he was playing this VR game, he had to climb the ladder, climb the ladder was good, but then going down, it was very, do you think this, you know, all that you guys are learning and implementing into video games can be used in a therapeutical way in the future, as in, you know, this sort of experience is making them approach their limitations in real life better?
Possibly, I think the, when we think about accessibility, it's more for trying to remove barriers from people being able to play, as opposed to sort of trying to get them in a world where they could play without maybe what they experience in modern day, or day-to-day life."
"I think it's sort of, we don't want to see accessibility as that kind of thing, of sort of giving them like a different life, it's more about trying to let them enjoy an experience, and sort of make sure the games they want to play, they can play.
Fantastic, alright. Thank you so much for your time, Joshua, I'm looking forward to attending your panel tomorrow."
"Thank you so much, it's been great talking to you. Enjoy the show.
Thank you.
Thank you."
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