In the early 2000s there were many games that allowed you to change up your control scheme and even UI elements. It seems as budgets got larger and games became mainstream those options have been ditched to focus on the wow-factor in games rather than making them accessible to more people.

I assumed it was less about budget and more about the directors and artists refusing to concede control over how their game looks and works.

Kind of like how the Magic Mouse charging port placement is designed to prevent people from using it while charging, since that's "ugly"...

I'll jump on the band wagon and echo the same sentiment for Web. Imagine using a screen reader.

My pet peeves is games that require middle clicking and don't let you remap all of the functions of middle click. I have to plug a mouse into my gaming laptop to play them.

One thing that really improved quality of life for me as a southpaw, is the PS4(/5?) feature to remap button assignments system-wide.

WHy? It's a entertaiment business not a governmental service. Developing features that 0.1% of users will ever use, same time can be used for bugfixes that help the 99.9%

I've said this before and I will say it again, accessibility options benefit everyone, not just the 0.1%.

My partner is ESL, she understands spoken English fine when it's slow and precise, but in the fast environments of TV and Games, it's often hard for her to quickly get what they just said. So, subtitles, the accessibility option for the hard of hearing, is beneficial to her.

Similarly, I may want a more casual gaming experience but experience the same story as someone else - but difficulty is subjective. I may want just a larger reticle so I can see better, reduced motion blur and walking bounces so I don't feel sick.

These little options are a relatively simple addition which benefits absolutely everyone

Yes, this is the thing people forget. As I've heard it said: good accessibility design is just good design. The classic real life example is curb ramps, which were mandated for accessibility for disabled people but are useful to everyone.

They don't benefit absolutely everyone; that's hyperbolic language. They /could/ benefit everyone in a situation of varying degrees of severity that that person /could/ possibly be in at one time.

Do you think adding qualifiers makes the point any clearer? I think it just makes it harder to read. Accessibility options in video games do nothing for new born babies or people in a vegetative state, but that doesn't really need to be said.

The point being made was wrong, and the language suggests rhetoric more than reason.

Reason is how you figure out if something meets a criteria. Rhetoric is how you convince people. That's a simple fact of the human mind and not one that can be easily outplayed.

I don’t remember where I saw it, but I recently read that an overwhelming majority of gamers prefer subtitles for cut scenes.

Hell, I know people who can hear just fine but who nonetheless watch TV and movies—in their native language, mind you—with subtitles on 100% of the time.

Subtitles can be trivially TTS'ed since the 80's. Literally.

Totally agree with this. Subtitles and a good contrast are very important for me. On many games, with the basic contrast settings, I can't see much.

People think like this all time, until something happens to them. A few years ago I seriously hurt myself in a ski accident. I'm better now, but only then did I notice all the little things that we could do, without really much effort on our part, to make things accesible for other people. I'm not talking about treating anyone special at all, I mean accessible in the most literal sense of the word. To even have a seat at the metaphorical table.

All I can say is that if you were in a similar situation you would just see this differently, which is an obvious thing to say, I know, but I really mean it. Like, you would with every fiber in your body, just see this entire situation completely differently.

Any way, I don't think there's any harm in asking the "why" question, but it is harmful to ask it rhetorically I guess? I'm not saying that's what you were doing, but I mean just generally speaking, to ask the question as if to make a point assuming the answer is already known. It implies the question doesn't need asking, and the answer is obvious. The real truth couldn't be further from that, but it's kind of hard to understand if you can't experience it for yourself.

Also, I really want to just head off any "truth is subjective" type comments, or "your reality vs my reality". It's like, yes, there is always that, but what I mean is if someone suddenly lost their mobility and had to experience a world suddenly inaccessible, they would just understand what I mean in a way that's deeper than petty rhetoric. It just wouldn't make any sense by that point to pretend that this isn't important.

You're getting downvoted, but honestly I feel like this is the elephant in the room of accessibility efforts.

A lot of them just feel like they're catering to a tiny slice of the user base that would probably be better served in some other way. In some cases, they arguably make things worse for everyone else, like WCAG 1.4.1, mandating that your links have ugly underlines just because some people might have trouble reading them. Fun fact: HackerNews's links are noncompliant, and could get them sued in Canada.

I mean, that’s one solution to WCAG 1.4.1, but not the only one. Per WebAIM’s recommendations[1] on the matter:

- Color is not used as the sole method of conveying content or distinguishing visual elements.

- Color alone is not used to distinguish links from surrounding text unless the contrast ratio between the link and the surrounding text is at least 3:1 and an additional distinction (e.g., it becomes underlined) is provided when the link is hovered over and receives focus.

Lots of options in there besides just slapping underlines on things. Could be bold where other text isn’t. Could just be a color that stands out enough against your text. Etc.

[1]: https://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist

Contrast ratio between the link and the surrounding text is at least 3:1 sounds easy to achieve, but in practice it rules out almost every color, so it's a nonstarter in almost every case; WebAIM actually has a good article showing how few colors actually can hit a 3:1 ratio: https://webaim.org/blog/wcag-2-0-and-link-colors/.

Sure, you could make links bold, but no one does that for a reason: it looks ridiculous.

The thing that I find particularly egregious about that rule about it is how this doesn't even seem like it helps that many people. A screen reader user would necessarily know that an element was a link regardless of color, and even colorblind users are likely to be able to see that the text is lighter, even if they cannot make out the specific color, particularly if the color used isn't red or green.

"Tiny part" in reality usually ends up being as much as quarter (1/4, 25%) of user population. Just because people aren't completely blind/deaf/disabled doesn't mean they don't benefit from accessibility features.

I think there's a massive difference between having accessibility options and hard-coded accessibility options. I don't like subtitles on my English language TV shows; however, having the option to turn them on doesn't affect my experience at all. Adding text to speech doesn't impact my gameplay either, provided I have the option to turn it off.

Oh I completely agree, I love accessibility options -- what I don't like is when the pursuit of accessibility ends up making the experience worse for users with the default settings.

>mandating that your links have ugly underlines just because some people might have trouble reading them

I hare designers that chose terrible font sizes and terrible color contrast, do you designers use some extra special screens where light gray on white looks readable?

I am wondering if a site with such fancy designs that look smooth and cool could do an experiment and offer a high contrast, big fonts, no animations version then let the user decides. Maybe we could get some data and see what people that use them able sites use, liek Gmail , do people chose themes with low contrast, many animations and cool looking links?

I hope good designers will prevail in the end and get rid of the form over function crowd, where you need perfect vision and some super expensive screen to be able to proeprly use a web page.

> do you designers use some extra special screens where light gray on white looks readable?

Not a designer but I am a photo nerd, and yes these screens exist

The super expensive make sense if you are a "print" designer, if you do web you should test your stuff on regular devices.

I will always be amazed at how many people can type “because this group is a minority, meeting their needs is unimportant and shouldn't impact the majority” and think they've contributed a novel thought. Your elephant in the room is just basic everyday ableism. You can't even stomach a link being underlined for someone else's benefit lol.

26% of all citizens in the US have some type of disability. [CDC]

7,675,600 US citizens have visual disabilities. [National Federation of the Blind]

3.7% of all US citizens have fine motor skill disabilities. [NIH]

Also, it's the right thing to do to ensure everyone can experience joy.

The odds of anyone actually responding to you instead of just demonizing you, condescending to you, or talking past you are very slim, although a couple people have made good faith responses.

Something they haven't said yet is that a lot of accessibility features are already a solved problem, or they're commonplace enough that they seem to be. So a big publisher (which is what your parent was referring to) would be able to get them in at low cost, relative to gigantic overall costs of publishing any AAA game. So it makes sense for them to do it to reach everyone they can. And they know people will write articles like this one and bring them publicity, and if not they'll just astroturf one anyway. The author of that article has had at least one other accessibility-related article published on the gaming web recently, so don't assume they're not just on a press junket.

For all developers, your question is more of a question. Should every single game developed by every single type of developer be "accessible"? It would certainly be nice, but must they? Of course not.

Accessibility can mean two things: affordances that people need to have an equal experience, but also affordance that people would like to have a more pleasurable experience. And in the entertainment business, people experiencing pleasure tends to be good business.

As noted in many introductions to accessibility, these features help more than just the stereotypical example you may think of when hearing that word. There are many forms of accessibility: lifelong, acquired, temporary, chronic, and situational. Between those 5 forms, these features really help everyone.

It’s all about context, consideration, dignity, but mostly, letting the challenge be the puzzle itself instead of the structure of the scaffolding holding the puzzle in place.

As Gen X and Millennials eventually retire[0], there are going to be a ton of people with lots and lots of time on their hands, with vision and hearing and fine motor control mostly ranging between "so-so" and "terrible" (thanks, aging!) who really want to spend some of their now-ample free time playing video games.

[0] Well, I mean, hypothetically these generations might retire in significant numbers around "normal" retirement age, even if the numbers aren't looking so hot for that right now....

Everyone is eventually disabled sometime.