Accessibility by Numbers: A Critical Review of Game Accessibility Guidelines

As official regulations and unofficial recommendations on designing accessible video games have continued to grow, several organisations have developed guidelines to make the endeavour easier for developers. This chapter discusses a variety of these guidelines, tests how well these documents delineate areas for improvement in commercial video games and attempts to apply accessibility checklists based on these documents against titles with which are considered applicable. Horowitz’s findings demonstrate each of the documents’ strengths and weaknesses, concluding that while more recent publications are thorough, they also feature highly inapplicable areas that could disproportionately cost developers time and effort. However, in conducting this evaluation, he is also able to conclude by indicating some important areas of accessible game design that developers appear to almost universally neglect.