26 per cent of players in the US has a disability that affects them playing games, according to AbleGamers.

Founder and executive director of the charity Mark Barlet revealed the data at his talk during Devcom 2019, which altogether equals to 46 million people across the country.

The company surveyed disabled players with 45 per cent choosing keyboard remapping as their number one improvement for games, such as custom controls or one-handed controllers.

Following this, subtitles being turned on placed second at 41 per cent. Examples of this are captions, text enlargement, alternative alerts and colour blind options, which the charity claims affects one in seven men.

APX

“You can start thinking about APX before a single line of code is written,” said Barlet.

The APX model is part of the core foundation at Ablegamers which provides a framework for developers to work from when designing their game.

An APX design driver example was given where a player is stuck on a jump puzzle and instead of being constricted indefinitely, instead, they have the option to skip that particular section. This then allows users to continue progress and still experience the main story elements of the game.

AbleGamer recently launched a new scheme to place accessibility champions within development studios.

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