Accessibility and Inclusion in Games and VR

AboutAbout 1.3 billion people, one in six of the world's population, experience significant disability¹. A game that only works for people who can see clearly, hear clearly, hold a controller with two hands and react quickly has excluded a large share of its possible players before anyone has judged whether it's any good.

Flat-screen games have made progress on this over the past decade, and several of the best examples come from there. VR is further behind, and harder, because a headset interface assumes more about the body than a gamepad does. This page looks at four case studies, the current state of VR accessibility, design practice, the legal position in Great Britain, and representation.the headset assumes a standard body

What a VR Interface Assumes About the Body FoundationalKnowledge that endures for decades — core principles

AA typical VR experience expects its user to see in stereo with both eyes, hear directionally with both ears, stand, turn their whole body, reach with both arms, grip and press with both hands, and tolerate a moving camera without nausea. Each assumption excludes someone. The table maps common barriers to features that remove them.

The bottom row affects many players with no disability at all, which shows how blurry the line is. Comfort options built for some users end up used by most.the curb-cut effect: accessibility aids become standard features

Four Case Studies Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

The Last of Us Part II: accessibility at scale

NaughtyNaughty Dog shipped The Last of Us Part II in 2020 with more than 60 accessibility features, grouped into presets for vision, hearing and motor needs that players can open and adjust option by option. It was the studio's first game with full control remapping, and it allows any button hold to become a toggle and any rapid press to become a hold. Combat options let players stop enemies flanking them or stay hidden while prone². The design lesson is in the presets: sixty options are only usable if a player can start from a sensible bundle and adjust from there.presets reduce the cognitive load of setup

Hearthstone Access: a community fix and its fragility

Hearthstone Access was a volunteer-built mod that added screen-reader support to Blizzard's card game, making it playable by blind and low-vision players. Because it worked from outside the game, frequent official updates kept breaking it³. When its developer ended support, Blizzard said it would look into native accessibility features, which left blind players without a working option in the meantime⁴. The case shows what community fixes can do, and also their limit: accessibility that isn't built into the product depends on someone else's spare time.

AudiOdyssey: one game for blind and sighted players together

AudiOdyssey, built at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in 2007, is a rhythm game in which the player is a DJ trying to get a club dancing, played with a keyboard or a Wii remote. It was designed so that blind and sighted players could play the same game together at a similar level of challenge, in response to the observation that games for visually impaired players were usually designed only for blind players⁵. Building a single game around sound, rather than adding an accessible mode to a visual one, is the inclusive-design idea in its plainest form.

The Xbox Adaptive Controller: changing the hardware

Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controller, announced in 2018, is a flat unit with two large buttons and a row of sockets that accept external switches, buttons, mounts and joysticks, so a player can build a controller around their own body. Microsoft developed it with AbleGamers, SpecialEffect, Warfighter Engaged, Craig Hospital and the Cerebral Palsy Foundation⁶. It works because games on the platform already support remapping. Hardware flexibility and software flexibility depend on each other.

The State of VR Accessibility Ephemeral / ToolingKnowledge that evolves in months to a year — check for updates

Naikar,Naikar, Subramanian and Tigwell inspected 106 free VR experiences for the Meta Quest 2, checking whether accessibility features were available for the kinds of interaction each one used. 36.8% had no accessibility features at all, and many others could have benefited from more⁷. Free experiences are the ones anyone with a headset can try at no cost, so this is the part of the VR catalogue with the lowest barrier to entry, and more than a third of it offers no adjustments.free samples are not representative of paid apps

Guidance exists. The W3C's XR Accessibility User Requirements (XAUR), published as a Working Group Note in 2021, sets out the needs of disabled users in VR and AR and suggests requirements, including multi-modal input and output, synchronised devices and customisable controls⁸. The Game Accessibility Guidelines, written by developers, specialists and players, organise practical advice by basic, intermediate and advanced cost⁹. Neither is binding.

Design Practice Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

• Start early, and with the people affected. A barrier found at concept stage is a design decision; found after launch it's a rewrite. Disability organisations can help with recruitment and with legal requirements.
• Give every important signal more than one channel. A threat should be visible, audible and, where possible, felt through haptics. That rule alone covers much of the vision and hearing rows above.
• Make controls fully remappable, including one-handed layouts, hold-to-toggle and adjustable sensitivity, so assistive hardware like the Adaptive Controller can work.
• Offer subtitles, captions, text scaling, high contrast and colour-blind modes, and in VR place subtitles where the user can read them without turning.
• Put difficulty under the player's control. Hunicke's case for dynamic difficulty adjustment, where the game quietly tunes itself to the player's performance, is about keeping the challenge between too easy and too hard as a player's skill changes¹⁰. As an accessibility measure, our view is that hidden adjustment works less well than visible, player-chosen options, because a disabled player often knows which specific demand (timing, precision, reading speed) is the problem and wants to change that one.
• Keep it working. The Hearthstone Access story shows that accessibility can break with any update. Add accessibility checks to the test suite like any other regression.

The Legal Position in Great Britain Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

UnderUnder the Equality Act 2010, a provider of services to the public must not discriminate against disabled people (section 29) and must make reasonable adjustments, including to how a service is provided, where disabled people would otherwise be put at a substantial disadvantage (section 20)¹¹. For services, that duty is owed to disabled people in general, so it has to be considered in advance rather than after a complaint. How far it reaches into game design hasn't been tested much in the courts, but it applies clearly to the services around a game, such as online stores, account systems and customer support, and to VR used in education, training and healthcare, where an institution is providing a service and choosing the tools.

Representation and Avatars Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

InclusionInclusion also concerns who appears in a game and who a player can be. Character design, stories and avatar systems that only offer a narrow range of bodies, skin tones, genders or cultures tell other players the space isn't meant for them, and stereotyped characters do that more directly.

In VR the avatar is also the player's body. Yee and Bailenson's Proteus effect studies found that people behave in line with their avatar's appearance: participants given more attractive avatars were more intimate with strangers, and those given taller avatars negotiated more confidently¹². Applying that finding to inclusion is our own extension, not Yee and Bailenson's: if self-representation affects behaviour, then avatar systems that can't represent a disabled user's body, or a user's own skin tone or gender, affect how those users act and feel in the space as well as how they look.

Access Before Accessibility Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

BeforeBefore any accessibility setting matters, a person needs the hardware, a safe space to use it, a headset that fits over their glasses or head covering, and a reliable connection. As VR is adopted in schools, universities and healthcare, those costs decide who benefits. Institutions that require VR for a course or a treatment have to plan for people who can't use a headset at all, with an equivalent alternative, much as they would for any other inaccessible format.

Related Topics

• Virtual Reality and Games: Ethics, Law and Society: the overview of this set.
• Game Design Fundamentals: difficulty, flow and player experience, where accessibility decisions start.
• Building for Immersive Platforms: comfort, cyber-sickness and wellbeing in headset design.
• Ethics and Human Rights in Virtual Reality: inclusion as an ethical requirement.
• Accessibility and Learning: accessibility in teaching contexts.

References