Today marks Global Accessibility Awareness day, a international event to raise awareness across all industries. Awareness of game accessibility amongst educators in the UK is at a fairly high level, but there’s great potential for more to be done.
I’ve met many lecturers with a strong interest in how to avoid exclusion of the 20%+ of gamers who have some kind of disability, and students have a great affinity for the subject too.
Global Game Jam is a great example, an event with a high proportion of students for which the UK has seen two successive years of optional accessibility criteria, always best recieved by the student participants. For many it has been the first time they’ve come across accessibility, and they’re astounded that the basic things like flexible controls and colour-blind friendly design or modes aren’t in all games as standard.
They’re rapidly becoming more standard, and by the time the current intake of students find their first jobs in industry it’s going to be something that they’re really going benefit from knowing something about.
Currently
Accessibility provision in undergraduate courses is fairly varied. Some don’t yet mention it, some as do briefly as passing comments in other lectures. Some have guest lectures on the topic, and for that there’s a decent base of experts in the UK who can help. There are a good number of postgraduate research projects focussing on game accessibility too.
All of the above areas have potential for expansion, but there is not yet to my knowledge, and I’d be extremely happy to be corrected a specific assessable module for undergraduates covering accessibility basics in the UK, or even anywhere else in the world yet.
Future developments
The following is a link to a short survey to gather some more information about current levels of interest, current levels of provision, and interest in working on future developments. This should allow us to take some steps toward upping the level of provision, to connect the people who currently have an interest in the subject, and set up some partnerships to combine expertise, produce new materials and push the level of provision forwards.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KXF7M7X
– Ian Hamilton