Today marks Global Accessibility Awareness day, a international
event to raise awareness across all industries. As part of that effort I’d like
to share a little information about one of the pieces of the accessibility
puzzle: the concrete figures-based business case.
Awareness of and provision for the 20%+ of gamers who have
some form of disability has been rapidly improving globally, and the UK have
been at the forefront.
As well as the efforts made by many of our studios, from
one-man indies to AAAs, we have several organisations and individuals dedicated
to furthering accessibility in games, most famously SpecialEffect, and others such as Dual Ring and OneSwitch too. There are regular accessibility
talks at conferences, and plenty of coverage in our press .
This has all led to a significant portion of our industry being
aware of the value of the disabled gamer demographics, and thanks to the
resources such as the UK-led gameaccessibilityguidelines.com,
many also have a good idea of the simple design considerations that are
involved.
Business case
As the games industry is so audience-focussed, simply
knowing that there’s an underserved audience, a group of people who are being
unnecessarily excluded, is enough for many developers.
Others find justification in general statistics – the 20% of
the UK population who have an impairment that comes within government
disability stats; the additional 8% of males who are colourblind; the 14% of UK
adults who have a reading age of primary school or lower.
But for others there’s still the completely valid question
of how that applies to your own games. How do you know that those demographics
are interested in your specific product?
PopCap commissioned a study
that showed that the portion of thier audience that was disabled was actually
higher than the portion of the general population that was disabled. The study is
from 2008 so out of date now, but if you’re involved in studies on demographics
there’s a nice opportunity there to do an update.
That’s stilll fairly general, but there’s a very simple
solution to a more specific business case.
Gathering game specific data
It’s pretty rare to find a game now that isn’t full of
analytics, gathering metrics on fine details of gameplay. If those systems are
already in place it’s a pretty trivial job to extend them out to also cover UI.
Recently a producer from a AAA shooter franchise, one that
gathers huge amounts of data on gameplay, told me that he had always wondered
how many people actually played with subtitles turned on. The answer is blindingly
simple – put one of your analytics hooks into the subtitles on/off button. It’s
a straight yes/no thing to track too, no complex data analysis required.
There are other common accessibility features that are
controlled by settings so easy to track, such as remapping controls, or turning
on a colourblind mode. Not all of these features are used exclusively by people
with disabilities, but if you know how much a feature cost to develop, how many
players actually use it and how much each player is worth it’s pretty easy to
get a sense of value.
There are some features – for example support for
screenreaders on smartphones, allowing blind gamers to play – that are not used
by anyone other than gamers with that impairment, and without which they can’t
play at all. Again gathering that data is very simple, a single line of code tells
you whether a player is playing while the phone’s the screenreader is turned on.
Once you have some reliable data you then have directly
relevant evidence to inform future development, including cost/benefit for if
you’re in a situation where you need to choose between which features you’ll
have time to implement, or how where on a backlog they should go.
Publishing data
There are rare some instances of accessibility feature usage
being collected (in some of the BBC’s games for example), but noone anywhere in
the world has yet gathered data like that and gone on to make it public. If you’re in a position to be able do that,
through a blog post or a conference talk, that’s when you’ll be able to make a
truly monumental difference.
How useful the information would be for other studios and
publishers is obvious, and there’s also another side to it.
The question of the
concrete business case is one that is present across all industries, but
there’s no way to know how many people looking at a website are colourblind, or
how many people entering a building use the ramp instead of the steps, or how
many people cross at traffic lights because of sound rather than the visuals.
People
in many industries are crying out for any concrete examples of usage stats on
accessibility features, and they don’t have to be from within their own
industries.
This puts the games industry in a unique position. Through
some simple analytics we can not only make a difference to our own bottom lines
and the quality of life of the disabled gamers we’re including, but what we
learn can also be used to the improve the lives of people with disabilities
aross all industries.
– Ian Hamilton