Accessible Play

Accessibility laws weren’t built with games in mind.

We think that’s a problem.

Digital accessibility laws cover almost everything you’ll interact with on a screen: websites, apps, PDFs, even a graphic in a social post. Games didn’t make the list.

That’s a problem we’re solving before anyone even asks. We’re building our own standard, one project at a time, for players the industry usually designs around instead of for.

We don’t need a law to tell us everyone should be able to play.

Not a Checklist. A Solution.

There’s no single fix for accessible games. That’s the whole problem, and the whole opportunity.

Screen readers, for example, are excellent tools – for the right application. They’re built to read a web page, and they do that well. In a game, they run into a limit fast: they can tell a player everything written on the screen, but they can’t tell them where to click. So instead, we build assistive reading tools designed for how a game actually works – dialogue a player can tap to hear, answers read aloud before they commit.

This is still a new frontier. We ask what the game actually needs, and build for that – finding it is the research.

Who We’re Actually Designing For

Say “accessible game” and most people picture a blind player. That’s the smallest piece of it, and usually not the one we’re solving for. Blind and low-vision gaming is its own genre and not something you can retrofit.

Since there aren’t hard and fast rules for accessibility in video games, we’ve crafted our own – adopting principles from website ADA law where they apply, and inventing our own where they don’t.

Leaving a player out isn’t a design tradeoff we’re willing to make.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing players. Spoken dialogue doesn’t do them any good on its own, so captioning matters more here than almost anywhere else.
Colorblind players. Color is never the only signal a player needs to read the game correctly — some of our own team is colorblind, and it shows in how we design.
Neurodivergent players. The pace slows where it needs to, and nothing important is left for a player to infer.
Players navigating motor or cognitive differences. There are no twitch-reflex mechanics in our games, and that’s on purpose. Nothing punishes a player for reacting a half-second slow, because speed isn’t what our games test for.
Players who struggle with on-screen text. Voice acting and read-aloud answers mean a player never has to fight the page to get to the content.

Accessibility in Action

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Mission HydroSci 2.0 Color is never the only signal a player gets. Every cue that matters shows up at least two ways, so a colorblind player never has to guess what the game just told them.

vSchool Fully voice acted, so no player is locked out by the page. Every answer choice can be heard before a player commits to it.

Build This With Us

We review new projects with Mizzou’s disability office as we build them, and we treat every new barrier as its own open research question, not a one-size fix. If there’s a population you work with who wants to play but hasn’t had a real way in, that’s exactly the kind of project we want to hear about.