The topics we will approach in this Devlog:
How can we make our game more accessible to people with difficulties and how do small details matter?
How we started to think about accessibility
One beautiful and relaxing school day in ESTG (our university), me(tixa), Pardal, and Delfim decided to attend a video class that some of our teachers organized about accessibility, the orator that day was David Tisserand, David is the director of accessibility at Ubisoft and in that hour we surely learned a lot and how small things could change an experience for someone with difficulties ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧
We started to think about which people could we help in our game and what kind of things we change??
We didn't take long to conclude we would change all that including organizing by color, that in the beginning was two or three of our puzzles. This is because Daltonics was an audience we could easily reach and help in our game (Also shoutout to Delfim, our artist, who is Daltonic 💀💀💀)
Things we changed
We changed all color-related puzzles to other pattern-recognition forms.
1. A puzzle to organize books by color we change to organize by thickness (we had also a pattern on the books but we ended up changing it because we found it would distract people from organizing by thickness and ended up focusing only on the pattern)
2. The bedroom puzzle had clothes hanging and we wanted to again organize by color, we decided to do shirts with various patterns and organize by patterns rather. Same on another puzzle with flower pots.
And this is just some of the small things you can do to make your game easier for all, if you think well about itan estimated 16% of the global population has a disability
It's estimated that there are 46 million gamers with disabilities, creating a strong incentive for video game companies to improve their accessibility efforts. Gaming provides entertainment and community for billions of people worldwide.
I think especially we, indie game designers, have a duty and a lot of power to change the industry more than is changing already and there are such little details that matter for so many people, people who want to play just like us, just like our friends, family, etc.
To sum up
There are a lot of articles, videos, and podcasts about this point and it's very interesting to search about, is very easy and we are giving a change to people that somewhat don't have that chance daily.
