Speaker: Douglas Gregory Twitter: @D_M_Gregory — How do we take (as developers) what we hear in conferences and bring them to our game developement.
a11y features have always been as an extra.
This brought battles with producers, managers. To the question: How many people are actually going to use that feature?
But, think about it, do we want to actually exclude developers?
After many years, a11y became a measurement of quality. Even with the best intentions, it was done at the end of the development. This lead to things like subtitles without background contrast or small font size.
Between 2013-2018, a11y became part of the standard to uphold. Now we are starting to see a11y as a key diferentiator.
Has a configurable hardware that sits on top of the control.
During the development of this game, this are the things that went wrong:
We build a team, small by AAA standards. We already had key individuals in different teams pitching a11y ideas (designers)
User research team, was actually the one that help catalize this. They put together tmeetings with the team before we had anything to show. What barriers were there present by players with disabilities.
The User research team gave back a lot of resources like the game a11y guidelines.
Take back to your team all the information that you take from the experts.
Building a11y from the start.
There are options that are better to implement at the beginning of the project:
Don’t rely solely on colours to identify aspects of the game. For instance change the icons when you upgrade levels, not only the colour.
Anytime you can inform your users in more than one channel, they’ll have more options to pick you whatn you’re trying to convey, instead of trying to decipher what you’re trying to say.
Ubisoft added an option to add the configuration of the control toy digitally (for those that can’t do it using their hands)
Button mashing: add an option setting to hold the button instead of mashing
Trying to make the game less oriented to kids (more mature), lead to having to add more text in the screen (subtitles), make some players unable to play because they couldn’t read all the subtitles on time.
When designging a game UI make it easer as possible to navigate it. Add more action depth if that helps reduce the attention bandwidth.