A photo of two players playing a game using a traditional controller and one adapted for motor skills challenges from Pelaaja magazine

During April 2021, I had the honor and pleasure of being interviewed on game accessibility by Mikka J. Lehtonen for Pelaaja magazine, the larges game magazine in Finland. The article appeared in the May issue of 2021, under the title "Saavutettavuus peleistä kaikkien viihdettä". In this blog post, I include excerpts from the interview with Miikka, incorporated in the magazine article

Could you tell us a bit about yourself, your research and experience with game accessibility?

I am Lobna Hassan. I am a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University's Center of Excellence in Game Culture Studies. I grew up playing a lot of the classical 90s games with my brother on an Atari console and then on a PC. Super Mario, Doom, Prince of Persia, these were some of my favorite games. As I grew up, studying and eventually work took most of my time that I had relatively less time for games and was mainly playing light games like Candy Crush on my phone or tablet here and there.

Coincidentally, it happens that I am a person who doesn't see very well. I was born with a genetic condition that affects the eye called Albinism, and because of that, I have a visual impairment. What that means is that I need to get close to things to see them well and I need fonts in the games I play and software I use to be large enough for me to easily read it. Having a visual impairment has never stopped me from doing anything I want, and the same applies to thousands and thousands of individuals like me. For example, I have always been an excellent student, I have a PhD, I held so many teaching and research jobs and was successful at them but I can't play most of the popular games nowadays which has also made me play less and less over the years.

Most games are designed for people who see well. For example, if you are playing Fortnite, the gameplay screen displays a lot of information to the player in one screen and the player has to not loose the game while tracking everything going on, such as what weapons they are using, the time, their team, enemy players, the map. The player also need to see well to be able to spot an enemy and shoot at it so they could win......... the first time I played Fortnite in 2018, I lasted 11 seconds in the game. Must be a world record!

Maybe Fortnite is an extreme example but, unfortunately, this is the situation with most games on the market. They do not offer a lot of accessibility options that any player who is slightly different from what developers expect struggles with them. When I sit down to play a game after a long work day, I just want to play it, I don't want to struggle to just play the game.

Being that I grew up with games and I still do appreciate them, my research gradually drifted from e-government to gamification. Eventually however, and specifically since late 2020, when everything we are doing became about digital tools at large that are not the most accessible, I felt that enough is enough we, myself included, needed to do more for accessibility. I felt that I have a combination of unique qualities that can make me contribute something very meaningful to the world on accessibility .

Accessibility is not a challenge unique to games but we have to start somewhere and game studies and gamification are my departure points.

A screenshot from Pelaaja Magazine with information on Lobna Hassan and some of here interview answers.

It feels like traditionally accessibility hasn’t been a big priority for the games industry. Would you agree? If so, what do you believe the causes to be?

Accessibility has not been a big priority to the gaming industry. To begin with, there is very little awareness in society at large of what disabilities are. Mainstream media have given inaccurate examples of that for so many years. They either show individuals with disabilities as completely reliant on others to do the most basic tasks of life. Or they show people with disabilities as superheros (Daredevil) who need absolutely no help and can do everything even better than individuals without disabilities. Both images are extreme and inaccurate. But consequently, most people, developers included, do not fully understand what individuals with disabilities need or who they are.

Add to that, that it is inaccurately believed that people with disabilities are a very small segment of society, who have very little purchase power, and so, even if developers would be willing to put in the time to learn about implementing accessibility in their games, they are discouraged from doing that because they think they will not be making money out of that extra effort. However, the accessibility market is not small, and aside from the morality of equal access, money could be made from it. According to the latest statistic from the UN, there are globally more than 1 Billion people living with disabilities and that number keeps increasing, not just due to people being born with disabilities, but because of old age, wars, accidents, illnesses. Some estimate that more than 90% of that 1 Billions plays games. That is huge.

Beyond that, assuming a developer wants to implement accessibility in their games, they often do not know how to go about it, or can't find guidelines that can help them with that. Or then they sometimes perceive accessibility as an afterthought. After they have spent all this time and money into building this beautiful game, they need to spend even more time and effort to make it accessible. At this point, developers usually are discouraged and just want to be done and show their beautiful creation to the world.

We should, however, work with developers on addressing each and all of these challenges. This is teamwork and we are all in this together.

What is your view on the current status of accessibility in video games? What problem areas and areas of improvement do you still see?

The accessibility situation is starting to gradually improve with more awareness. Microsoft (Xbox) recently released accessibility guidelines. the website http://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com has been built and is getting noticed as a place to go to when developers want to find guidelines on making games accessible, and we see accessibility being integrated in majorly praised games, such as Assassin's Creed Valhala, and hopefully that praise would encourage more developers to follow suit.

We need to do much more work though to keep these guidelines updated and to encourage people to adopt them. We do not yet have a lot of guidelines for VR applications, for example, and technology is just going to keep introduce new inventions that we need to make sure are accessible.

Most importantly, accessibility design needs to become a core task in game development processes, just like writing scripts for a game, or voice acting, or graphics design etc. so that it becomes just like any basic step that is part of developing a game rather than an after thought or something "extra" that developers have to do rather than essential and core to the development process.

Do you have any memorable personal experiences with accessibility, good or bad? Possibly games that did things especially well or poorly?