by Joe Lonergan
The Game Accessibility Conference (GAconf) Awards acknowledge and applaud
individuals and studios pushing the boundaries of accessibility in gaming.
The awards took place last Wednesday 24th January and featured a day of
talks, networking, and exploring accessibility for disabled gamers. They
also had an awards ceremony as part of the gaming conference.
The 2023 edition of the Gaming Accessibility Awards once again recognised
and celebrated the efforts of people across and around game development to
raise the bar for accessibility. They had 19 categories, shortlisted by an
expert panel, with winners decided on by a combination of public and jury
vote. We now live in an era where accessibility is celebrated. This is
especially true now in the world of Gaming as shown by some popular games
getting released on PlayStation and Xbox, so people who are blind and have
low vision do not have to restrict themselves to word or sound games.
There is a whole lot more out there now.
This is proven by YouTubers like the popular Ross Minor who has a YouTube
channel dedicated to gaming accessibility. He has thousands of followers and
puts out regular content of him playing video games as a person with sight
loss, one of the most popular videos is of him driving in Forza Motorsport.
Accessibility in Gaming cannot be mentioned without saying the name Steve
Saylor, a major advocate in the field of accessible gaming and you can read
more about him on his website at:
https://stevesaylor.net/accessibility-consulting ;
He had a massive input into the sixty different accessibility options built
into the game, The Last of Us on PS 5.
The popularity of Blind Gaming is also helped by PlayStation and Xbox
consoles both having fully functioning screen readers built in. This also
allows the user with sight loss to access other media on the console such as
YouTube, Netflix, and other streaming apps.
Going back to the Gaming Awards, while it is fantastic to have 19 different
categories, we will focus on the best.
Blind/Low vision category
Each category had 3 different nominees. In the Blind/Low vision category of
accessible gaming, the Nominees were Forza Motorsport, Mortal Combat 1, and
Stories of Blossom.
All the above games were totally accessible to blind players and also had
audio descriptions. The overall winner in this category was Forza
Motorsport. You might think wow how can they make a Motorsport game fully
accessible but with a series of beeping sounds and engine noise as well as
some voice commands and audio description it is made fully accessible. Of
course, there is a big learning curve to a game like this, but when you
fully learn the game, it is very rewarding and stimulating and a great
challenge if you like your car games. It is also one way someone can
experience a driving simulation game. Some vision-impaired gamers have
stated it is the nearest they have come to driving a car since they had lost
their vision. Forza Motorsport is available on the Xbox gaming console.
One of the main objectives of the Gaming Awards is to put developers who
make their games accessible in the spotlight with the hope of getting other
big game developers to do the same. If you want to read more about the
gaming accessibility awards check out:
https://www.gaconf.com/ ;
and enter on awards.
Vision Ireland Technology News.
