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How to make your mobile games more accessible to people with disabilities and impairments

Ian Hamilton gives a few practical tips

How to make your mobile games more accessible to people with disabilities and impairments

At Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2016, Ian Hamilton, UX Designer & Accessibility Specialist at IHDC, gave a talk on how to make mobile games more accessible to disabled gamers.

He started by defining disability as "a mismatch between someone and their environment", and not the medical condition that the person has.

"We cause people to be disabled"

"As designers, as creators, as content producers, we actually cause people to be disabled," he added, saying that design decisions like certain colour choices make a game inaccessible for certain gamers, even if that wasn't the intention.

One way to fix this is to make sure your games are easy to understand from a visual point of view, with large icons and backgrounds that don't overpower the gameplay, and bright, obvious colours.

You can see all our videos from Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2016 in this YouTube playlist.


Editor

Ric is the Editor of PocketGamer.biz, having started out as a Staff Writer on the site back in 2015. He received an honourable mention in both the MCV and Develop 30 Under 30 lists in 2016 and refuses to let anyone forget about it.