LogInSpecialEffect's Mark Saville and Bill Donegan told us about the barriers the people with disabilities can face while playing and shared how their resource tool assists game developers to create games that would be more accessible to people with disabilities.
Last month, charity organization SpecialEffect launched DevKit – the resource tool that provides game developers with information to help them improve motor accessibility of their games for disabled people. We asked SpecialEffect Communication Officer, Mark Saville, and Projects Manager, Bill Donegan, about the barriers the disabled people can face while playing, what DevKit offers to overcome these barriers, and the main challenges for the game developers who intend to make their games more accessible.
In-person assessment visit (pre-COVID)
SpecialEffect
Mark Saville and Bill Donegan: We’re a UK-based charity that puts fun and inclusion back into the lives of people with physical disabilities by helping them to play video games. There's no one-size-fits-all way of doing this, so our specialist assessment teams work with people individually to find out exactly what they want to play and what they need to play it. We’ll then match or modify technology to create and loan personalized gaming control setups, and back this up with lifelong follow-up support.
Our Founder and CEO Dr. Mick Donegan started the charity back in back in 2007 because he realized there was a largely unfulfilled but crucially important need amongst severely physically disabled people – the need to play. Video games had the potential to offer a virtual opportunity for people with physical disabilities to compete in, experience, and enjoy real-world activities they'd otherwise have limited or no access to, so he set up SpecialEffect to meet the challenge. Initially, the charity ran on a voluntary basis with a very small core group of staff but, over the years, it's expanded, our reputation has grown and we now employ approximately 25 staff.
Our teams aim to spend as much time with each person as is needed, which makes it possible to tailor our accessible gaming setup loans to their unique situations. That's a real privilege but also probably the biggest challenge we face; the fact that everyone's needs, aspirations, and abilities are so different. It can take a lot of time to match up the right pieces of equipment to suit someone's physical needs as well as their personal goals in terms of which types of games they'd like to be able to play.
The trickiest setups involve a mashup of all different types of access – eye control, switches, voice control – and it's crucial to ensure that they all work together seamlessly, reliably, and comfortably within the person's environment. We also recognize that people's abilities may change over time, so we offer lifelong support for everyone we help. There are some gamers we've been working with for well over a decade now.
The benefits we see go far beyond simply having fun: games offer an unparalleled opportunity for the people we help to participate as an equal in astonishingly rich competitive gaming environments and social communities, resulting in greater independence, self-esteem, confidence, achievement, an opportunity to demonstrate to others the best of themselves – the list goes on.
Everything useful that we learn through our assessments and research has the potential to be recycled to help others worldwide, resulting in resources like EyeMine, gameaccess.info, and Eye Gaze Games. It’s also a privilege to be able to share our accessibility experience with developers to help make their games more accessible and to collaborate with manufacturers like Microsoft in the creation of internationally available accessibility products such as the Xbox Adaptive Controller, and of course resources like the SpecialEffect DevKit.
All the help and advice we provide, whether it’s to individual gamers or multinational studios, is given at no cost so we're 100% reliant on fundraising to maintain our services.
SpecialEffect DevKit
Mark Saville and Bill Donegan: It’s been very heartening to see the positive initial response from game developers following the launch. We’ve been working for many years in collaboration with developers around the world: working with EA Sports on making FIFA more accessible for example, and we’re hoping that the SpecialEffect DevKit will be an effective way of extending that expertise and experience to many other studios. We’re also working on the localization of the kit into several languages and promoting it within universities and colleges to widen the awareness of motor accessibility issues at the entry stage of game development.
Remote assessment (current model since March 2020)
Barriers that Disabled People Can Face
Mark Saville and Bill Donegan: Whilst we work directly with individuals to create custom controllers for them to be able to access their console or PC of choice, they may still face barriers from game to game. For instance, a player may have a controller that allows them to access all the different stick, button, or trigger inputs a game may need, but gameplay may require these to be used in ways that are a real challenge for them. For example, a player might be able to access the A button comfortably to press it momentarily, but can’t hold it down for a set duration, repeatedly press it, or hold it continuously. If a game allows an alternate interaction, this particular challenge could be removed.
Other examples include a players’ controller simply not being recognized as a compatible device on a particular platform, timing elements that require quick or precisely timed movements, or the requirement to use more inputs than a player has access to. The SpecialEffect DevKit covers these potential barriers and shows ways that developers have removed them from their games.
Altering Gameplay
Mark Saville and Bill Donegan: The DevKit covers options that developers have provided for players to customize how assisted the different elements of gameplay are, such as player strength, timing elements, and analog action assists. It also has examples of how gameplay may be simplified, in terms of offering alternate actions, providing automatic actions, and predicting and automating certain actions. The Devkit also shows how the information provided in a game can have an impact on its accessibility. For example, how players are able to access settings, navigate and understand them and test them out before playing.
Bottlenecks
Mark Saville and Bill Donegan: We’d love the examples in the DevKit to inspire developers to create accessibility options and features suitable for their own games (that they know inside out) and which encourages additional creative solutions to help move game accessibility forwards. The more ways there are of approaching some of these accessibility barriers, the better.
However, it might be that a particular game simply doesn’t need to offer some of the features demonstrated in the DevKit. For instance, if a game already has a ‘simplified’ control scheme by default, it might not need to offer players additional reduced control schemes. Or, if a game doesn’t require timing elements, options to remove these won’t be required.
Roadmap
Mark Saville and Bill Donegan: We’re fully committed to helping many more individuals to play games to the very best of their abilities, and we’re looking forward to keeping up with the accessibility challenges of a fast-moving games industry and its ever-changing technology.
Alongside that, we’re planning to increase the number of games available through our Eye Gaze Games website, and we’ll also be working hard on our other inclusion-driven projects that extend beyond gaming, like StarGaze where we’re using our many years of expertise in eye-gaze technology to bring communication, independence, and hope for people in intensive care units with a severe injury or illness. There’s also our BubbleBusters project, where we’re using telepresence robots to reconnect medically isolated children with their education and friends.