The goal of the Path to Games Accessibility Project is to convene leading games accessibility experts, game technology vendors, and lead game programmers, producers, artists, and testers to identify and clearly state what technologies and processes can be developed by 2015 that will greatly enhance the ability of people with disabilities to better play the videogames they want and love.

Hurdles to Games Accessibility

To date admiral work in the field of games accessibility has been done mostly by researchers, accessibility advocates, and lone-wolf developers acting as independents or adding in features to games they're working on.

The International Game Developers Association's Accessibility SIG has provided strong leadership in defining the issues and needs for games accessibility but has not taken the necessary steps to convene key leaders in an attempt to actually solve "the how" part of the games accessibility equation. The Path To Games Accessibility Project is an attempt to consolidate and build upon this pioneering work and create the necessary research and implementation roadmaps that will ideally drive the marginal costs of accessibility compliant games towards zero for developers, publishers, and game consumers.

Game development today is a process whose costs are determined mostly by the cost and time to employ the talent to create, test, and deliver a product to market.  From small indie studio using digital distribution to large publishers pushing out major commercial games at retailers worldwide the costs factors for development are the same: talent * time.

The issue of time is not just linear either.  Missing certain specific dates on a calendar could create very specific mishaps beyond just the push-back of a launch to another specific date.  For example, miss the end of year window and you launch outside the holiday shopping season which could be a critical time for sales of certain games.  Producing a movie-related game and you miss the day-and-date release of the movie and it can be a disaster.

Producing a game for a console requires hitting very small windows for your certification test cycle and as a result you can be pushed off to a much later date then even the time you need to complete the game.  Miss a specific ship date within a certain quarter and sales are not booked and earnings targets might be missed and investors will punish your stock which may have severe implications for management and all who hold stock options within the corporation.

All of this creates tremendous pressure not only to reduce time as it relates to direct labor costs but also to avoid items which may extend development time or create uncertainty around critical testing windows where bugs might cause unforeseen delays.  This is the environment that accessibility features and technologies must survive and it is not one that is all-that-forgiving.

What Must Be Overcome

Thus, the issue before accessibility proponents is actually fairly simple in concept: how do you create accessibility features in games where the disruption of doing so is negligible allowing the impact of doing so to outstrip the opportunity costs of implementation.  This is critical because often the rhetorical issues around videogame accessibility are that there should exist a straight equation whereby the direct labor costs to enable accessibility features is outstripped by additional sales of the game to people who otherwise would not be able to purchase the game.  While this sentiment seems perfectly logical it fails to accomodate for the uncertainty factor and problems that might crop up that disrupt the straightforward application of the ROI formula.  This is because any uncertainty added into a game's development increases the chances something could go wrong and cause a game to miss critical release certifications, marketing windows, sales and financial cycles that carry with them the aforementioned hidden costs that don't turn up right away in a simple cost-benefit analysis on a per-title basis.

The Bottom Line

This is not to say game companies shouldn't include the risk of adding accessibility to their games.  Quite the contrary - they should.  And the compensation of doing it well and consistently could be significant.  The Ablegamers foundation using basic commercial revenue statistics for the industry and incidence of various disabilities on a global level calculates as much as $2 Billion in retail revenues might be further realized through better accessibility support.  Furthermore, to comply with the rigors of accessibility in terms of software and game design may actually result in better games outright regardless of whether the player has a disability or not.

What the Path to Games Accessibility Project recognizes however is that a true answer to the industry's accessibility problems must not only drive straight-up costs down but more importantly provide a truly reliable and integrated process that decreases development risk such that it has no discernible affect of its own on development schedules.  To do this a total solution must integrate into fundamental technologies and production tools the industry uses, the platforms most favored by gamers, and the post-launch support mechanisms for games that are created either by the developers/publishers of the games or independent and vibrant fan communities.

Fundamental Frameworks for Accessibility

Our aim is to carefully detail accessibility tools, middleware, and processes that meet the requirements we recognize must be met, state their current efficacy, and describe precisely in terms of technical spec and business rules what is needed to secure their existence.  Currently we've identified five main frameworks that can better enable accessibility to exist at little cost and risk to developers and game publishers large-and-small:

1. Foundation technologies in games operating systems, hardware, and middleware.

These would be baseline technologies and APIs that enable all developers to inherit as many core-accessibility features as possible without having to do much of anything which is more akin to how many pieces of application software work today in relation to their underlying operating systems.

2. Specialized content creation tool features to allow for solving issues as part of the everyday development process

For example, a complete color blindness solution might be include a set of features for art creation tools like Autodesk' 3D Studio Max and Maya products which help artists simulate color blindness on screen in real-time so they may quickly check and avoid color combinations that may result in problems playing the game for people with such a disability.  By integrating at the very heart of the development process the impact on time may drop considerably since it quickly becomes part of the overall process of optimizing art and other assets for a game.

3. Specialized hardware interfaces and APIs

While much has been done in terms of better hardware for people with specific ambulatory and cognitive related disabilities much more could be done to improve the ability of players to play their favorite games.  We intend to identify and spec a common business and technical model that will help increase the number of input solutions for game players while reducing the cost of the hardware and the time it takes to optimize it for any particular game thus reduce time-related costs to the end user.

4. Specialized third-party tools for accessibility features

Some solutions for games accessibility will require new stand-alone middleware solutions.  Our hopes are to identify what these are and how they should work.  Once that's complete we intend to explore how they could be created and released as open-source solutions that can be deftly integrated into any game commercial, independent, or otherwise developed.

5. Community related features

One of the inherent problems for games accessibility is that some of the work to make a game fully compliant requires not only design changes or development effort but content creation that could be significant in time-and-scope.  A possible low-cost solution however would be to provide the means for the community of gamers (disabled or not) to create the necessary content changes themselves to a game.  For example, closed-captioning might be best accomplished by providing the means for users to add-in their own CC content packs (in any language).  Gamers could then work to add these features within days if not weeks of a games release.  While such efforts may rob those with disabilities from playing a game on its major release date it may provide a happy medium between ultimate accessibility and financial hurdles.  The ideal version of this however, is a standardize means for such a user-generated-content model so that standardized tools and formats can make it easy for seasoned community members to rapidly support each successive title as it comes to market.

Next Steps

Having identified the goals and high-level means of improving the environment for videogame accessibility our next step is to convene a conference on the topic whereby experts and supporters will gather to truly shape "the how" of this all.  We will then publicly report those findings for further comment from the wider accessibility, gamer, and developer communities.  The final step will be to organize the talent and, where needed, the funding, to enable these solutions to be fully operation no later then 2015.  We hope to do this in extensive partnership with the videogame industry but it must start within the true rank-and-file talent centers, and technology providers first.

If you wish to comment or join our effort we expect to host our first meeting in Washington D.C. by March 1, 2010.  If you wish to participate in this meeting please contact us via here.