Making The Last of Us Accessible for Blind Players

80.lv: Please introduce yourself. What projects have you been a part of?

My name is Brandon Cole. I am a totally blind, professional accessibility consultant primarily working in the video game industry. I am known for my work on award-winning titles such as The Last of Us Part 1 and Part 2, but I have worked on other products as well, including mobile games and even the Twitch streaming platform briefly.

80.lv: How did your path in games begin? Could you discuss your journey?

I have been a gamer since I was very young. I actually started gaming because of a prank played upon me by my older brother, who convinced me I was playing Super Mario Brothers on our Nintendo when I was, in fact, holding an unplugged controller. I vowed after that to one day finish a game without his help, and so I just kept trying games until I succeeded. I never looked back.

I’ve always loved games and thought deeply about the ones I couldn’t play. You might say I’ve been an accessibility consultant in my own mind for years. My now fiancé noticed this and suggested I start blogging about my ideas. I did so, and that got me invited to a panel on accessible gaming at GDC in 2014. At that time, I was speaking only as the blind gamer, not as any kind of insider. However, I did well enough there to get noticed by Ian Hamilton, a co-moderator of the panel who later created the Game Accessibility Conference. He invited me to be one of the first speakers there in 2017. That’s where I hooked up with Naughty Dog, developers of the Last of Us franchise, and the rest is history.

80.lv: How did you join The Last of Us team? What were your tasks as a consultant?

Though I met a couple of representatives from Naughty Dog during GAConf in 2017, I still had an important job to do. I was invited to the studio where I would effectively be selling my ideas and myself to the rest of the team. I knew what was on the line here, so I gave it my all, and it worked. We did have a couple of doubters, but ultimately the team decided to give this blind accessibility thing a shot and let me help them do it.

My job was, first, to brainstorm. I had to help the team come up with concepts for the features that would make up the game’s blind accessibility. I, therefore, co-designed many features including navigation assist, the in-game screen reader, aim assist, and so on. After that first brainstorming session, I went away for a while and let them work. All future sessions, though, were much more involved. I playtested what the team had built based on our previous session, provided feedback on that work, and then the brainstorming continued as we tried to come up with even more features and ideas. This went on for about 3 years, and I even continued providing feedback and offering up ideas post-launch. I like to say that I’ve never actually stopped working for them.

80.lv: Could you discuss your work? How was the collaboration organized?

The team would book a couple of days for me to be there at a time and they would be very focused on me and any other consultants they had booked for that time. I would meet at different points with all development teams, from UI to design to audio and so on. Brainstorming sessions frequently occurred over lunch, which honestly seemed to be the perfect time for them. Playtesting would take place before and after, and sometimes things we discussed at lunch would be fixed live, in real time, in the build I was testing. It was a very warm, very welcoming environment that I loved stepping back into every single time.

80.lv: Were any particular parts of the game that were difficult to adapt in terms of accessibility? What were the main challenges?

When you’re working with really talented people, it all seems easy. That said, yes, there were challenges. One great example was the challenge of bringing the stealth aspect of the game to blind players. This was something we talked about a lot because we wanted them to have that option. We went with the invisibility while prone feature, knowing it was a bit of a concession but deciding after a lot of thought that it was the best choice with the time and resources available. This feature allowed the blind player to go invisible to enemies while lying prone, letting them sneak up and take down their enemies with stealth. We provided options around this for those who felt that made it too easy, allowing you to activate an invisibility time limit, which would be determined by your stealth difficulty setting. Also, the feature is intentionally not perfect. If an enemy does the equivalent of stepping on the player, the player will still be “spotted.”

Another challenge people might not think about though is related to in-game dialog voiceover versus screen reader narration. We discussed at great length when one should be made quieter than the other. This was related to the importance of the narrative because we didn’t want to interrupt important story moments but also wanted the player to be able to hear UI-related information when they needed it most. For this reason, screen reader narration is ducked down in volume while a character is delivering a story-related dialog line. However, if you are in a combat situation, where your status, ammo count, and so on are the most important pieces of information, character voices are ducked severely instead in favor of screen reader narration to ensure you’re always getting the information you need.

80.lv: What were your final thoughts when playing the game? How comfortable was it?

I really appreciate the wording of this question. It DID feel comfortable to finally settle in and play The Last of Us Part 2. It felt like the video game home I always wanted because at last, I could play without any restrictions or need for sighted help. And of course, this came with a feeling of pride since I had helped to create that feeling not just in myself but in blind gamers everywhere.

80.lv: What’s your take on accessibility in games today? Could you please share some good and bad examples?

I think we’ve come a very long way. Last year I got to say that not one but two games that I never touched were made fully blind-accessible based on inspiration from my previous work. God of War Ragnarök literally had features directly from The Last of Us, and I was not involved during development. The developer of a game called 1428: Shadows Over Silesia called me the “spiritual father” of the game’s accessibility. These and a game called As Dusk Falls, which is also fully blind-accessible, are great examples of how it’s done.

But yes, there are bad examples as well. The recent FIFA entry from EA claims to have menu narration among its accessibility features but, in fact, doesn’t narrate anything that actually helps the blind player. It narrates the “press X to continue” prompt on a few screens without actually reading the contents of the screen and doesn’t narrate any options or settings at all. Sadly, this is fairly common, with many games including Gears 5, Minecraft Dungeons, and Flight Simulator featuring incomplete narration and lacking many other accessibility options. All that said, I am aware that many developers were inspired by the bar set by TLOU 2, and more are working on solutions than you might think. Games take time though, and we blind gamers are notoriously impatient.

80.lv: What are the things that still need to be fixed in terms of accessibility? What can developers do to help different groups of gamers? Should this somehow be regulated by law?

In a perfect world, morality would win. In a perfect world, accessibility would just be seen as the right thing that it is and wouldn’t need to be regulated. Sadly, this is not realistic, so I do believe some regulation would help. I think many developers are on the right path and doing the right thing, but if high levels of accessibility were actually required by law, well, let’s just say I’d feel more certain that I would always have work.

In terms of what could be done for the future of accessibility, I personally just hope to see more developers educating themselves on what accessibility is and inviting the disabled into their studios to help them reach those accessibility goals. After all, nothing about us without us, right? The likelihood that every person will be disabled in some way at some point in their life should be enough to justify accessibility as the right move. Developers want people to play their games, so even if they don’t yet know how to achieve that for this or that type of disability, they should take the shot. Bring in some disabled consultants, and we will help. I promise we want to play your games too.

Brandon Cole, Accessibility Consultant

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine