PAX 2020 Accessibility talk

In 2020 I had the pleasure to be a part of PAX representing my school DigiPen Institute of Technology. I was offered the chance to do a talk so my friend Mark Esparagoza and I talked about different types of accessibility I focused on built in game accessibility while he talked about development of technological accessibility including controllers.

My primary point was explicitly starting accessibility in the early stages like in pre-production. I had sketched out different examples of potion bottles since at the time I was working on Chamomile Grove. I made identical bottles different colored liquid, then talked about when gray scaled it is less effective and without text it is completely ineffective.

Then I made the bottles different shapes so they were more identifiable but it still would require description or experimentation in order to understand what the bottles effects were. and again the removal of color and text would make them less readable, however experimentation could lead to shape association eventually.

So I finally had made bottles that could be read universally without text and color helped, but didn't need color to be read by anyone. In this case text wouldn't be necessary to give a general feel of the potions effects that anyone no matter what language could understand.

The talk was an 'Ask Me Anything'(AMA) so I did get a question of if any games I knew of had done similar things to the example I gave for n accessible bottle design. I gave an example that I love of BioShock Infinite vigor bottles and showed this image to discuss.

After PAX I had the pleasure of talking with a developer about the accessibility of the bottles and they talked about how each bottle had a unique shape, color and icon so more bases were covered with how different people understand and categorize the functionality.