Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Other accessibility issues
Besides the obvious ones, there are some aspects that few people think about. Let's
start with a common element of text. There are a lot of text strings inside modern
games: menu labels, rule descriptions, in-game notifications, subplot elements as
messages, and diaries. They are an essential part of the game products, they help to
navigate, drive a story, and so on. But in some cases it is hard or impossible to rely on
them. First of all, regular players do not like big portions of text, especially if it appears
in pages, without any accents, comfortable paragraphs of small size, and so on. Then
there are some players who find it hard to read, or the speed at which they read is
not fast: small kids, people with different forms of dyslexia (a state when a reading
process is impeded in some form), and people who speak other languages. Besides,
developers always try to provide localizations for their titles; in many cases that is not
enough, it is very hard to cover all the common languages.
All these categories may have trouble interacting with the game, because they do
not get the words or it is hard to read them. It means that other elements should
be used on par with texts. First of all the menu navigations, game rules, and so on,
must be pretty logical and clear to understand without any additional descriptions.
Then special non-verbal communication elements should be used widely, as icons or
other types of graphic illustrations of different actions. According to The Internation-
al DYSLEXIA Association, up to 15-20 percent of the population have some symp-
toms of dyslexia in various forms of slow or inaccurate reading. It means that some
form of image-based communication can be more comfortable for them as well as for
kids, especially when games are oriented on an audience that uses large buttons and
some clear icons (they should not be very abstract as kids have no proper experience
to read abstract symbols; hence, they should be small illustrations with small scenes
of actions shown clearly).
Note
While working on game applications for little kids, remember that you should take
goodcareoftheirhealthconditions.Thegamemustbeinterrupted(inidealcases,
that is included into a game process) if a kid keeps playing it for a long period
of time (for instance, every 10-15 minutes), for the eyes to relax. When a person
is playing, he does not blink much, and that is not good for the eyes. During a
