HTML5 Could Make Gaming More Accessible for People With Disabilities

Games capture our imagination in a way no art form has before–their interactivity and replayability provide a sincere refuge from the travails of everyday life because when we immerse ourselves in our favorite games, our routine concerns fade away as our embodiment drifts into the digital ether.

For a long time, gaming was the sole domain of the digital outsiders–regarded as a novelty by most, but treasured as an escape by a chosen few who would go on to construct one of the most expansive and alluring industries in modern history. Arcades were seen as seedy places, often associated with gambling and organized crime. Gaming was a boys club with a high-bar to entry, in part because of the judgment imposed by the rest of society on self-identifying "gamers."

In one generation, we've totally changed the idea of what a gamer is. The largest demographic of growing gamers today is adult women, who comprise 36% of the gaming population (compared to adult men at 35%). We've known that the stereotypical image of a teenager camped out in his mother's basement, deploying Cheeto-dusted controllers against a barrage of Space Invaders is outdated at this point, but it can be difficult to envision who exactly is playing all of these new games today.

With each revolution in technology, our culture has adapted to fill the empty space and the gaps in our perception of possibility in games. Avatars have lent us anonymity in addition to personality–we can be whomever we please and live any life it is possible for us to imagine, giving us tremendous freedom and digital import. New technology allows us to hone our design-focused thinking to be as inclusive as possible, to keep rendering the stalwarts of gaming until we are all capable of seeing ourselves as space marines, futuristic free-runners, city-planners, field generals, and confused plumbers.

Freedom to reconfigure is one of the most essential parts of the internet era–downloading scripts to invert the color of text on sites make them easier to use, magnifying text and speech to make computers easier to understand, and programmable macros can automate repetitive tasks so they take a fraction of the time. Regardless of what your special needs are, technology is an infinitely configurable tool to allow us to communicate across all manner of barriers. Our ability to hack our technology to a system preferable to our specific needs is synonymous with our freedom itself.

From its inception, HTML has always been about accessibility. With the ubiquity of HTML5, this is becoming truer than ever before as it relates to gaming. The markup language allows developers to create multiplatform gaming experiences, where anyone with a computer, smartphone, or tablet can play games–something that once required a powerful gaming computer or dedicated console.

With the rise in the independent game developer, the power is now in the hands of the individual to shape the future of gaming to be more inclusive, more forward thinking, and more accessible for all.

Intel® Developer Zone has featured posts about how basic usability guidelines can help developers ensure the widest access for their content, so that senior citizens and people with special needs can benefit from the technology boom. Our lives are increasingly digitized, and making sure that we have access to our content and applications despite any handicap should be a concern for any developer. Now, the community is increasingly expanding this practice into gaming experiences.

Industry professionals and activists have released a useful set of Game Accessibility Guidelines–a living document intended to inform developers and consumers of the problem, and supply them with simple tweaks and solutions to ensure wide access across a range of possible audiences. The site features testimonials from gamers who use modifications and benefit from the design-focused thinking that the guidelines promote. There's a veritable treasure trove of information on Intel® Developer Zone on how to ideate, design, build, test, launch, and monetize your game, and products like Intel® RealSense™ Developer Kit are enabling developers to think about gaming interfaces and accessibility in new ways. Technology has advanced to bring gaming outside of the box, so what adjustments can be made to ensure the widest access to a video game for people of all types and abilities

Sight
•Making use of easily readable fonts
•Providing high contrast between text and background
•Ensuring interactive interfaces are properly spaced, particularly for touch screens
•Suppling pre-recorded voiceovers for any text in the game (including menus and installers)

Sound

•Creating different volume controls for sound effects, background, music, and speech

•Making sure any information relayed via audio is also reinforced with text or visuals

•Having a visual means of communication in multiplayer

Physical and Motor

•Utilization of re-mappable controls

•Making sure every part of the user interface can be utilized with the same input methods as the gameplay itself

•Limiting multiple simultaneous actions (i.e. multiple repeated swipes)

•Utilization of non-traditional input methods such as speech or gesture commands

Cognitive

•Including tutorials of varying complexity

•Letting users progress through text prompts at their own pace

•Providing a clear indication of interactive and non-interactive game objects

•Using a clear narrative structure, and including summaries of progress

•Allowing users to replay any unlocked narrative or instruction

•Creating levels of gameplay that can be adjusted for sophistication and complexity

Speech

•Making sure that speech input is not required, instead included as supplementary

•Supporting text chat in addition to voice chat for online multiplayer

•Utilizing more advanced speech detection algorithms that allow for accents, regional dialects, and other variations in speech

While the gaming community is getting better and better at designing experiences that are accessible for people with varying disabilities, users are finding more ways to re-tool games to ensure that anyone interested can share in the joy of the medium. These mods not only serve to grant wider playability for exiting properties, but also help to inform developers on how future projects can be tooled for a wider audience.

Voice commands provide a useful interface for those who have difficulty using a controller. In 2015, YouTube and Twitch streamer Benjamin Gwin published videos of himself playing and beating the notoriously challenging Dark Souls using voice-commands alone. He made use of a program called Voice Attack, designed to relay a series of voice commands into keyboard presses and mouse actions. It's mind-boggling to consider speaking every single keypress in such a complicated game but after exploring the realm of adaptive game interfaces, not much can surprise you.

In 2010, Jordan Verner beat Zelda in a speedrun with a community sourced keystroke list featuring over 100,000 steps. Verner is blind, and asked the community to help construct a map of every maneuver, attack, roll, and button he would need to beat the game–and the gaming community responded. Over 2 years, a map was created, and the commands were read out to Jordan by a text-to-speech interface live as he played. Our collective memory of playing a certain game brings us together. Punishing levels are fondly remembered when gamers chat about their shared experiences–the more participants in these conversations, the stronger the common narrative.

Haptic vibration, gyroscopic manipulation, and touchscreens are all employed to help blind gamers navigate virtual environments. Researchers at Intel are using virtual and augmented reality to provide the blind with opportunities to traverse games like The Witcher and Nevermind. Optimizing new languages of touch and feel is important to increase legibility with these games, and new technologies are making that process easier. Researchers are wearing haptic belts that vibrate when an avatar is oriented in a particular direction within a game- so that someone can navigate a digital obstacle course with a haptic echo-location force feedback which informs them what obstacle is around them.

There have been some amazing innovations in gaming with non-traditional interfaces, utilizing 3D cameras such as the Intel® RealSense™ Camera, like Intel® Software Innovator Nathan Grenier's creation, Tanked!, which uses a sandbox, projector, and 3D camera create a game that dynamically transforms terrain in real-time, creating a revolutionary gameplay mechanic. With innovations like this, there's endless possibility for creating interfaces beyond the typical button-mashing or touch screen interfaces commonplace today.

As it becomes more commonplace for developers begin to build these sorts of features into traditional games, it lays the groundwork for adapting them for HTML5 browser-based games. With HTML5's considerable market reach, the gaming audience can grow and diversify. It's one thing to play such games plugged into a console or a high-powered gaming PC, but the nature of gaming is changing. Browser-based and mobile games are more popular than ever, and more accessible to all. This revolution in gaming has yet to fully extend to accessibility through HTML5, but the tools to build those bridges are readily available, and developers are taking notice.

One game that's garnered a bit of attention around the web for it's outside-the-box thinking. Deep Echo, by Taldius, is a unique spin on the traditional dungeon crawler, completely playable by the blind. Utilizing a sonar-like audio experience inspired by a TED presentation about echolocation by Daniel Kish, players can navigate a series of mazes using voice prompts and frequency of sound for a unique and engaging experience. The thoughtful gameplay has resonated with an audience beyond the visually impaired, and demonstrates what the future of lightweight accessible gaming could look like.

Accessibility activists have been making their voices heard. E-sports and streaming services have minted gamers such as The Aieron, Mackenseize, and Brandon Cole who have all voiced their concern for more inclusive gaming. Charities like Ablegamers seek to "improve the overall quality of life for those with disabilities through the power of video games" by advocating on behalf of the disabled community to increase accessibility. These forward thinking developers and advocates will redefine our perception of possibility and continue and lend to a more ubiquitously accessible gaming landscape. With developers and companies like Intel taking note of the conversation, we can hope to see a new standard of accessibility across a wide range of devices.

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