Making games more accessible

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  • Hey folks, I try to make my projects more accessible and I am wondering if anyone here does the same and has some good tips to share. For example if its possible to make the game accessible to be played by a blind person and if yes, if you have some good tips on how to do that.

    Accessibility for blind people is the most urgent thing right now, but other tips are welcome too. I know about the general tips (e.g. use good contrast and give options for key rebinding, etc.) but I am looking for what construct offers on a technical base.

  • What Construct offers? Accessibility is generally a design issue, not an engine issue.

    You can use text to speech for blind users, to answer your specific example. Did you have anything else in particular in mind as far as technical capability goes?

  • Thank you for your reply. I know that, for example, webpages have to be designed in a certain way to be recognized by a screenreader. I would like to know if a project made in construct can be set up in a way, that the screenreader app of a phone can be used to control it.

    I guess the answer is no, since I opened a webpage that contains one of our construct projects with the screenreader and it could not recognize anything in the game, it just gave an error.

    I will have to see what I can do with the text to speech feature then. One thing that breaks my mind is how a blind person can activate that feature on a web hosted game, but maybe I care about that once I got the rest working.

  • It was added recently, you can check a box called "read aloud" on text objects to make them readable by screen-readers.

  • Oh that sounds great, I'll check it out, thanks!

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  • It's me again, with another question regarding accessibility. I'd like to know if its possible to give pictures an alt-text (like on a website) out of the box, or maybe with an addon.

    Similar question: are there any accessibility features out of the box for videos, e.g. subtitles or audio descriptions?

  • Hello TinyCrocodile. Were you able to improve accessibility in your game? This should have way more attention that it does.

  • Hey, I am glad you are interested in making games more accessible too! I was able to implement some accessibility features. This is what I did:

    1. using the "read aloud" option on text elements that was suggested by fedca earlier (this only works with a screen reader though, if you want to read the text to everyone, I suggest speech synthesis)

    2. making sure the font had a good readability, size and contrast with the background

    3. making the font scalable

    4. adding easy language texts (were provided by the contractor) as an alternative to the more complex texts

    5. not having excessive effects and animations that could disturb players

    6. providing a portrait mode (the screenreader useage gets messed up when you rotate the phone in landscape mode)

    7. this was the biggest surprise: using the html buttons

    Html buttons are already quite accessible, e.g. they are "seen" and read aloud by the screen reader, without any extra checkbox like for text elements - they will be read aloud at any time though, they can't be "hidden" like when you place an element outside the viewport. I'd need to check the project again to see how I solved this.

    Html buttons also can be accessed by using the tab key on the keyboard helping ppl who don't have a mouse. Screenreader useres also use the tab key to navigate. Note: your elements should be in an order that makes sense to tab through. I had some struggles with that, but again, I'd have to check the project to see how I solved this. I think the solution was to make a layout plan BEFORE I put the elements in and then creating the elements in the order they are supposed to be accessed (e.g. buttons and texts in the upper left corner first, buttons and texts in the lower right corner last).

    What I could not provide: a scrollbar that is accessible with the keyboard and with the voice control. I used the ProUI plugin which is easy to use, but unfortunately not good for accessibility out of the box. In the next project I want to experiment with the iframe instead of a text element to see if that could work - it already comes with its own scrollbar. I also could not add alt text to the images, I would have had to come up with a custom solution. Since the images of the project were not super important to the useage, just eye candy, we did not provide alt texts.

    I hope this helps, let me know when you have any questions and good luck!

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