How can user research improve your game's accessibility?

1 What is user research for accessibility?

User research for accessibility is a subset of user research that focuses on understanding the needs, expectations, and experiences of players with disabilities or other factors that affect their access to a game. User research for accessibility can help you answer questions such as: Who are your target players and what are their accessibility requirements? How do they perceive and use your game's features, content, and interface? What are the pain points, frustrations, and delights that they encounter while playing? How can you design and test your game to ensure it is accessible, usable, and enjoyable for them?

2 Why is user research for accessibility important?

User research for accessibility is vital to create a game that is more inclusive, engaging, and successful. By conducting user research for accessibility, you can discover and prioritize the accessibility issues that affect your game and players, design and implement relevant accessibility features and options, evaluate and validate your solutions with real feedback from target players, and communicate and promote your accessibility efforts. Doing so can help you avoid costly and time-consuming fixes later in development, avoid assumptions about player needs and preferences, ensure solutions meet expectations, and build trust, loyalty, and reputation.

3 How to conduct user research for accessibility?

User research for accessibility follows the same basic steps as any user research project, but there are some specific considerations and best practices to keep in mind. When planning, you should base your goals, questions, and methods on relevant accessibility standards and guidelines. It's important to recruit a diverse and representative sample of players with different types and levels of disabilities or access needs, using online platforms, communities, organizations, or networks that specialize in accessibility or disability. Data collection should utilize a variety of methods and tools that are suitable for your research objectives and participants' abilities and preferences. You can use surveys, interviews, focus groups, usability tests, observations, analytics, feedback forms, assistive technologies (e.g., screen readers, magnifiers, controllers), accessibility evaluation tools (e.g., contrast checkers, color blind simulators), and more. Analyzing the data should involve organizing and synthesizing it using coding, categorizing, sorting, visualizing methods. Lastly, reporting the results should be done with clear language and actionable formats that communicate key findings to stakeholders (e.g., reports, presentations).

4 What are the benefits of user research for accessibility?

Incorporating user research for accessibility can bring a range of advantages to your game and team. Quality and usability can be improved by ensuring that the game meets the accessibility standards and works well with different devices, platforms, and assistive technologies. Additionally, the player experience and satisfaction can be enhanced by providing them with accessibility features and options that suit their needs and preferences. Furthermore, your game's reach can be expanded by making it more accessible and inclusive to a broader range of people. This will also increase the retention and revenue of your game as frustration and churn is reduced. Lastly, user research for accessibility can foster the innovation and creativity of your team by challenging them to think differently about your players and game, as well as exploring new solutions for accessibility.

5 What are the challenges of user research for accessibility?

User research for accessibility can present some challenges and limitations that you should be aware of and prepare for. These include finding and recruiting enough suitable participants with disabilities or access needs, along with adapting and adjusting research methods to accommodate their needs. Additionally, you need to balance and prioritize the different accessibility needs of your players, as well as implement and test your solutions within the constraints of time, budget, resources, and platform. Lastly, communicating and collaborating with your team and stakeholders about the importance of user research for accessibility is essential, so that they can support and integrate your findings into game development.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?